I bought this movie because of the trailer. The simple fact is the trailer isolated all the good bits and sold a much better product than Alien Rising actually is. The story fails for critical reasons. There is an obsession with fighting ability, an obsession that has no bearing on the story at all. All this fighting is designed to show us that the heroine is the best at fighting with all the men (aside from this star there are only one or two unimportant other women). I'll be honest. This aspect was so juvenile that I only got half way into the picture before I stopped watching. There is a lot of cgi, which is used for wide shots of the facility, spaceships, helicopters, and the aliens, and even, I suspect, for the sea. It was only ever OK quality. This is a 2013 movie, a good decade after good cgi became available. The sets were unimpressive, as was the script. I'm prepared to give Alien Rising 4 stars because the story had begun to have some sci-fi originality before I stopped watching, and that's important to me as I love any expansion of good sci-fi writing. But that originality was also riddled with tensions around the heroine, whom in the matter of a couple of minutes rejects a former lover and starts a new love affair with another man. It's all bits and pieces, and in the end it was obvious that the set up was to confirm who survived and whom got killed in the second half of the movie, when, I venture, the alien escapes. One day I'll go back and see if I nailed it. This is yet another sci-fi movie that has not had sufficient overview before, during or after production, and we the public have had to suffer another dud.
Review of Alien Rising
