I think Warren mentioned this movie in 1 of his posts, so I decided to make it official and give it its own thread.

I actually really wanted to see this when I first saw trailers, as it looks like my kind of movie.  I wanted to love it.  I thought sure I'd at least like it.  But...no go.

I was very surprised to read that this was shot back in 2017, and was the last film to be released under 20th Century Fox, as Disney bought the company and changed the name to 20th Century Studios.

We open very quickly here, with little to no character buildup, and I think that was a problem, as we really don't know shit about anyone, which makes it hard to root for them.

The creatures are intro'd quite late, IMO, but they look very cool...at first, then, the big baddie is intro'd very late into the short 96 minute runtime, and for me, everything went way downhill, very fast.

I don't want to spoil anything, but let's just say the film is very Lovecraftian, and Cthulhu seems to be be here.

FX were hit and miss for me - some scenes looked good, others did not, but overall, I found the filming to be too dark and blurry to really see things like I wanted to.  The big guy did not look good at all to me, and that's a big problem, as it was a big set piece that probably cost quite a bit.

Some $80 Million was spent and this was a flop, bringing in only $41 Million WW.

IMO, this should have been much better.  It looked to me like alot may have been cut out, and if that's the case, it was a mistake.  It just came across way too much like so many other similar movies we've all seen.

Did I hate it?  No, I didn't hate it, but I doubt I'll ever watch it again.

Grade - C

I agree with pretty much all of what you've said here, Jeff.

Alien had a lot of scenes shot in near darkness but you could still see the monster in the dark clearly. Towards the end the monsters in this looked very octopus-hokey and before that I often had difficulty seeing what we're supposed to be terrified of.

I loved the opening scenes and I think Kristen Stewart equipped herself nicely. She's a fine actress but Norah doesn't come close to being Ripley and Alien this is not.

It was worth seeing but ultimately a bit disappointing as it never quite reached the heights or scares it should have.

I thought this was okay. Definitely seems like it's missing about 15-20 minutes, but what we have is a solid enough popcorn flick. I still think this needed to be rated R. :P

I agree with you both completely.

Yeah, there were some early scenes where we were supposed to be freaking out, but the filming was so murky, I didn't see what they wanted me to, either.

$80 Million on this oh so simple, by the numbers scripts.  I don't get it.

I read this script a couple of years ago and I was so unimpressed with it I couldn’t believe they were making it. They changed quite a bit in the film but it didn’t make it any better.
I thought it was decent until the end. I love how in the movies all you have to do to get your nuclear power station to explode is just go to your friendly touch screen and drag some faders up.

James