When an alien comes along, you must shoot it. When an alien comes along, you must shoot it.
BQB here with a review of the latest Alien flick.
I give this one a solid B Plus. IMO, you won’t be disappointed and its a fun night out at the theater, but you won’t remember it 6 months from now or have any interest in rewatching it a year later. Effort was put into the homework assignment and had it been any other film it would get an A but it chose to be derivative of something that has already been done many times before.
The plot? Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her android BFF Andy (David Jonsson) team up with a group of youngsters who are fed up with their lives indebted to a crooked space mining corporation. They have put in their time as indentured slaves and were supposed to be released long ago but the corporation keeps changing the deal, telling them that they have to serve more years. Their parents lived and died just this way and they want their freedom.
So they hatch a plot to break into an abandoned space station and steal unused stasis chambers that will allow them to make a break for it on a 9 year trek to a free planet. And you might have guessed the station is abandoned for a reason. ALIENS!
Overall, it is an acceptable action flick. The downside is I didn’t really care too much about any of the characters. Some of that might have been intentional. Some of them were presented as dicks so you didn’t mind too much when they became alien chow. Rain is OK but she’s no Ripley. The star of the film is Jonsson’s Andy, who goes through a Flowers for Algernon-esque ordeal. The story begins with him being a dimwitted android, for Rain’s late father programmed him to be a companion who is just smart enough to assist Rain but not smart enough to throw her under the bus. He is loyal to a fault, a lapdog who suffers all manner of abuse. When he gets an upgrade from Rook (I can’t figure out if this is the original droid from the original film or a copy) he becomes a genius and takes over the expedition and it becomes a suspenseful plot point to figure out whether Andy is leading the party to their safety because he cares about them or to their doom as revenge for all the abuse he was put through.
There are some silly CGI things. Rook, based on the original character played by Ian Holm, looks fake and I wonder if there wasn’t a better way to tie in the original. SPOILER ALERT. There’s a hybrid alien/human that just looks silly and I think they should have just stuck with the aliens.
The criticism of this movie is it is formulaic. It sticks to the plot of too many in the franchise. There’s always the pulse gun. There’s always an android. Someone needs to say “get away from her, you bitch.”
But in this film’s defense, the last couple films, where they got away from the typical space miners/explorers get accidentally trapped in an alien infested vessel and fight their way out, (i.e. the last two went in search of the creators of the aliens as in Prometheus) they seemed a bit lame too.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Jonsson is the star of the show as he plays two roles in one film – a dullard and a genius and he’s so mistreated in the first half that you almost hope that he is leading these shitty little twerps straight into a gaping alien maw in the second half.
SIDENOTE: I mean, Rain is pretty nice to him although when push comes to shove, she puts herself and humans above him but the other kids suck.
Bookshelf Battle 