It's a little puzzling that people who love Alien and Aliens don't love Alien Isolation. It's truly frightening, like the movies.
Although I respect the developers for attempting something different with the game (i.e. no guns, no swarms of aliens ala
Aliens), I found the depiction of the alien in
Isolation to be entirely at odds with the original Giger creature. I mean, the thing stomps around like a hyperactive Raptor, making huge amounts of noise in air vents and jumping out at the player like a cheap carnival trick. I understand the game required an alien that would be much more mobile and active than the largely static Giger monster, but in making that (major) concession the game misunderstands the tone and mood of the original film. The original Giger alien did the exact opposite of every monster in the history of the movies: it was slow, poised, studied and elegant, and was threatening in a deeply unsettling sexualized manner.
Alien: Isolation observes none of this, and even if this is largely due to the demands of game dynamics, it's less
Alien: Isolation and more
Alien Resurrection: Isolation - the alien is a slobbering, growling, stomping monster with no subtlety or suggestiveness at all.
I also think the this new NECA Alien is wrong-headed in approach. The original Rambaldi mechanized head was used explicitly for
extreme close-ups in
Alien, and strictly via quick cuts (i.e. the killing of Brett, and later Parker). Indeed, the lips extracted in
very tightly framed shots that
only showed the mouth; seeing these oversize lips on a full-size model looks comical -
because they were never intended to be seen like that. I think NECA have mistakenly translated what was clearly a very specific mechanized special effect that was carefully confined to quick edits onscreen to a general model, and it looks rather ridiculous as a result.
