the movie was definitely flawed. no denying to that. characters that were barely present and not even properly introduced play bigger parts than some which occupy a bigger deal of run time, there are things happening without a reason, decisions made without a reason, what was the point of hiding the presence of Wayland and his mercs? what was the point of the snake creature? what was the point of Fifields mutation? all of these things point somewhere, but the movie utterly fails to make them matter, and to cover it it keeps trowing more and more stuff until it can almost overwhelm you and make you forget just what the f**k is going on. visuals were nice but the quick editing and soundtrack made it impossible to immerse in them. there wasn't a single pan, time lapse, walking, flying or exploring sequence to build tension. luckily Ridley still managed without, but it didn't feel like it was comfortable with showing you more.
and i get the feel like every single one of those things had a strong and solid reason idea behind them, but they just forgot to implement it, and instead of ditching it entirely, they kept it because they were afraid they wouldn't get a second shot at it.
i pray that when the movie is released there's enough footage ready to be added in to make this mess make sense, because when it does, i can actually start loving it. so far i feel like i watched a movie that hasn't finished filming yet. this needs like two whole extra hours.
still nice. i missed the oppressive dark exteriors of LV-426 but movies like red planet proved that empty alien deserts can be frightening too. i wish there was more to that planet though. it seemed unbelievably opportune for them to land and end up so close to these temples right away. wonder if there were more Gigerian, creepy structures around the planet that they just didn't see. that's another point, we never knew the real nature of this place. even in alien we knew the Derelict crashed there, it was very solidly established. word-dropping "military base" here was as close as we got, and i got the impression that it wasn't accurate to the situation at all.