Unsure why you build up this entire rep as a gorezone edgelord just to make an ALIEN movie that’s this tame. Sure, the design work looks great, but even that has the faint feeling of watching someone else play a video game set inside a familiar, fucked up world; trudging behind soulless NPCs who become cannon fodder for a swarm of creepy crawly face huggers and slimy xenos that snatch and dispose of these hapless dopes mostly offscreen. There’s a neat new wrinkle to the monster’s lifecycle thrown in, and a nasty final beast that threatens to actually add life to the last reel, but the rest is so flat and prettily generic that it never rises above overly expensive fan fiction. A real “you had one job” scenario that sells itself on practicality yet completely falls apart once it revives a central antagonist who looks almost completely CGI (and whose previous incarnation in ‘79 was one of the ickiest puppets ever put to film). Inexplicable, really.

[Source: Theatrical Screening]