Ten thousand years ago, a meteor hit earth. The crashing was witnessed by wise men who did not know where the CGI would be added so the meteor isn’t actually in their eyeline. Thankfully, it didn’t cause destruction, just a crater and a green stone—the morning star. The stone exchanged many hands in the eons that have passed and was believed to be the ultimate weapon by its master… and they were right. Wait, this sounds familiar. Oh, they are putting it in a fancy box… an ark of the covenant, if you will. It gets lost? Yeah, I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark, too.
This is all narrated by a narrator who is not impressed and I’m guessing served as the best boy grip for the production.
The rock is found and ends up in a secret facility that is doing some genetic modification on an alien to create the perfect soldier. Plans like that never work out. Especially when the alien looks like a predator/alien hybrid. A team of marines (or whatever) are sent to deal with the facility after the creature escapes.
The cast of characters isn’t much to write about. We have the mad scientist that created the alien (I think) who is carefully overacted by John Savage. Hurley from Twin Peaks is a computer coder that was put to work at the facility because he tried to pull a Superman 3 penny scheme. The marines don’t really have personalities, except the leader who is angry. She is portrayed by Michelle Goh who hasn’t been in anything since 2005 so I’m not gonna rub salt in any wounds.
The creature is the star. It is an amalgamation of DNA from a lot of aliens, and the mad doctor. Oh, yeah. The rock is actually just a USB key that has a lot of alien DNA information. It is an obvious copy of a xenomorph that formed inside a yautja but it’s different enough to be interesting AND it’s a guy in a fly costume, not crappy CGI. In fact, the use of CGI is impressive. Most cheap sci-fi films from this era were teaming with some of the worst CGI known to man, here, it is used sparingly. They even have obvious miniature work in some scenes. I like that.
That’s it for the positivity. The film is way too much a rip-off of everything that preceded it to be entertaining. The plot is basically Aliens, the only thing missing is Newt. It even has the facehuggers running around trying to grab the uninteresting marines. Between monster scenes, it’s dull, so you have plenty of time to figuring out what happens next and even if you didn’t, nothing would surprise you.
