Ahem.
I didn't hate this movie.
At the very least there are not half as many things in it to register anywhere on the scale of dislike I held for "Prometheus" ,though I still did have more than one or two WTF moments.
Its perhaps the third best "Alien" movie there has been, and with that level of expectation set its occasionally brilliant and quite good for some of it but its still got some of those tremendously irritating flaws that stem from daft character decisions and dialogue that are really going to grate on alot of peoples nerves, particularly after the stick "Prometheus" got for them, yet it remains, depite that , an improvement, if not a massive one.
But please note this- its a really bleak chapter in a saga thats not really been noted for its overall happy themes.
Its actually very ,very dark ,with an added pinch of bloodily and horribly depressing in exactly the same way "Alien" and "Aliens" ultimately wasn't, and though it pulls much of its identity as a film from its original parentage , its still all kinds of ironic that it totally misses out on what essentailly gave those stories the kind of success they had with audiences.
Its definitely a huge attempt to drag the franchise back in line with peoples expectations though and it does (for the most part )succeed in that. But I can see why its been rewritten so many times , certain moments and ideas don't seem to fit very well together tonely and part of me thinks this is probably due to what Ridley was speaking of in the podcast, he might be trying to push the "Bladerunner" and " Alien" universes together using a fairly obvious bridge.
BUT Ridley mate, its never going to be as big as "Star Wars" its just too ****ing grim and nasty by half to get the required audience numbers. It was all a bit too brutally ugly for me at times and uneven and I was left feeling slightly cheated by the end of it, even though I knew I had definitely seen another " Alien" franchise film this time, if really just one half of one (again!).Ridley really wanted to guarrantee he gets to make another movie in the series I know but I can't quite see much more than one ,unless he does something a little radical, but I'm still not convinced.
The EFX work is (once again) stunning but a little too graphic in parts for my tastes. And it may take some people a while to get over the way the beasties in action are filmed here but the speed and ferocity of their movements in attack, although CGI'd worked well for me,the effects although used differently to expectations are good. The actors and characters were nearly all fine and in no way a fraction as dislikable as in "Prometheus" even though yet again its seems that "In space no-one can ever make a sensible decision". Perhaps it was because they were so domestically ordinary within the context of the filmthat I really felt their deaths on a level I haven't experienced since "Aliens".
But forget about getting any real answers about the Engineers though, most of that part of the story that caused so much discussion is pretty much jettisoned and absent and I didn't even really buy the idea that this planet was even their origin point. This film is really all about the "alien" in the same way "Prometheus" wasn't and on that level it succeeds admirably,and I think it will please alot of the fan base.
But what I REALLY took away from this film in the end is that Ridley is struggling to bring something original back into the series. If anything it seemed he had mashed ,if not altogether successfully ,two of his greatest hits and the strong echoes of that one movie in a key character seemed strangely at odds with the rest of the other film, but to say much more will probably spoil the movie.
Still it was much better than I thought it would be, for those looking to see people killed in many grisly and gory alien ways rejoice, this is the film you've been waiting for.