Bonker99June 10, 2012Well I've seen it three times, basically to confirm my original thoughts on it which were:
Theme - great.
Pacing - way, way too rushed in first half, many poignant shots barely held for a second etc, no chance of building an immersive atmosphere.
Script/characters - lowbrow and smothers the higher themes.
Acting - superb turns by Fassbender AND Rapace; these two save the movie from being a disaster IMO. I think I'm in love with Shaw/Rapace.
First 10-15 minutes: Sublime. LOVED the Lawrence of Arabia tie-in, most appropriate for the film/David and one of my childhood fave movies.
Editing: OK, here goes ... Clearly the worst edited movie I've ever seen on the big screen. Absolutely butchered. I would expect a bare minimum of 10-15 minutes has been lost but could be 45 minutes easily. Missing scenes are obvious from the point at which the movie dives into a complete mess immediately following the fabulous caesarean scene being interspliced with THAT zombie scene, a hacked Weyland scene and the *excruciatingly* jarring exposition of WMD etc by Janek to Shaw following an apparently missing scene with Janek and Vickers. The movie, in pure filmmaking, storytelling terms is lost from here ...
This is/was a very important movie to me being an Alien nut, hence the multiple revisits to confirm just WTF I was seeing/hearing and I can't tell you how disappointed I am.
One can only hope that most/all of what they shot will one day make it into the Bluray as this could be a great movie but it's very, very clear that a large portion of what they shot didn't make it past the editing suite, presumably on orders of the Fox suits who I utterly despise ...
