No, I haven't seen it. Yes, I know RedLetterMedia is not an infallible source of movie criticism. But when I read about the movie myself, from promotional material for it no less, I found myself asking "that's it? That's all there is to this?"
Maybe my interest/fondness of the franchise hasn't fully recovered from that "David actually made the alien and killed all the Engineers" retcon asspull from before that made the universe feel very small and stripped it of a lot of curiousity and dread in the darkness of space and all of that.
If you saw it and liked it, that's great. Share what you liked about it if you like. The set design, physical costume/makeup work, and even the acting all sound promising, but I don't think I could bear to sit through what really does sound like some LLM-written kitbash of the previous movies.
Got to see it in cinema for free the other day. Thought it was pretty good. Pretty creative action sequences, didn't feel 'plot armour' filled at all, soundtrack was awesome, and for the first time ever (for me) CGI gore had me viscerally reacting/cringing in a good way. I was pleasantly surprised the whole way through, especially given the start where it seems like it's gonna be focused around some chipper teenagers being quirky in space. I won't say it was well written in terms of tension and themes and all that malarkey, but it keeps going at a good pace and isn't completely see through.
However, I'm not a big alien fan overall. Only seen the first one, and a decade ago at that. Never researched or thought about the universe of it, just see it as 'cool alien movie'. For that reason, I didn't pick up on the fan service, that when explained to me by my friend did seem pretty cringe (bad cringe).
I made no real attempt to analyse any of it. It's not a movie that's meant for that.
I have had a hard time turning off my tendency to analyze what I'm consuming, even when I wanted to.
I've often had a bad time with what others said were "popcorn movies" to me to dismiss whatever I was seeing in them while watching them. Sometimes that served me well, especially if something took a turn for the worse later or if the people in charge of making it wound up being chuds or the like, but sometimes I'd actually prefer to "popcorn" thoughts away but it just isn't happening.
I used to be able to do that with Beavis and Butt-Head for example, but when I got to the recent new episodes and saw the one where Beavis was in need of government services and the subtext seemed to be "lol welfare recipients stupid and lazy" I stopped watching that episode, and that season, entirely.
I get what you mean. I'm like that 90% of the time - I think the key is just being very tired when you watch it. I started thinking about the world the characters lived in and whether it was an interesting, realistic, or at all Marxian approach to world building, and then I was like ah, why the fuck am I even bothering? An utterly pointless task. Sit back, enjoy your ice cream, enjoy the huge sound system, and let it wash over you as an exercise of feeling/experiencing rather than an exercise of thinking/logic.
Considering how exhausted most working class people are most of the time, I think I see the mass appeal of "popcorn" movies, for better or for worse, then.