The question is whether it stands on its own regardless of those elements, and the answer is a definite yes. A viewer could go in without having seen the rest of the franchise and feel like they got a satisfying cinematic experience, because the winks and nods are well integrated into the fabric of the film. I know this because I went with one such viewer.
I think the actual question is, “is the final product harmed or lessened by the need to incorporate all those references?” And I think absolutely yes. This could’ve been a much better movie, if it had been fully untethered from its (I assume corporate) insecurities.
No one is going to skip your movie because they find out that none of the characters are androids, or because it doesn’t call back the weird white hybrid monster or black goo or any of that shit. Are there xenomorphs in your movie? Good. Done. Fan service fully addressed.
So there’s an extra level of pathetic baked in when you include a line like “get away from her you bitch,” or have a camera linger unnecessarily on a deepfake of Ian Holm for no reason other than because it is a deepfake of Ian Holm. Theres literally nothing gained. There’s no need to mirror scenes, or in some cases individual shots, at all.
It is less of a movie than it might have been because so much of its computing power is devoted to regurgitating the past. It repeatedly goes out of its way to show us things that, in this context, are not interesting and have no meaning.
I did think the first 40 minutes of this movie were mostly pretty good. I really appreciated seeing physical monster props and people in costumes.
The second half was a profound letdown. The shift from good to bad was so jarring that I had to wonder if studio executives got involved. “Audiences like callbacks, where are the callbacks?” “What was that line about the bitch? Remember that? Can we add that here?“
Which is why I said the first movies were allegories about the destructiveness of corporate greed, and this one is just an example of it.
I agree with everything you said about Deadpool…but I guess with Deadpool I feel like it barely counts as a movie, so I don’t grade it as one. It’s almost exactly like watching Looney Tunes. They talk to the camera, make esoteric cultural references, have ironic or playful musical cues, blow up repeatedly, and survive. It’s just fucking Looney Tunes.
