I was actually kind of disappointed whenever there was a monster moment, since it cheapened a lot of the more intellectual elements by reminding me of the rest of the series, which in a lot of ways this movie had little to do with.

Don't get me wrong, I really liked the movie, but it was just good where it could have been great. The part with the worm that broke the guy's arm and then forced itself into his mouth was awesome and creepy as hell, but when it first started it immediately changed the tone of the movie in a way that was off putting.

And the alien at the end was kind of bogus. With all of the smarty pants philosophy going on I was expecting at least some kind of profound hoozimawatsis, but instead I just got an angry alien killing machine without any emotional impact. I suppose they were trying to keep the movie ambiguous by not explaining just why the aliens wanted to destroy humanity, but I thought that was pretty obvious anyway: the aliens were scared of what they'd created so they wanted to purge the galaxy of all of their life creating experiments. Wondering about the details is interesting, but ultimately the "ambiguous" ending was kind of not so ambiguous.

But other than all that it was a pretty good sci fi experience. The visuals were great, the characters were fleshed out and believable, and the sets were moody where they needed to be and/or satisfyingly futuristic without being futuristic to the point of silliness.

And creaturey featurey though it may have been the giant, evil starfish at the end was far too awesome for me to complain. And when the Alien alien popped out of the alien guy at the very end it was pretty spectacular. It was rather cool revealing that the...what were they, "xenomorphs" I think? Yeah, it kicked some ass that the xenomorphs came from a mixture of alien and human DNA combined by a weaponized mutagen.