
Almost a complete 180 of my opinions on this from the last time I saw this. Not a flawless film by any means but so much better than I remember it -- I feel like the worst parts of it are when it feels like a "Franchise film" and the best stuff is when it's Ridley trying to work through his feelings on faith and god and horror, and the weird thing is that these are very connected throughout the film.
It really feels, as a movie, an attempt to do that, to merge his two Big Topics of "creepy wet aliens" and "what is the purpose of faith". I feel much more able to judge the latter stuff now that I've seen more of his output, and I still love Alien so the former stuff is good.
But there's just so much in here: the temple that Janek can only see as a military installation, the fact that everyone has a different interpretation of the engineers (who are, in themselves, objects of faith), the mural of the xenomorph as holy figure.
I couldn't help but interpret, for myself, that the xenomorph may have been an object of worship for the engineers, and that all their technology of transformation was a ritual to become like the gods that they remembered, and perhaps those gods, too, were unknowable and savage to them.
