Saw it with my partner on Friday.
My review:
There was so much fan service that I thought it was a bad Tumblr fanfic and wish I had pirated it.
Fan service spoilers, general complaints, not in order
- Andy the android. Seriously? How lazy.
- Rook? Ash? Rook in Dutch is "smoke", give me a break! Also that CG face was abysmal! I've seen better deepfake videos.
- How the hell does the Company find Nostromo in the middle of space after it blew up in all directions at an unknown location? Stuff keeps moving outward in space and space is infinite... To even figure out where it would be their physicists would have had to pinpoint the original site of the explosion, where the explosion took place on the ship, how much outward force the explosion exerted on the ship, and the exact date and time of the explosion. In the middle of fucking space.
- The mouse/rat giving "birth" was a terrible callback to 3 with the dog or cow, depending on the cut.
- Trying to blow the Xeno out of a hole in glass... C'mon!
- Humanoid birth (Alien 4) that looks like an Engineer (Prometheus), coming out of a human...
- Xeno breathing down Rain's neck
- Andy sounding like David when inserting the module
- Andy and Rook continuing the terrible trope that every single android has referred to it as "the perfect organism"
- Face huggers swimming, a bad callback to 4
- Do NOT get me started on how convenient it was that the ship flew into the cargo bay when the pilot lost control
- The cryosleep fluid makes no sense and retcons 2. If Ripley was out for as long as she was between 1 and 2, then how many canisters were on her EEV?!?! What about between 2 and 3?!
- Rain stepping out of the lift with the gun was a shot for shot remake of 2
- Andy crying when being left behind, a callback to David, unless hes one of the original David models with a new skin? Lazy writing either way
- Stay away from her... BITCH 🤮
- The acid kill retcons 4. One drop goes completely through the guy's leg, while in 4 it only burns the skin slightly.
- The scene where Rain blew away the Xenos when gravity was off was a callback to 2 with the turrets in the tunnel, down to having several rounds left after they're all gone
- Rain entering the mission in the ship's log at the end. Does she even have any formal training there?
- Since when are planetary rings solid? And since when does a vessel the size of a large city turn into shredded cheese when scraping against a bunch of space ice?
- Flashing runway lights, a direct callback to all of the other ones
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There's more but these are enough to get the point across. I think it would have been a better film if it tried to be its own film and not reference every single iconic scene from the previous installations. At least they kept the technology and set painting consistent this time, unlike Prometheus...