oh no, it is actually really that bad? (I’ve heard only whispers in dark corners… )

I don’t know how it is if you’re NOT a scientist - it might be marginally passable if you’re not a scientist - but I spent the entire movie waiting for the plot to happen and I could never really find it in me to care whether anyone lived or died because honestly they mostly killed themselves by being an utterly incompetent crew who had no idea what the fuck they were doing. Adric described it as a ship full of “tourists on a space cruise” and that really summarizes it best.

I mean, the plot is incoherent, they make declarations about what alien things are for left and right without ever having any reason to believe their hypotheses, and the aliens themselves are on screen so often that they might as well do a little dance while they’re there, and that would have been more entertaining than anything else they did. I mean, the very first shot is of an alien creature doing something that’s never explained and as soon as I saw it I thought oh shit, this is going to be bad. You can’t have suspense when everything that’s supposed to be mysterious and creepy is right there!

But, damn, I mean, they really hit every horror trope with this, and not in a good way. Every cheesy gross-out thing you can think of was done in this movie.

It was a shame they didn’t send any actual scientists on this mission or they might have, you know, taken all the appropriate precautions and then it might have actually been unexpected when things went wrong. This movie was like, if you watched Alien and it opened with Sigourney Weaver wearing an alien egg as a hat.

Just, aaarrrgh. I wanted to walk out halfway through but people were in my way so instead we just watched the trainwreck happen and tried to make the best of having our genre shit all over by fucking amateurs.

…So basically, yes, tl;dr: it is that bad.