Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The Good: -There have been various opinions about the special effects. Personally, I thought the visuals and soundtrack were awesome. They definitely made me favorably disposed towards this film. -Michael Fassbender is spellbinding. The Bad: The main problem with the entire film is that nobody (other than Michael Fassbender) has any plausible motivation for the majority of their behavior. As a result the entire movie is basically just an exercise in convenience, much like your modern B-movie horror flick. **** COMPLETE SPOILER **** Weyland is old and dying. A couple scientists convince him our progenitors are located in a specific solar system based on some old cave paintings found in separate locations. Weyland immediately spends a few trillion on a space ship and fills it full of the most absurd band of miscreants he can find, plus one awesome android, plus himself (shhhh it's an unnecessary secret). His plan?... become immortal somehow. It's just completely absurd. Why is he secretly on the ship, instead of just... entirely visibly on the ship? It's HIS ship. Why does he think wandering up to these aliens and asking them a few questions is a good route to immortality in the first place? Honestly his role/quest is entirely unnecessary and should have either been legitimized with SOME sort of evidence, reasoning, or belief structure, or thrown out. When his quest inevitably and laughably fails even his final quote... is stupid. We don't care enough about his mission to care about its failure. The four scientists are far more maddening and will be discussed from least maddening to "makes me want to curl up into a ball and sob uncontrollably" can-of-walnuts crazytown. We start with the two scientists who discover the... constellation (hold on a minute, why were the aliens pointing out their biological-weapon-factory-planet to a bunch of neandarthals?? A 20,000 year delayed trap? SENSELESS). Noomi has "faith" which is discussed and never legitimized outside of some sad, pithy dreams, but she has very little sense. She does, however, occasionally react to situations properly. This occasional legitimate action makes her not completely terrible. Noomi's boyfriend scientist does not react to any situation properly. First, he takes of his helmet because... Why not? He gets depressed by finding dead aliens instead of living ones. He also manages to be a gigantic asshat to the most dangerous character on the ship (Michael Fassbender drips with menace throughout the entire movie). Afterwards he sees proof that he is infected with some crazy alien eye worms and... ignores it. Ingenious! Needless to say when he is torched with a flamethrower nobody cares. Choosing who is worst between the geologist and biologist is kind of like choosing the least appetizing between two liver flukes. You can't win. The geologist gets lost in a cave which he MAPPED with his OWN devices. Furthermore being that he is... I don't know... a GEOLOGIST, why can't he find his way out of a cave? Meanwhile the biologist, in possibly the most daringly risky action in all of fictional biology, sticks his hand basically INSIDE the mouth of an alien death snake after RUNNING from a "possible life form reading" in the previous scene. What lifeform was he imagining previously if he's willing to immediately leap into the mouth of a terrifying, albino snake-beast? They both die horribly and nobody cares. I honestly laughed derisively. This is all a long winded way of saying a bunch of stuff happens and nobody cares, seemingly not even the characters in the movie. The science doesn't make any sense, of course, but I cared a lot less about that than the terrifying senselessness of the story and characters. Once the movie clunkily transitions into its horror phase there is a feeling of stupid inevitability to every death as the characters one by one run (sometimes quite literally) directly towards their doom. At the end of the movie (kindly telegraphed by the previews to the movie... thanks marketing!) all I could feel was a general malaise. This feeling combined with the knowledge that this script could have been fixed for about .01% of the money pumped into special effects left me decidely nonplussed. This movie could have been one of the best Sci Fi epics of all time; instead it's a laughable farce. Worth watching once just for Michael Fassbender and the aforementioned effects, or lots of times if you liked Transformers...