For those wondering since I don't give a shit about spoiling this thing, this is the brand new unique monster:
Yes. It's basically just taking the Newborn from Resurrection, and making a cgi slop monster using Engineer assets, a dash of xeno design, and stealing the razor tongue from Giger's catwoman Alien idea from Alien3.
It rips out of an egg the lady laid via black goo, and is basically a slasher villain.
I'd suggest sticking with the comics tbh. I seriously recommend Genocide, Glass Corridor, Apocalypse, or the Original Script or Gibson's Alien 3. I'd also heartily recommend Dredd v. Aliens. I've been on a binge of comics recently.
My roommates asked me if I wanted to go see this movie. I told them I'd rather eat broken glass and wash it down with salted lemon juice. I've long since learned that this franchise (among many others) will never be worth a damn again.
After a few days reflection, this movie is just frustrating. There's the core of a good movie here with the first act being decent, setting up nice atmophere and nailing the 'retro tech' of the original. Andy was pretty cool, and when not-Ash is activated it becomes even more interesting, with the rest of the characters not too unlikable. And then it just gets lost in memberberries and slop to become an overly long mess.
Like, what happened?
I liked it. I thought it was better than the last two films. There was one really stupid plot hole that could've been easily fixed with 30 seconds of thought by the writers, but on the whole I rate it 7.5/10.
Cailee Spaeny is very good in her role. - Not a bitchy, annoying, unbelievable girlboss character, just someone who keeps trying to get out of a bad situation.
Well the production values were decent - the creatures and the sets looked good. I liked seeing the stage of the alien post-moulting. Contrary to what I low-key expected, there was some decent acting on display. David Johnson playing Andy being the most notable. But like so much media today, they've not learned to produce good stories so much as they've become very good at telling bad ones. The polish hides some real flaws.
(It got a little Uncanny Valley on Ian Holme as a minor note, however)
Alien: Isolation was an influence here, though that's not a bad thing. It was written more like a video game in places, mind. Go here, solve this. And I thought I would be the only one here to note similarities to Free League's Alien role-playing game but gratified to see others have as well. Which brings me onto the spoiler part of my thoughts.
I'll start with the RPG stuff. As well as just something that feels generally familiar about the movie from the RPG, one of their major published adventure arcs deals with
the culmination of hybridisation and the creation of the "Perfected Ones"
Some of this is no great leap from the movies so it's not strong evidence the writer was familiar with the role-playing game. But it feels familiar. Like the Alien: Isolation influences though, that's not a bad thing.
It upped the Action Movie immunity from other movies, which is a moderate flaw. It's not going completely over the top, it doesn't ruin it. But when someone falls what looks like nearly 10m onto their back onto a metal deck and gets to run away ten minutes later, for example, it feels they have a bit more immunity than the crew of the Nostromo would have been granted. Things like the acid in the air and some other things also fall under this generosity. But it's not completely overboard. I can live with it. It gets rolled in with various other things that just felt a little implausible. Like Andy going from broken down and physically impaired - which I instinctively look at and think hardware problems - to much smarter and more coordinated from the new module (software). It would be like my computer suddenly running way better because I installed Windows 11 over Windows 10. But again, it's not a critical flaw. He's an old model designed for (I think) physical labour and colony building, I guess I can grant them a pass that you could install all the latest patches and fixes and new functionality. It'd actually be quite Weyland-Yutani to have all the capabilities present but not actually have then turned on unless you paid for the upgraded licence. And as I said, the actor is good.
The accelerated timeline for the alien reproduction lots of others have already said so I'll only add on a little more. The original Alien movie always had that implausible growth rate from chestburster to adult drone. The movie comes from the era of movies like The Thing which has a creature that can rapidly reproduce, change its mass and shape on the fly. We accept it in The Thing but in the Alien movie it was always the least believable element for me. So when I see things like the experiment on the mouse or the hybrid's absurdly rapid growth, I try to put it down to the original's 1970's sci-fi horror genre but it's still too much. Perhaps the movies biggest flaw for me. The writers could have figured out ways to stretch out the timeline of the story and keep the tension and it would have helped with the movie feeling a bit Action Movie, too.
Actually no, I know what the biggest flaw in the movie is for me, and I'll come to that in a moment.
About the hybrid, I was quite sad at the route they went with that. It's a leap in human evolution. I kind of felt that they shouldn't have killed it but attempted to get it to the colony and see how it turns out. Unfortunately the writing made it completely inimical and didn't give it the signs of intelligence I felt that a human hybrid should have. But this is probably just my teleological tendencies coming out again. It would have been a much more interesting ending if it hadn't shot to 3m tall in the space of ten minutes but instead had been some really disturbing and realistic hybrid infant that they placed in a cryopod to take with them. There's all sorts of interesting dynamics you could have at the very end there. For example, the mother could try to kill it and it be Rain who stops her, seeing it as an infant. Anyway, I'm speculating, the effects and look of it were good and it worked in the plot. I just think it could have had more depth in the story and implications.
I realised I don't need spoilers for my final thoughts. Positives, I'll again say that the cast are generally pretty good. Which probably reflects poorly on me that I expected them to not be. Isabella Merced was the pregnant girl and though she couldn't quite match Veronica Cartwright as Lambert for looking terrified (has anybody ever?), she was effectively terrified when hiding from it. Callie Speeny as Rain is a decent lead as well. Although she's rather tiny (5'1" to Sigourney Weaver's 5'11") I suppose that's good for hiding.
The biggest flaw for me isn't actually any of the things I wrote about in the spoiler section. It's the nostalgia bait. It's everywhere and I actually don't need it. The attention to detail with sets and lore is what I care about and they did that well. The movie beats being repeated I don't need and the pinnacle of bait is "Get away from her, you bitch". What were they thinking?
I'm not blind to the movies positive qualities. I don't see anything in it which contradicts existing canon or that it doesn't fit in well with established lore. That's worth quite a bit in this day and age. And although I've been critical I think it's worth a watch and I would actually go to see a sequel if it gets one. Numerical scales are too simplistic - good and bad don't always cancel out, like oil and water you often just end up with just both. But if I had to smoosh it to a single point on a scale I'd probably give it a 3 out of 5. Cast, production values, respect for the lore - all positives. Some janky writing and an overly compressed timeline, bring it down.
After a few days reflection, this movie is just frustrating. There's the core of a good movie here with the first act being decent, setting up nice atmophere and nailing the 'retro tech' of the original. Andy was pretty cool, and when not-kayne is activated it becomes even more interesting, with the rest of the characters not too unlikable. And then it just gets lost in memberberries and slop to become an overly long mess.
Like, what happened?
What happened is that these movies tend to go into the trash once the aliens show up. The first halves of these movies are usually world building or character building and seeing the new technology or some mystery planet to explore. Then the second halves are the horror components. With stuff like characters petting space cobras, removing their helmets, getting killed in a shower sex scene like a 70s slasher, running down corridors and breathing heavily, and every other horror trope that this franchise embraces. And the scientists all behave like complete idiots.
How many of these films in Alien and Predator have now ended with a new alien being born? The newborn or the predalien or the space jockey alien and so on. They just copy and paste from each other for decades. Ridley Scott talked about how the "alien was cooked" and audiences were bored with it. But now every film is just obsessing over the xenomorphs and they can't seem to do anything but rehash everything over and over.
Even Aliens is ridiculous. A small child survives against 300 xenomorphs. Futuristic Space Marines are wearing 1960s gear. They send an entire team down to the planet without leaving a single person on the main ship. The xenomorphs are nothing more than cannon fodder as well and the horror is abandoned for campy action. The special effects like the shuttle crash in front of the projector screen are laughably bad as well.
Why would the aliens kill or impregnate a child which couldn't help them reproduce? It makes perfect sense.
The problem with the writing is not being anti-WU enough. They should have made the mining planet a hell world with constant deaths and accidents, then the kids being a group of orphaned survivors desperate for escape gives stronger ties to each other instead of the lackluster garbage we had. Then, they steal the mining ship to get to the station instead, now you've set up higher stakes that make more sense. Now you've got more cannon fodder to kill, and urgency in their attempt to piece together an escape plan that requires more team effort so they can't and won't let each other die.
Nigger, wut? You think the Aliens are "impregnating" their victims? Have you even seen any of the films? - In Aliens, Newt's brother has one gestating inside him.
Nigger, wut? You think the Aliens are "impregnating" their victims? Have you even seen any of the films? - In Aliens, Newt's brother has one gestating inside him.
It's already Red Dawn in space except even more contrived and nonsensical. At no point does anyone make a logical or correct choice, just the dumbest idea that could come to mind to move the plot a long. At zero point does anyone decide to cut their loses even if it would make sense, nor does anyone communicate anything effectively. The end of the movie is literally the main character covering up what happened for no reason.
Impregnate is the term used throughout the franchise. By characters in-universe and in the author perspective material in movies, games, comics, RPGs, etc. And it's not quite the same as a wasp because a parasitic wasp is simply using the host as food and protection whereas it's explicit in Aliens that the facehugger isn't implanting a self-contained egg but incorporating the host's DNA. That's stated in the movies so about as canon as you can get, but also detailed out of universe in various places. That's part of the genius of the species - it uses the native lifeforms as a template and makes itself almost a more aggressive perversion of the local species. Which is why you see humanoid xenomorphs in the first two movies and the "bambi chestburster" in the third one. And in non-movie media you see it do the same to avian and aquatic life. Whatever the environment it finds itself in, it is essentially therefore pre-adapted. It starts with the generic infiltrating facehuggers then the aggressive form parodies whatever was targeted - which will be whatever is the dominant species. Impregnation is an apt term for it as well as the in and out universe term.
As to Newt surviving, it's not because they don't want to impregnate her - they don't have any compunction about doing so at the end of the movie when they actually catch her. It's simply that it's an entire colony, not taken over in one instant, and she is small and knows her way around and hides. Out of 60-70 families, it's not weird that one little girl could survive for a time. There's food and water and she just has to lay very low.
Saw it at the theater last night and slept on it, overall it was surprisingly solid, but the over indulgence on fan service hurt it massively, I fully expected them to run into a Queen and them do a shot for shot recreation the standoff scene, also my theater groaned when CGI Ash showed up, thought it was bad enough at first because I thought it was just going to be a cameo but then he kept showing up to sprout more "Remember when he said this in the first movie!?" lines.
But when it's doing it's own thing it was actually fairly good, the scene where they're trying to sneak past the facehuggers was fantastic and as others said the zero-G scene in the hive was a highlight too. The first half was definitely better than the second and if you remove CGI Ash that first half would probably be an 8/10 for me.
I do think it could have used a bit higher of a bodycount, but at least the kills that were there are worthwhile. The chestburster scene gets talked about all the time, but seeing that dude who tried to electrocute the main Xeno get dissolved by it's blood was a great highlight too, pretty positive that's the first time we've seen in detail a character get killed by a it.
One last note is that the set designs and effects were impressive, I was a bit surprised the production budget was $80 mil, and I just want to tip my hat to Alvarez for being a director that can use their budget effectively.
Overall I'd give it a low 7/10, it's good, it's better than a last three movies, and I'd put alongside the assembly cut of 3, but it's a bit frustrating because if the second half was as good as the first and they reduced the fan service, it would have been legitimately great.
No, Kane acted stupid. He declared the ovomorphs to be eggs, that it had organic life still within, and he still put his face up to it. The reason it works though is it is perfectly within his character and does not contradict it. He was written in script to be a "rainbow chaser", and he was always the most gung-ho of the trio that went to the derelict. He makes a bad call based on what his character would actually do.
Compare to Prometheus' biologist, who panics at the sight of a dead Blue Man, but is fine with the Hammerhead snake. If it explained that he was concerned that due to preservation things like mold spores or viruses might still be active in those bodies based on data they have, it'd make sense. But it doesn't. That's what makes him look dumb, since it feels contradictory.
Compare to Bootleg Firefly captain from Resurrection. A team of smugglers who were on the station to provide cargo. Him grabbing guns initially makes sense. His insistence to continue after seeing one covered in horrid goo and in the middle of a crisis? Nope, makes him stupid and contradictory. It's why he looks dumb, since while it might make sense for an opportunist to do this, it conflicts with a smuggler's tendency to be cautious due to their job.
Again, Romulus sounds like it's inoffensive barring the memberberry spam that likely got snuck in via ChatGPT. I just lost any interest in it due to the black goo bullshit continuing to be raped into the franchise... likely on Scott's direction since he did produce this one. Covenant ruined that one too much for me to ever bother acknowledging it as canon.
No, Kane acted stupid. He declared the ovomorphs to be eggs, that it had organic life still within, and he still put his face up to it. The reason it works though is it is perfectly within his character and does not contradict it. He was written in script to be a "rainbow chaser", and he was always the most gung-ho of the trio that went to the derelict. He makes a bad call based on what his character would actually do.
Kane is a space trucker. He's exploring the egg vault and interacting with the eggs because he's entranced by being in a giant alien ship. The characters in Prometheus and Covenant are supposed to be world class scientists. Who should not be petting the space cobras or removing their helmets. I can understand the cooks and helicopter pilots in The Thing not being military level cautious as well. And the military personnel in Event Horizon wanting to immediately leave the ship and blow it up. It shouldn't be the other way around.
I still laugh remembering the crew in Covenant removing their helmets and then the black spores immediately getting into their bodies.
Been a while since I watched Resurrection. But you have Call the android constantly sabotaging and disrupting things behind the backs of the other characters. Which is the only explanation for why people behave so stupidly. She's meant to be like Ash in the first film or the Hal 9000 but Resurrection embraces its comedic writing too much and it comes across as convoluted and inane.
Kane also was a failed medical student and the ship's XO. He does in fact have the brains to realize that doing this might be a bad idea; it was why in cut footage, the director's cut, and scripting he did have a pistol on hand just in case. However, since his character is consistent throughout the film, that being he is chasing a dream and constantly wanting to discover something no one else has before, it doesn't come off as him being dumb.
The characters in Prometheus and Covenant are supposed to be world class scientists. Who should not be petting the space cobras or removing their helmets.
Oh I hate the choices of taking off their helmets, since even if it has breathable atmo, you still aren't sure of microbes. It's up there with the geologist specialist who designed the 3d mapping software not being able to have said map in his gear when they got lost.
I also don't like the 'motes' thing tbh, since at that point it makes your actual monster look a lot less effective as a bioweapon. Just do the mote thing; it's way more efficient than an egg.
Been a while since I watched Resurrection. But you have Call the android constantly sabotaging and disrupting things behind the backs of the other characters. Which is the only explanation for why people behave so stupidly. She's meant to be like Ash in the first film or the Hal 9000 but Resurrection embraces its comedic writing too much and it comes across as convoluted and inane.
No, she is. But the gun thing required el capitano to be a retard. You have to, in the middle of a situation turning to shit, with the military evacuating and the power going out, decide to follow a trail of guns, then pick up one that is covered in ooze, and then move to get one more gun.
I remember this scene vividly, because it was the scene in my most recent rewatch of it that made me go "oh fuck off" while laughing at it.
I don't understand this obsession with making tranny versions of the Xenomorph (Resurrection and Romulus) or exploring the beginning and giving us some gay prototypes (Prometheus and Covenant). I am sick and fucking tired of shows and movies that explore the beginning, the inception, the penis in vagina cumming moment. It's a sickness that been prevalent for decades now, where you make a good movie, then rape it with prequels and dozens of sequels to the prequels or spin-offs.
This is made worse by the knowledge that better concept exist.
I remember reading some comic or whatever about an Alien King (counterpart to the Queen) or some Alien civil war where two competing hives were duking it out. This is way more interesting for an Alien fan, then the endless rehashes of the same plot over and over again.
