Overrated

Better Late Then Never

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

I've just noticed this is a film "Made for TV". Why am I constantly getting "Made for TV" movies from the local video shop??? Well that will explain why this flick is such rubbish.CGI scenes are atrocious. There is a scene at the end with a helicopter vanishing into the horizon. It just sits there, static, against the fake CGI background. The CGI looks terrible, especially on the helicopters. Shadows and light falls wrong on a flying machine - it's even worse on the fake little baby alien larvae-things.The big alien is just a dude in a monster suit. It looks clumsy and slow. How the hell is it able to bring down fast running human soldiers is beyond me. It's a ripoff of Alien and Predator. Yawn.The soldiers are all cardboard cutouts, you don't know jack about any of them so who cares. They're just monster-fodder. They can't seem to hit anything when the guy in the rubber suit plods at them, so his costume must be impervious to normal bullets. But these macho soldiers continue to use the same weapons against the rubber-suit guy even though Rubber Suit is picking em off one bloody body part at a time. Why don't they try to use better weapons against Rubber Suit? There are plenty of times in this boring flick where they could do better stuff to improve their survival, but no. Let's just continue to run around and shoot our ineffective guns that have unlimited ammo and we don't ever need to reload, not once! Also that woman was a poor representation of Ellen Ripley. She's so hardcore tough nothing except Arnold can defeat her. She easily takes down Rubber Suit Guy with a little knife. Yawn.What rubbish.0/10

I've seen worse. Which is not exactly a compliment for this movie considering some of the utter garbage I have encountered in the last few months on the Sci Fi Channel and elsewhere. Nonetheless, while this movie was bad, it falls more under the rubric of the traditional bad Grade B movie which just rips off its entire plot, creature, setting and everything else from superior movies, but still manages to be mildly entertaining. Indeed if this movie had been the first of its kind, there would even have been a few laudable things to comment on -- the unrelentingly dark and creepy remote laboratory, a suitably vicious creature which kills in gory fashion (and looks like they spent a little money creating) etc. But as it is, its just one cliché after another. Its been done better many times before. But then again, its been done worse. If you want to see how bad a movie with "Alien" in its title can be, check out something called "Alien 51". Comparatively this is a work of art, and while I am glad I did not rent it, I am not entirely upset at having turned on the TV to catch it. For fans of the genre, not good, but not pluck your eyes out terrible either.

Secret government/corporation/rich private entrepreneurs acquires technology to develop dangerous creature in virtually inaccessible, dimly lit, claustrophobic lab facility. Creature escapes, killing development team and most of rescue/cleanup unit sent to erase evidence except for one or two survivors who vow to bring down the system and those responsible for creating the threat.This formula, perfected in better films like "Alien" and "Aliens," has been done to death, particularly by the the "original (not!) films" produced for the SciFi channel. Only the creatures change along with minor variations on the script/"plot" for the rest of the cast to perform in locales ranging from oil platforms to remote underground labs to ships/stations in space.This particular feature looks and acts more like an ad for a video game than an original film. It is not worth even a rental and is only barely more entertaining than an infomercial.

*SPOILER ALERT* *SPOILER ALERT*My friend and I watched this one the other day. After it was over, we both agreed that "Alien Lockdown" is what a B-movie should be like. This was about as good as we could have hoped for. "Alien Lockdown" promises you an alien and a lockdown. It delivers both with a smile.So an alien runs amok inside a government lab and kills lots of people. They send a hot Asian chick and her hit squad to take it out. The lab is under Lockdown. An "Alien Lockdown". That's it for plot as the rest of the movie has lots of soldiers running around a big building with flashlights beaming and guns blazing.I have seen this movie before. I have seen this movie many, many times before. All of the B-movie clichés for monster flicks are on proud display: Soldiers, flashlights, big empty building, monster crawling around in the dark, etc. "Alien Lockdown" is not trying to be different or original. It's happy to just take B-movie fans through the monster killing motions. I was satisfied with this one. It hit all the necessary buttons for me. There was a hopping mad alien, he ate a lot of soldiers and a good time was had by all.