Again with the face-eating monsters, Mark Morford

Oh, no. You guys. There is something under the ice. Alive. Malevolent. Bizarre. Enormously terrifying. It will soon hurl our entire cluster of space-traveling heroes into fits of insanity and violence and much panicked screaming. Oh, no.

How will our astronaut movie heroes possibly survive? And just what is the monster, exactly? What did this gritty new film’s creators come up with? Does it matter? Will you pay 15 bucks to find out and then be vaguely disappointed because you’ve seen 15,000 things just like it 15,000 times before? Oh heavens, yes, you almost certainly will.

By the way? The landscape in this upcoming movie – it does not matter what the title is, or who stars in it, or that it’s coming out soon, even though it is – is gorgeous. The cinematography is stunning. Many millions were obviously spent on the special effects because the realism is sort of effortlessly mind-blowing in that look-what-they-can-do-with-computer-graphics-these-days sort of way.

The plot is, as always, childishly simple: The usual humanistic buildup (news conferences, crew bonding, photos of the kids back home) is soon followed by Our Intrepid Crew landing majestically on Europa, the frozen fourth moon of Jupiter. The score swells. There is amazement, much cheering back home. It’s breathtaking out there, really.

The rest: http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2013/06/04/again-with-the-face-eating-monsters/