1. 3D is here to stay. It’s not the only way to make films, but it will gradually become the dominant way, with only independent and avant-garde directors using it until the independents can afford decent 3D cameras (that day is fast approaching – JVC is already selling a $3000 camera that shoots 1080p 3D). The technology has vastly improved since Avatar, with directors realizing that the point is not to make images come out of the screen, like in a cheapo fright fest like My Bloody Valentine or a shock-and-awe action film like Clash of the Titans, but to give a layered depth to the images that I can only describe with the invented phrase “extreme deep focus”. I could tell this from the trailers – some of the acting looked shitty, but I will see The Great Gatsby come Christmas because the images produced by the 3D digital print were so luscious they literally aroused me sexually. Apologies for the TMI… once we get into the actual film, as Brentos says, it’s beautiful. The opening credits are reminiscent of The Tree of Life, and the rest looks like it was shot by Kubrick, not Scott. The layered depth, along with the ridiculously beautiful lighting and tone, means you have to see it in a theater. Michael Fassbender is stunningly beautiful in all his scenes, which leads me to the next comment…

2. Fassy. He should be nominated for Best Supporting Actor. I never doubted once that he was an android. His sense of cold, ruthless devotion to the mission was similar to a humanoid HAL 9000, and he did as good a job of playing a robot with humanoid thinking and a certain amount of ghost in the machine as Ian Holm did in the original Alien, although their purposes in the story are completely different. And now, story…

3. SPOILER ALERT! MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT!

I love the fact that there are no direct references to the original Alien until the last scene. It’s a standalone film in the Alien mythology that, like Edwin N said, is more of an existential space drama than a sci-fi body horror film. It’s hard science fiction on the level of science fiction literature, that only has a 65 score on Metacritic because it would probably work better as a novella. It’s not the literary, cinephilic science fiction I’ve dreamed of making since I was a kid (when I had no idea that people like Jacques Rivette and Thomas Pynchon had done all the basic ideas I had for films or books years before I was born) that combined dreams, melodrama, mythology, psychology and philosophy to form a metagenre that could do anything… but I guess I’ll have to invent that myself.

Grade: A.