Gritty, Working-Class, Romulus is one of the franchise’s best

Alien: Romulus - Fede Alvarez - 2024

★★★★--Loved it, but it wasn’t perfect. Alien is my Star Wars. Love all the movies, even the ones that aren’t good, likeAlien: Resurrection. As such, I watch all of these through the rosiest colored glasses imaginable and will watch every version of every bit of IP that gets put out there. Because the movie is pretty working-class, the stakes might seem kind of low, but not for the characters, of course. Best to think of it as the Rogue One of the Alien franchise in basically every way. Stand alone flick. Set between two of the original movies. Doesn’t have a huge impact on the other movies. Brings back an old dead guy with horrible CGI. So forth. 

Gist is a group of people and their android butler (jk) board a derelict space station to get cryo-pods/fuel to escape their mining colony on a Saturn moon. This leads to them fighting for survival against face-huggers, Xenomorphs, and shitty “synthetics” as happens in these flicks.
 
The cast is mostly unknowns. Rain Carradine is played by Cailee Spaeny—only thing I’ve seen her in is Mare of Easttown.She is the dead girl. David Jonsson plays Andy, the robit. Others include Archie Renaux as Tyler, Isabela Merced as Tyler’s preggers sister Kay, Spike Fearn as Bjorn, Aileen Wu as Navarro, and Ian Holm who is back from the dead as Rook, another robit. 
 
Director is Fede Alvarez. He previously did the 2013 Evil Dead movie, eh, Don’t Breathe, and The Girl in the Spider’s Web, one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. 
 
Some of the stuff I like: the acid blood in zero gravity, the thing at the end (no spoilers), robot maintenance, and getting back to the working-class aspects of Weyland Yutani. Actually, this is the most working-class movie of all the movies, which adds to the mythology. We get a lot glimpses of that over the course of the movies, but this one, these guys are the bottom of the barrel grunts. This also really focuses on the whole immortality goal that becomes so important in the prequels. 
 
Also of note, none of the movies are as unsettling as this one, including the original. This is straight up white-knuckle horror shit. 
 
The guy who plays Andy is great and does a lot heavy lifting. Starts out benevolent, becomes a company man, then goes back to being cool and seemingly feeling guilty. 
 
Soo, I’m really looking forward to Alien: Earth, which takes place about the same time as Prometheus. Bummed we probably aren’t getting a sequel to Covenant. But you never know. Hopefully that a lot of the quests get answered then. 
 
I’d put this at No. 4 on my list of Alien movies. My order from favorite to least goes thus: Aliens, Alien, Prometheus, Romulus, Covenant, Alien3, and Resurrection. 

Alien: Resurrection - Jean-Pierre Jeunet - 1997

★★-Pretty incredible cast is somewhat wasted on this installment. Not as horrible as I remembered, but pretty not great. 

Gist of this is 200 or so years after Ripley died, she and the queen Xenomorph that was inside her in Alien3 are brought back to life to harvest this bioweapon. Yeah, again with the bioweapon stuff. Now Ripley is upgraded to human/alien hybrid clone status. She basically has Matrix powers. She and a group of space pirates are trapped on a spacecraft with 12 aliens. They are trying to kill everyone so the queen can make it to Earth and do her thing down there. 

Love a good basketball scene out of nowhere, which this film has. Ripley has some fundamentals, can dunk, and has acid blood. At 5'11, I'd take take her in the first round if I were a WNBA GM. I remember seeing an interview with Sigourney Weaver and she claimed she made that shot she threw behind her head from 30 feet out on the first take. Looked it up and apparently true, which shocked Ron Perlman, causing him to lose it. 

From Bloody Disgusting: “I watched her training for this sequence, and they were rehearsing this little thing for a month. She never made it once. The camera’s rolling. I’m in the shot where she’s walking away and it goes in.” It indeed would be shocking, I'm sure. However, they were able to cut his reaction out and the shot was able to stay in the movie without being faked. 

Here's the cast...  We've got Sigourney Weaver back from the dead as Ripley. Winona Ryder as the smaller, whinier droid version of Ripley (more or less). The always fantastic Ron Perlman. Perlman plays a great pervy creep. This was sort of his modus operandi back then. One-on-one banter during basketball, then, at one point, Ripley asks, “Who do I have to fuck to get off this boat?” He replies, “I'll get you off... maybe not the boat.” So naughty!

Others include Brad Dourif (you know, Chucky), one Kim Flowers who is there to show off her remarkable ass (I think), the guy that played Tuco Salamanca, Leland Orser who I mostly think of from this and Se7en as the guy that kills a prostitute with a switchblade dildo, Dan Hedaya (Nick Tortelli from Cheers), and Michael Wincott who is sort of having a moment after Nope. Also, Gary Dourdan who looks like this buddy of mine I went to high school with. He's mostly known for the role Warrick Brown on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Finally, one J. E. Freeman as the main evil scientist. He was often a bastard, notably like in the role of mobster Marcello Santos in the David Lynch movie Wild at Heart with Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern and as a henchman in the Coen bros dope flick Miller's Crossing. 1990 was a big year for him. 

This movie has a few feels, believe it or not. First we have this horrible bit where the scientists put the eggs in front of these miners to impregnate them with the Xenomorph embryos. Cold blooded. 

This flick also features the saddest of the aliens. Again, they aren't asking for any of this. Born into this bullshit like livestock. Smarter than your average Xenomorph because of the human intelligence it has. Plus it feels a little emotion. It doesn't just want to kill. Then it dies horribly and slowly in excruciating pain after being betrayed during a tender moment with it's chosen mother. Fuck, man. 

This version of Ripley, by the by, is completely different from previous portrayals and is pretty interesting. Sigourney Weaver's performance was widely praised. Her allegiance is questioned because she birthed the queen when they brought her back. Has a connection or whatever. Do you fucking know who she is? Exterminating Xenomorphs is all she does!

When she sees the failed clones is another one of those shockingly moving bits from this franchise. It's kind of surprising that Sigourney Weaver came back for this and put in such a stellar performance. She is a great actress and all. Criminally underrated even. This is sort of trash, yeah, but without her would have been embarrassing, probably. 

In the bad column we've got some “hacking the mainframe” bullshit. They even say it at one point. “I have to hack the mainframe manually. I destroyed my modem.” “I have a neuro-processor that allows me to dream.” Little of that shit. We also get more lazy anti-corporation stuff. The corporate guys, of course, are comically terrible. They are always worse than the aliens, ya know. I think this series did more to hate corporate empires than anything else really, other than what they do in real life, of course. 

The film also ends on a weak note with Ripley finally getting back to Earth. This should have been cool after four movies, a Christ-like death with resurrection, and countless dead aliens, but is sort of like, look at that, Earth, cool, I guess. See what this is about, why not. Bill Bryson must have had this scene in mind when he wrote I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes from a Big Country in 1998. 

The film also has a lot of potential that wasn't fully realized. 

Like Ripley, the queen too is an alien/human mismash and at the end starts giving birth to more hybrids instead of eggs. Cutting out the middleman. An exceptional cool concept that does not deliver in the end. 

This is probably something that has potential to explore, the birthed hybrid killing the queen, it's mother, then taking to Ripley, it's grandmother, who ultimately kills it. But this is too crazy to put that much thought into. 

Overall, it had good pacing and was pretty entertaining. Larger cast than most of the Alien movies, these extras are mostly there to raise the body count. There are some good moments like the underwater alien chase scene that goes on for like several minutes and nearly resulted in actors actually drowning. Then when they finally get out, the facehuggers are there waiting for them. The Xenomorphs look like they would be great in water. The biggest problem with the movie, IMO, is that the tone is all over the place. You have Nick Tortelli here and Chucky yucking it up, then Ripley damn near makes you cry. Likely more too many people giving too much input, like with Alien3. I feel like it could have been really good, but it tries to do too much and fails. 

Alien3 – David Fincher - 1992

★★★-“The Bitch is Back.” Another kick ass tagline. Saw this in the theater with my dad and brother while my sister and mom watched Sister Act. At the time, I thought this movie was pretty great. Rewatched in junior high school and changed my opinion to meh. This viewing I'm watching the Special Edition also known as the Assembly Cut (which David Fincher refused to be involved in [more on that later]). It's 30 minutes longer than the theatrical version. I'll call it a mixed bag. Kind of dumb, but has some potential. Feel like it was a good flick for director David Fincher to get his start and figure out what he wanted from the rest of his career. This, obviously, wasn't it. 

One change of note in this version, I had always been reluctant to rewatch this because it's a dog in the theatrical cut that get implanted by the facehugger. A brutal animal in pain scene I wasn't about. In this version, the alien burst out of a yak like animal that they farm for meat outside of the prison. The dog was part of the studios considerable recutting, which was a weird one. Thankfully, didn't have to watch that shit. 

Back to the basics on this one. One solitary Xenomorph picking off unarmed prisoners that don't stand a chance. In this installment, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is the only survivor from Aliens after the ship crash lands on Fiorina 161, a wasteland inhabited by former inmates housed on this maximum security prison planet. After, again facing skepticism, Ripley leads the men into battle against the alien. 

Cast includes Holt McCallany who plays Bill Tench in Fincher's incredible Netflix show Mindhunter, Charles Dance who was Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones, Charles S. Dutton (title character from the show Roc among other things [bought a lot of stock in that guy]), Paul McGann from Withnail and I, Lance Henriksen (again), and Pete Postlethwaite (Keyser Söze's lawyer, Mr. Kobayashi, in The Usual Suspects). Ripley and the eldest Lannister go to pound town, which is a weird way to introduce sexual encounters into the universe. 

Ripley, among all these rapist and murderers (who have all taken a religious vow of celibacy), is repeatedly told not to go around the prisoners. The warden guy basically says that she will be raped and murdered if she goes around these guys. First chance she gets, she waltzes into the mess hall, trying to show them she's not afraid, I guess, maybe that she is just one of the guys, I don't know. Not a good situation for her or the prison, ya know. When she walks in, the first guy she engages with says, “You don't want to know me, lady. I'm a murderer and rapist of women.” She's like, “alright, well, I'm just going to sit here with you and the other sexual deviants and enjoy my meal like one of the guys.” It's never a woman's fault, but maybe in this very dangerous situation, try to be chill is all I'm saying. 

Which brings me to this fucked up attempted rape scene. This is by far the darkest of all of the films in the series and like all Fincher's work with a few exceptions features psychopaths capable of anything. Though fucked up, I sort liked this aspect of the film. I was all in early... but the movie starts to fall apart in the last third. 

It all starts when Ripley is all, we have to kill it, they can't take the alien and use it as a weapon. You know this speech because she makes it in every movie. Charles Dutton is like, why not? Fuck them, but really, why should we should we volunteer to die here when there is a lot worse shit out there already. He has a point, but then the point is mute because some idiot lets it out because he thinks it's cool or whatever which is my biggest beef with the movie. Really, it's not terrible. At times it's nearly great. But this is so unforgivably dumb. They have it trapped, neutralized. And then no. I don't recall if it is the same in the theatrical version. But I would have really hated this in junior high and it would have ruined the movie. 

Also, dumb and irritating is after Ripley finds out that she has an alien in her chest, she is like everyone has to die now. Call off the medivac team and nuke the bitch. You know, Ripley, this is her one plan for every situation. Now that she is going to die, might as well take everyone else with me. The guy in charge is like, uh, fuck that. Sorry you're going to die, but no. Pretty fucked up on Ripley's part, to be honest.

Then after this weird scene where Ripley goes to kill it and mistakes a pipe for the alien head, she asks Dutton to kill her. But Dutton is like, fuck you, how about you help. She goes, makes her speech again and rallies the troops with an anti-corporate rant with Dutton throwing out some god stuff and they're all on board. 

It kind of comes back around and is exciting at least with a lot of chasing and murdering which culminates in an alien covered in molten lead. When they turn the sprinklers on it, it dies in a satisfying explosion. Spoiler. 

But then it ends on some dumb shit with the return of Lance Henriksen, the designer of the droid that looks like him, who spouts some corporate nonsense and tries to convince Ripley to let them take the queen out of her. It then descends into self-sacrificing nonsense and Henriksen saying shit like “it's a beautiful specimen! You're throwing away the chance of a lifetime.” And Ripley Christ's herself into the fire. The end. I remember the chestburster popping out as she fell, but that doesn't happen in this version. 

So let's get into the production... 

Can't really talk about this movie without acknowledging the legendarily troubled production. Fox, the studio behind the flick, kept pushing the film back and making changes. Supposedly there were something like ten different writers for the film and Fincher was not the first director. Then at some point in1991 they released a teaser that simply stated “In 1979, we discovered, in space, no one can hear you scream. In 1992, we will discover, on Earth, everyone can hear you scream.” Incredible teaser. 

I remember being more than a little intrigued, hence seeing it in the theater at age 10 (my parents didn't discourage the horror/film stuff my brother and I were into and now I'm a sort of successful, sort of well adjusted adult, love you mom and dad). If you haven't seen it, uh, don't get too excited. This trailer came out before the script was finished and as anyone who's seen the movie knows, this shit ain't on Earth. 

Almost immediately Fincher started distancing himself, leaving the project before the final edit was in the can. That summer he said “If I go on to make 10 great ones, this'll probably be looked upon as my first bungled masterpiece.” In 2009 he told The Guardian that “no one hated it more than me; to this day, no one hates it more than me.” When he made the film he was 29-year-old music video director getting his first picture. Fox more or less had no faith in him and breathed down his neck the whole time, demanding recuts and reshoots throughout. You can read more about it on Film Stories. 

The 10 great ones/bungled masterpiece thing is pretty much exactly what happened as he has 10 more under his belt here in 2023 and most of them are indeed considered great. 

What's nuts is Fincher nearly left the industry after this experience, going back to music videos and refusing to read scripts until Se7en wound up in his lap. Thank fuck he stuck with that shit as he is one of the all-time greats. In my opinion he has three movies in the top 10 of this century in The Social Network (behind only There Will Be Blood for best movies of my lifetime), Zodiac, and Gone Girl. Mank and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo ain't bad either. I haven't even mentioned his best two either in Se7en and Fight Club. I wrote papers in college about both of those. Hell, Fight Clubbasically turned me woke when I saw it 1999. It completely changed the ways I look at consumerism and contemporary masculinity. 

Despite all the issues between Fincher and the studio, a lot of the actors working on the film were impressed enough to keep working with him. 

Dance, the love interest in the film, said that while it wasn't the nightmare it's been characterized as, it still wasn't an easy shoot. He explained that the executives back in Hollywood, the film was shot in England, phoned Fincher at all hours of the night, ignoring the time change, just basically fucking with him. For what it's worth, Dance said doesn't regret that he was a part of it and that he'd like to work with Fincher again, whom he considers a genius. “The minute David Fincher first walked onto the set I thought, 'My god, this guy is going to go far.' He was fantastic,” he said. Talk all that for what you will. He later did work on another Fincher film with Mank, playing William Randolph Hurst. 

One of the prisoners (a lot of them sort of blend together) Christopher John Fields is in four Fincher films, Holt McCallany was a henchman in Fight Club and has since gone on to star in Fincher's Netflix show Mindhunter, and Charles S. Dutton also appeared in Se7en. Then again, there are several actors who won't work with him again for what sounds like pretty good reasons. Notably Robert Downey Jr., Jake Gyllenhaal, and maybe Mark Ruffalo. Dude is tough to work for, for sure. 

Final thoughts...

My parting words here. This is easily the cutest little alien of the series. Nicknamed it “Bambi”. Running around on all fours. They used a dog in a suit at one point. Not sure it it made it into this cut, but it's pretty adorbs. Just a little guy. Aw. People went wild when Sigourney Weaver buzzed her head. Good look on her. I've historically been kind of into that. And, finally, while not perfect and near the bottom of his films, it does have it's moments, and shows more than a few glimpses of the promise of Fincher's later work. Overall, highly underrated. 

Aliens - James Cameron - 1986

★★★★★-Might be the greatest sequel of all time. Takes the world/premise of the first movie and dials it way up. Plus, no one is better at subtly shitting on corporations than James Cameron. All of his movies are a soulless corporate entity focused on profits to the extreme, causing preventable death to completely innocent people (or aliens or whatever) on a massive level. My kind of dude. With this flick, he goes all out with it and when in doubt, throws a couple exploding aliens in there. Incredible. 

To hammer this home, the first half hour of this movie is the most brutal shit a character has ever had to endure mentally. After floating in space in stasis for close to 60 years instead of the eight weeks she was expecting, Ripley wakes up to find her daughter got old and died. She is then forced to explain why she destroyed company property and gets fired and her space license revoked. They treat her like a criminal and even talk jail time. Then, when she suggests they check out the planet, a suit tells here that there are people there now! 60–70 families. “No complaints from them.” She immediately knows they are all going to die. Some real heavy shit to wake up to. Just put me back into stasis, Jesus fuck. 

Wrote a paper in college about this movie for a religion in film course I took. We all had to present on a couple of the predetermined movies. No one wanted this one because it took real work to make something of it. Intellectually confident as I was by senior year, I took this on by choice. Back as a stupid freshman, I dated a girl that was more or less identical to Ripley in this flick after the haircut. We did not have a good breakup and I harbored let's say dislike (she broke up with me because she thought I was a shitty writer, which has like always been MY thing, don't ya know, so I hated her) and I kind of held it against Ripley. So my take was siding with the Xenomorphs, which fucking killed. “They didn't ask to be born killing machines, they aren't the evil ones, they are just following their instincts in fighting this hostile group encroaching on their territory.” Lot of stuff like that with a bunch of digs on Bill Paxton. When I graduated, the professor from that class, one of only two classes I got A+s in, wrote me a letter saying he hopes I continue being a voice for “the other,” which was one of the best compliments I've ever gotten, and I think about often. I feel this way with damn near every creature feature I watch these days. Down with the status quo, I say! Rip that guy's head off, Cocaine Bear!

Admittedly, the Ripley-Newt relationship is surprisingly touching though, which makes it hard to all out root for their deaths, though I managed. She's sweet for a feral child, she won the “Citizenship Award” for her second grade class. I, too, won the citizenship award in second grade. I was opinionated and still loathed everyone, but I was much quieter about all that back then. It wasn't until high school that I realized I was also hilarious and developed my barbed wit and general gift of gab. So, yeah, on a related note, I've been in my fair share of tussles since ye olde citizen boy award of 1989 with that combination. The most terrifying part of the movie is when Newt is in the like sewage system or whatever with chest level water and the inevitable happens. Spoiler. Also, back to the movie, I thought Newt was the same feral child in Mad Max 2 aka The Road Warrior until adulthood. 

Remember them being in space a lot more. Most of the movie takes place on the ground with this nuclear disaster looming with blue lightning and everything. What this series is pretty much. Trying to get out and kill the aliens before wherever they are explodes. Anywho, this is why the marines can't use guns at one point, which is eventually ignored. Plot science at its finest, “you can't fire bullets, you're inside a nuclear reactor!” So it's basically go in there and die, which they do. 

It was probably crazy to see a bunch of aliens back when this came out. But I saw this before the original and was sort of surprised and let down the first time I saw the Ridley Scott movie as a kid with it just being the one. Something nuts, Cameron only had six Xenomorph costumes. It looks like there are hundreds. I shit you negative on this. Plus, we get the first queen, which is just amazing. 

Cast is nuts. Stars Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, of course. As an athlete, I love critiquing running form in film. And not a good runner, Sigourney Weaver. Form is beyond terrible. Worse than Harrison Ford's old man run in The Temple of Doom. Still looks great in underpants and a tank top though. Also get Bill Paxton, Michael Biehn from The Terminator and Tombstone, Paul Reiser from Mad About You, Lance Henriksen from Pumpkinhead who is probably most remembered from this flick and his character Frank Black from The X-Files its dope spinoff Millennium, and Carrie Henn as Newt. 

A little on Michael Biehn. I pretty much love every movie this guy is in. Bought a lot of stock in him after The Abyss, but it never really happened for him. 

The film, I'm sure everyone knows, has a happy ending. Yay! But then after another crazy long stasis we get bold Ripley in Alien 3 and see that the kid and Biehn died and there were facehuggers all over the ship. Boo. 

The one-two punches that both Ridley Scott and James Cameron had after their first movies in this franchise are unmatched. Scott made Alien and then Blade Runner (a top 10 all time), then Cameron makes The Terminator followed by Aliens. He also wrote the screenplay for Rambo: First Blood Part II during this same period. Fucking sick. 

Alien: Covenant is the greatest movie of all time

Aw shit. Covenant is easily the scariest installment of the series since Alien. It was fucking tense, yo. It's no Alien or Aliens but it's really, really good. Like any good horror movie I was pretty uncomfortable at times. But what makes it dope is how much it has stuck with me and made me think about it. The ending is totally something you see coming from a mile away, but then you don't, but then you do, so forth. Like most the movie, it’s predictable, but not. Sure it’s more people going to a planet and getting themselves picked off, but it is also the origin of an old testament god. Here be massive spoilers. 

Pros: Casting was flawless. Fassbender is amazing. Lots of beautiful people including the chick that is in all Ti West's movies. Has made me think more than any other movie in recent memory. 

Cons: Total bummer of a movie. Couple of cliches. Some unreasonable idiocy. Not much in the way of character development with a few exceptions. 

Disclaimer: There are massive spoilers below.

Rotten Tomato Consensus: Alien: Covenant delivers another satisfying round of close-quarters deep-space terror, even if it doesn't take the saga in any new directions.

Notes: First off, it is good to know in 100 years people still know John Denver songs and use GoPro 3s. Siri, by that point, is also pretty advanced. As we see in the opening scene, the droid from Prometheus, David, Michael Fassbender, comes online in an Adam meeting god moment. Except the god here is Guy Pierce, founder of the Weyland Corporation. They talk about how he created David and what not and David is all like, “isn’t it weird you are going to die and I will live forever.” Guy Pierce is like, “get my tea, bitch.” Implications here are clear. Essentially: “you are here serve me. I made you for this purpose.” But David has ambition. 

Basically, David is the secrete protagonist of Prometheus. If you think you understood Prometheus, well we think that shit. In retrospect, that movie is bleak as fuck. In Covenant, we are seeing the origin of a godlike power. And he is a vengeful god. He'd rather make his own life rather than play with what’s already around. He is on some next level shit. That is Covenant's big mistake. Not recognizing that his ambitions are godly. He is the robot version of Kurt Russell in Guardians Vol 2. My favorite part in Prometheus was when David met the space jockey and spoke to him in his native tongue, the space jockey is then like, “aw” and pats his head but then totally just rips it off. It was fucking hilarious. David, however, did not think that shit funny. He is basically above all this shit. He obviously had no respect for his creator and by extension humanity. Now, moving on to mankind’s creator, no respect for them either. So now when he goes with Elizabeth Shaw, who he kills and experiments on after she put him back together, to the planet inhabited by the architects and literally reigns shit down, their own bioweapon, on top of them, killing all nonbotanical life on the planet.

During his alone time on the architect planet, David keeps busy by cultivating facehuggers which he finally gets to use on Dr. Manhattan to make the first xenomorph. That scene is fucked. Right before we have this Neomorph, the product of the bioweapon alone, which is now airborne, infecting a host. It has killed at least a couple of people at this point but David talks to it and sort of calms it’s murderous rage for a moment. At that time the guy who played Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen shows up and mows the thing down. David is PISSED. “He trusted me!” he screams. Dr. Manhattan is all, “I need to know what the fuck is going on.” David is like, “well alrighty then.” Takes him to see the pods. One opens up. David is like, “don’t worry, it won’t hurt you,” and he is looking down into it and of course the facehugger is swirling around. All 10 or so people in the matinee showing I was at were like, “you fucking idiot!” We know what comes next, you see. And it does. Dr. Manhattan is passed out with a chestburster ready to go. David wakes him by chucking rocks at his face. He wakes. David acts like a dick and then we get the first xenomorph. It’s cheesy as fuck with David teaching it to raise it’s arms like an asshole. If I know one thing about xenomorphs, it is that they are not trainable.

The Weyland-Yutani Corporation is all over the place with these robots. Covenant has it’s own iteration of the David robot, this one named Walter. He is also played by Fassbender, who I stress was fucking amazing in these roles. Walter is the less insane, more predictable model. He is stronger and less murderous as he does not have the ability to create. It's like if every other generation of iPhone were pure evil. Except instead of spamming your contacts, it kills everyone on the planet and tortures you to death for fun. That too is my idea of a good time. Me and David should party. I could teach him about Shelley (I was a Romantic poetry scholar in a past life). He could teach me about the flute. We can listen to Wagner together. Good times. Won't let him pour my drink though. 

Anyway, David sees Walter as a brother that too lets him down. When they get together we get some Fassbender on Fassbender action. They kiss, which was weird, and David teaches Walter to play the flute, saying something like “you blow and I’ll do the fingering,” which was hilarious. But they end up fighting over David’s desire to “kill all humans” Bender style. It should be no contest, Walter is the updated model after all, but they are basically even, to my annoyance, which causes shit to get complicated at the end. 

Katherine Waterston, the survivor girl whose recent credits include the Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice (where she is blonde and tan) and that Harry Potter prequel, is a pretty lady that they make look as much like Ripley as they can. Actually everyone in the movie is flawless looking with the exception of maybe Danny McBride, but even he isn’t normal person hideous or anything. She is solid and the first half of the movie more or less follows her.

I’d say McBride sort of steals the show but with Fassbender that is not possible. When I saw him and James Franco were in it, Franco for all of like 10 seconds, I thought it might turn out to be a hilarious comedy which did not happen and McBride does a fucking great job. I was legitimately moved by his character which is crazy pants. 

Other than that, you don't really see them develop any of the characters. They're just red shirts. We see them long enough to learn one cliché about them and then they're dead. Some of those death scenes are fucking spectacular though. The best of the bunch is the shower death scene. It was fucking sick. 

Potentially hilarious?

All in all, great fucking movie. It’s so good it’s been hard to watch anything else. They totally shit on the Alien vs. Predator universe, which thank fuck, the xenomorphs and their precursors look fucking dope, good kills, gets you thinking, performances are amazing. This is a must own for me.