Overall Review: The movie is watchable and thrilling for its own sake but lacks any real attempt at establishing a coherent story.
The Good:
1. Michael Fassbender was really quite fantastic as the android David. He was by turns, a sympathetic, disconcerting, freaky creature. Emotionally-sterile yet also surprisingly malicious in some of his actions. Was all he did really necessary or did he do some of them just out of some morbid clinical curiousity?
2. Lesson for the kids: Be nice to androids. They might not have feelings but they may get back at you. Dr. Halloway was a charming enough fellow and certainly very much a sweetheart to his sweetheart, but he was kind of a jerk to David. Look what happens to him.
3. Acting from all quarter was generally very good.
4. Special effects and visuals were stunning.
5. The Korean guy who freaks out in Sunshine plays a navigator/pilot here again. Hehe.
The Bad:
1. Fails to answer its own questions. While I might concede that this is a deliberate ploy to better bring home the point, to haunt its viewers, it mostly feels like lazy storytelling to me. Almost like they were thinking of how to make the movie cooler and decided on a non-answer. I don't know... it just doesn't work? I'm sure I've watched something before where this has been tried and it worked. Not here, at least not for me.
2. Huge alien biology inconsistencies. Minor I suppose, but in the larger scheme of things it made the story even more disjointed. For example, why does Dr. Halloway die from the black alien stuff but somehow impregnates Dr. Shaw with it? How did it turn his stuff into alien baby juice? Why does Fifield run around like a zombie from Resident Evil after getting sprayed with alien acid blood and falling face-first into a puddle of black goo? Is this alien goo the same mysterious black goo in the X-Files movie? Why does Milburn die but Fifield doesn't?
I don't know. I just felt like after enjoyment I got left with the feeling of... uhm, what?
