Things "just" happen and no one reacts to what goes on.
I've lost count of the amount of times I've heard this complaint in recent movies, characters are reacting to whats going on, it's just that what's going on is a lot and its fucking weird.
- Stringer Bell tells his two lost crew members to chill the fuck out, while dead bodies are lying around them and a ping signal has gone off. Then he goes off to fuck robot girl, and apparently misses their screaming and camera feed. The next morning everyone wonders what happened to them, yet someone forgot to set the feed to record.
He entertains the idea of it being a series of blips from the drone as the life signs periodically disappear. The bodies have been sat in a pile for 2000 years, and although shots indicated he was concerned with the feed, I read the character's intention as to simply try and reassure his men they'd be okay for the night.
- The characters engage everything non-nonchalantly. Douche-bag college bro' taking everything light-hearted and playfully, like it's some fucking theme park trip. How are these characters biologists and geologists? How is several billion dollars being spent on something as serious as this expedition, yet most of the non-characterized crew think it's just the whole crazy family going to McDonalds. No one acts like a professional, except maybe Dr. Shaw.
The flight crew and geologists have dialogue early in the movie that establishes that they are expecting a very menial, routine job, two of them place a bet on it. I found it perfectly believable that the crew would be relaxed about such work. Dallas and chums were relaxed as fuck on the Nostromo before shit hit the fan..
- One of the "infected" crew members attacks the other crew members in the cargo bay, yet I don't know who the fuck these people are or why I should care about them being attacked by Zombie Biologist. Why not make a cool looking alien or some shit? Nope, instead we some actor who got sprayed with some black paint.
Did we know an awful lot more about Brett and Parker in Alien? Or Lambert? Ripley, Dallas and Ash are the only characters who matter in the original Alien, with a nod to Kane (Hurt) for his minimal role as chest-burst-meat. You're making a big deal out of what were only ever intended to be minor characters.
- After the attack in the cargo bay, not a single fucking character react to the events. Not even a "oh shit we just lost 3 crew members, shit just got real." Every one just carries on with their daily chores like it ain't no thang. Instead Stringer Bell just strides casually up to Dr. Shaw and say some shit about rescuing his personnel, while Dr. Shaw apparently has shifted from getting her husband inflamed by another crew member, being impregnated with an Octopus Alien, doing a violent self-abortion, filled with adrenalin shots, to striving to find the questions about life/aliens. Everything is completely rushed.
The Captain isn't concerned with saving his crew, he's concerned with making sure none of the stuff in the vases gets off-world, and Shaw shares the same concern. She goes along with the expedition to see the living space jockey precisely because she is still vulnerable to the suggestion and exploitation of her partner's memory... she has her own curiosity to satisfy, and as she demonstrates in the scene with the space jockey - a burning rage to seek answers that she can't possibly get. For someone who'd already went through the meat grinder in the operating theatre and lost the only person she cared about, and had her idealistic expectations about the engineers shattered - I didn't find it so unbelievable.
- Apparently the fact that Weyland Yutani Man is aboard the ship is supposed to be a twist, yet his role in the story is completely useless. He is introduced, says some shit about his remaining days, gets punched in the face by Space Jockey, and dies.
It's not completely useless if, for example, with his heir apparent dead - a future story bequeathes Weyland to David, or if the events in this story are somehow related to the merger with Yutani and their pursuit of the Alien. His makeup may have been shitty and his motivations shallow, but he was the reason for their being there... I had no issue with that.
- When Space Jockey wakes up, he just looks at the humans and then immediately kills them, hops in the space chair and suddenly wants to fly to Earth and bomb it with Weaponized Alien Goo. It's so fucking rushed.
We don't know enough about what their motivations were or what he was intending to do in order to say this. You are taking David and the Captain's assumptions as fact.
- In one moment Dr. Shaw tells Stringer Bell that the ship is about to take off and bomb Earth, so he would have to kamikaze into it in a completely abhorrent and cliché-ridden scene with Asian Guy # 1 and White Guy # 3. Five minutes later Dr. Shaw suddenly knows there are other ships out there (thanks to David), but she now says that they chose not to bombard Earth and she needs to know why. This contradicts what she told Stringer Bell and apparently she just wanted them to kill themselves for fun, along with her ticket off world.
She doesn't quite say that. She ponders that they had held-off their plan, and gone into stasis.. and she wonders why they had turned on the humans after creating them in the first place. She wonders what they have been waiting for, what their purpose or intention was with regards to humanity -- which as David says, should be irrelevant to her... but then, that was the whole point of the story really: the pursuit of knowledge or answers which may not matter or may prove dangerous, like Icarus reaching for the sun or Prometheus attempting to take the fire of the Gods... it also seemed to be about the myopic beliefs (scientific or existential) that drive those pursuits.
- The film suffers from a scene where two characters run away from a giant donut, without both characters simply stepping to the side and avoiding the donut. Dr. Shaw has to fall down and about to die before she figures out that she can just roll 2 meters to the side and avoid it. Great fucking job.
This is like saying if an aircraft carrier is coming toward you from 30 feet away at a rate of knots, you should have enough time to swim out of the way. The ship was no small thing. Shaw got lucky.
- The film basically ends with Dr. Shaw flying around in a space ship across the universe, finding Space Jockeys with the head of an Android. What the fuck...
- The two scientists who got left behind in the ruins. First off they are really scared when the captain mentions signs of a lifeform, and they run like hell in the opposite direction. Yet, when they encounter the Alien-snake, the initial reaction is to cuddle with it, which eventually leads to their deaths.
The character who does interact with it is the biologist of the two, not the geologist. His curiosity and familiarity makes sense. He treats it with the curiosity and apprehension that you would expect such a person to treat a snake with.
- Finding the ruins within ~30 seconds. So they travel to a planet so far away, when they enter the atmosphere they manage to find the ruins right away, and they just land there. If this had been real, then I would expect the ship to at least circle the planet once and look for other possible sites, what if there's an even more interesting place just a few miles away from the ruins? And I think a lot of people will agree with me when I say that the characters had little depth. They could have easily added 5 minutes when the ship flew over the planet, where characters could have gotten a little more time to "shine".
Shaw's partner tells them to set it down so they can check it out... yes they could have swept the whole planet, but he'd been working towards this his whole life, had slept for 2 years to get there and - as he said - "it's christmas, and I want to open my presents"
Everyone's a critic and critics gonna critique I guess. It's a good movie. Better than a lot of other dross that has come out this year.
I always try to be as quiet as possible in theaters, and hope others show the same courtesy, which they rarily do, and which is why I dislike going to theaters. 