Hi guys...been away a long time...
MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD
Saw this movie last week... And I have mixed feelings about it...
I loved the imagery, the production design, the Prometheus, and most of all, Noomi Rapace... Amazing actress and a delightful surprise... I have been tempted to see the Swedish Millenium trilogy but the language is to me like Catwoman using her claws alongside the Max Schreck's store windows...Sheesh... The religion versus science battle was lightly adressed here, but efficient nonetheless...
I have mixed feelings about the whole Space Jockey/Engineers thing... I know that it would be hard to make a sci-fi without the human element in the middle of it, grounding the story, but the entire 'They made us at their image' thing... nah...
The droids keep bugging me in this Alien saga, including this 'fake' prequel (I'll explian in a sec what I mean by 'fake')... They are way too human for my taste, showing machiavelian and psychopathic behaviors, including David's grinning after Shaw told him she did not want her parents dead... Him infecting Holloway could have been instructed by Weyland, so I can give that one the benefit of the doubt but the jokes about 'i didn't think you had it in you...Sorry, poor choice of words'...This cynicism is not credible for a construct that 'has no soul' (I loved David's reaction to that, and immediately noticed 'hey, that is not very robotic of him')...
So, on to the 'fake' prequel... I found it disturbing two things: first, that humans found ALiens before the Nostromo crew, rendering the Alien movie quite pointless... I mean, knowing this happened 30 years before Ripley killed the first xeno, and that a human spawned the first proto facehugger (looked more like an octopus to me...LOL) and henceforth the first protoalien and so on and so forth... meh...
I say it is a 'fake' prequel in this regard: it makes little to no sense that the distress signal the Nostromo picked up could be Shaw's, though it is hinted at...Second, taking 30 years to capture a radio transmission (though the Prometheus is no longer there, it surely sent a distress signal or data back to Earth... I mean, that is standard protocol for space missions, right?) and worse, if the distress signal the Nostromo picked up was not Shaw's, then who sent it and how did they manage to decrypt it?) Maybe that's for the P sequels to unravel...
AND it is a chronological prequel to the Alien because of the Weyland Corporation (still no sign of the merger with Yutani, though I can easily predict the falling of Weyland after Weyland and his daughter's demise) and the date, which sets this 30 years before The Nostromo's endeavor...
I have a lot of trouble with the story and never quite understood why the Vickers character escaped the Prometheus only to be killed moments later squashed by the falling Engineer carrier... I found quise amusing the fact that they both, Shaw and Vickers, ran a straight line instead of running to the side and therefore avoiding the ship falling on them... Shaw's survival still puzzles me for its sheer irrealism... her dome must be a lot stronger than the poor sap who was killed by Fifield...
There are a lot more 'huh' moments for me, but nevertheless, it is a movie that was a sight to look at (saw it in an empty theater all to myself, which was so cool! hey, I saw it two weeks after it opened...) And I enjoyed it... provided I don't overthink it...
Yet, I had a great time all by myself watching it... And I am gonna watch the sequel for sure, I assure you...
All in all, I give it 7.5 out of 10...
SCORE - 9 out of 10
STORY - 6.5 out of 10
VISUALS - 9.5 out of 10
DIRECTING - 8 out of 10
CHARACTERS - 8 OUT OF 10
REWATCHABILITY WHEN IN DVD - 10 out of 10
That's all for now, folks... take care
Cheers!