No, I haven’t seen it. Yes, I know RedLetterMedia is not an infallible source of movie criticism. But when I read about the movie myself, from promotional material for it no less, I found myself asking “that’s it? That’s all there is to this?”
Maybe my interest/fondness of the franchise hasn’t fully recovered from that “David actually made the alien and killed all the Engineers” retcon asspull from before that made the universe feel very small and stripped it of a lot of curiousity and dread in the darkness of space and all of that.
If you saw it and liked it, that’s great. Share what you liked about it if you like. The set design, physical costume/makeup work, and even the acting all sound promising, but I don’t think I could bear to sit through what really does sound like some LLM-written kitbash of the previous movies.
This “review” sucks. The two most interesting aspects of the movie are its portrayal of androids and what it has to say about women’s issues. Meanwhile the dude wearing red completely fails to understand Andy. Calls his original personality a “simpleton,” refers to his two personalities as “good” and “bad.” Zero mention of agency, enslavement, disability, emotion vs rationality. And the only thing these guys have to say on women’s issues in the film is that there’s a weird alien vagina. Good work guys. I’m not even sure what they wanted out of the film. They say the best part were the first 30 minutes, which frankly is just over-the-top sci-fi capitalist dystopia. It’s as derivative as the rest of the film. This is an interesting movie with a lot worth discussing, and they managed to hit all of the least interesting points.
I just can’t get past how ableist the movie is towards Andy. What aspects of his character do you think are interesting in the movie itself? Or do you mean what it represents about how broader society views disabled folks?
I’m still not fully sure how I feel about Andy. He’s coded as autistic, with his two personalities sort of being two stereotypical (?) “types” of autism (tropes?). I’ve seen analysis on how his character partially subverts but arguably still falls into racist tropes as well. The point is, if you’re reviewing the movie, you should be discussing these sorts of things. The guys in this youtube video don’t, and so their review is extremely shallow. A movie does not need to be good for it to be a good movie for analyzing.
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There were a lot of vaginas
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Their takes don’t always land, and that’s part of why I made this post: a second, third, or maybe fourth opinion.
I like the Alien series though I’ve been burned by it before (Covenant was horrid to me).
spoilers, discussion of SA
Early in the film, one of the characters reveals she’s pregnant, that the father was an asshole, but that she’s excited to have the baby. At the end of the film, she gives birth to a monster. A fully-grown man-thing that’s more sexual predator than human. How do you make a thirty minute “review” of the film and have nothing to say about this motherhood and patriarchal violence?