It’s… not great.
A latest in the weird reboot of the property since Prometheus (2012), this one appears to be an attempt to combat the poor reception to the other movies by going back to the roots. Unfortunately, it appears that Ridley Scott has both forgotten everything that people liked about Alien (1979) and fired everyone who mentions what worked or questions the genius of his new Prometheus ideas. In this case, he didn’t even bother to make it himself, but he did watch it after the fact.
It tries to play the greatest hits, and it seems somewhat inspired by the hit video game Alien: Isolation (2014), but ultimately it falls flat because whenever it has the choice of being a horror movie or trying to be the fresh take… it always chooses the later. I’m not sure how much control director Fede Alvarez had, but this seems to be his third attempt to redo a classic horror and so far… none of them seem to be working.
The saving grace of the film is the amazing standout performance by David Jonsson. It is a brilliant display of talent and craft from beginning to end.
From here on, there be spoilers:
This one is set during some nebulous period after Alien (1979) but presumably before Alien Ressurrection (1997). Weyland-Yutani has recovered the original xenomorph and the used a different model of the original android (using AI and CGI in place of the late Sir Ian Holm), but apparently not worked out that the creature was dangerous.
The best part of the movie is the establishing scenes, where we see what life is like for the regular miners on colonies controlled by Weyland-Yutani – a form of indentured servitude where their corporate overlords change the terms of the deal at a whim and always only for the benefit of the company.
The main problem with this is that it pretty entirely undermines the suspense of the film since it’s not hard to work out who’s going to live and who is going to die when one character gets introduced fully and the rest sort of get casually tossed in. This is particularly jarring since part of the genius of the original Alien was that the intro gave all characters equal weighting, and so it was genuinely unclear who was to be the final survivor.
From here on, the entire thing starts to fall apart narratively and thematically with events occurring never because of any logical or emotional driver, but because the later scenes demand it. The most obvious and confusing of these was the announcement that they were going there because of the cryo-stasis pods required to travel in space for years on end.
These are, apparently, just stored in the floor of a random corridor in the space station, and are entirely modular but use their own special fuel for all cryogenic technology… apparently including the air conditioning. The entire, previously established, world is mutated and twisted to serve the overall Prometheus narrative in a way that makes it deeply artificial and thus unable to build suspense.
From the introduction, we are sure who will survive and that they will have a relatively happy ending – and midway through it becomes clear it will be one that mirrors the ending in the original film that started the property. The presence of numerous xenomorphs also eliminates all tension about “where is it” as the answer is “they are wherever they need to be right now”.
One unique element that showcases how flawed this premise is, is the pregnancy subplot. Early on it is established one of the crew has morning sickness – her pregnancy is quickly dismissed as due to coupling with “some asshole”. Later she is seriously injured, and it is proposed she can use the Prometheus super-stuff that brought a rat back from the dead to heal herself.
The group rejects this solution, then later when left alone she uses it on herself. I have often commented to my friends that it profoundly bizarre that many video games (but most notably BioShock (2007)) seem to rely on a protagonist being the sort of person who will be perfectly comfortable putting things from dubious sources into their body by such means as random syringes they find on the ground.
In this scenario, a woman who’s whole identity is she is pregnant injects herself with a horrifying black goo from a strange syringe which she has no knowledge of (she wasn’t there for Ash’s presentation on how it works or what it is). When she gains no benefit from it but rather simply gives birth to a weird monster that kills her, it is the least surprising or emotionally engaging thing possible.
Even the sole plot that actually pulls emotional engagement is full of strange distractions. Andy (David Jonsson) is an “artificial person” created by Weland-Yutani then apparently found in junk, and partially restored by the anonymous father of the Final Girl, Rain (Cailee Spaeny) who was only able to imbue him with childlike capacity, Dad jokes and a singular directive to do what’s best for Rain.
From the moment this is revealed, the mind is assaulted with a non-stop barrage of questions:
- Wouldn’t Weyland-Yutani keep a pretty close watch on their artificial people? Surely they’d notice if one was discarded and then started operating again.
- Why was an android made for a mining colony so convincing? The original Ash was engineered to deceive a crew that he was human. Bishop was made in the likeness of his creator due to him being state-of-the-art. There’s no reason for a random colony droid to be so convincing – particularly if their main role was to work in mines.
- Wouldn’t the presence of such convincing androids create existential issues for the people working with them? The fear someone you know is really one, the constant question about what really separates you and the artificial? Basically all of the famous themes of Blade Runner (1982), also a Ridley Scott movie…
- Has the future really progressed so far that Weyland-Yutani were 100% comfortable with making a robot slave miner that looks like a black man – but is still looking back to Ancient Rome for inspiration?
The issues compound when a tiny data disc later upgrades all his systems, and those upgrades are undone when the disc is removed. Apparently he’s a old super android on par with the ones that haven’t been made yet, but also operates on 286-era MS DOS where all “upgrades” (like Windows 1.0) need the disk in the drive to be in play.
At every turn, the illusion of danger and emotion is torn down and we can almost see the director tripping over himself to ensure he includes the Prometheus stuff so that Ridley Scott will like it (which Ridley did, probably for this reason).
And yeah, the title is utterly pointless – it relates to an inconsequential detail that the movie sells up as being exciting but is ultimately irrelevant to all the themes and inconsistent with Weyland-Yutani’s general vibe.
Overall a disappointed tease at a return to form that showcased that the current generation of people in charge of making films in the Alien property don’t understand what made the property great in the first place. At least the actors seem to get it though.