Alien : Covenant

Agree. This has as much science going on as a Harry Potter film. David's lab would have looked antiquated in a Dickens novel and yet he did all this work? Alchemy is alive and doing quite well on this planet.

 

Can't merch a bacterium or virus.

 

Saw this in theaters when first came out. Thought it was good. Might purchase when in 5 dollar bin.

 

I shudder every time this thread gets bumped to the top again, as it's a reminder of how disappointing this vapid, embarrassing, unmitigated disaster of a film really was. Another stain on the legacy of the franchise.

 

Still haven't gotten around to watching this. I liked Prometheus enough that this has been on my radar, but would have liked it if they had continued the series planned instead of damage-control merging it into the Alien series.

Despite its big flaws, I thought the atmosphere and cinematography of Prometheus were stellar and to this day it remains the best example of 3D cinema I can think of.

 

Should I watch it again? I don't think I could stomach it.

 

I did. Though I found it enjoyable enough this second round, in the end it came off as something of a missed opportunity. Why, oh why, didn't they just continue where Prometheus left off? I would have loved to see Elizabeth confront the engineers. She wanted answers. We wanted answers. What we got was more confusion.

 

It's not totally Scott's fault from what I understand. Rapace wanted nothing to do with it, so he had to tool something with David and without Shaw. She was so good in Prometheus, it's really a shame. That abortion scene alone was worth the price of admission.

 

Watched it yesterday for the first time, it's almost like Ridley was giving fans the finger. It's time to put this franchise to rest for good, it's done.

 

That's a very EXPENSIVE finger, right there.....

 

It was beautifully made but dumb as a doorknob, something you could say of a lot of blockbusters. What makes this Prometheus more troublesome than most is that it thought it was smarter than it actually was.

 

Sometimes I think they back-fill in a bunch of the intellectual/philosophy stuff, knowing that a sizable portion of the audience will be educated sci-fi folks. Similar to what you find in Pixar movies where they have adult humor thrown in to keep the parents engaged. But really it just starts out as how to make more money in several markets for a franchise, with hopes they can keep it going for a long time, and that remains the main directive of the whole project.

 

Prometheus, for its weaknesses, at least tried to be something different than the usual "monsters chasing people down long, dark hallways full of exposed pipes and emergency lighting". It wants to be both a thoughtful, meditation on the origins of life on Earth...and a gonzo creepshow with monsters and space zombies. The two concepts never really come together, save for when Elizabeth/Noomi Rapace undergoes the space Caesarian. I hadn't seen an audience squirm like that in years...

Covenant has the same ambition to give an audience something to chew on AND something to run from, but is even less successful (...as the sequel to the prequel) because it embraces more of the usual Alien cliches - bad android, exploding bodies, dark hallways, good android, and highly ambidextrous monsters. Also, anybody who's seen at least one Alien movie will be two steps ahead whatever surprises Covenant attempts to spring on them ("Thank goodness they got that face hugger off in time!" or "Good thing Walter's around").

Strangely - and this is where I let my Geek Flag Fly - there's little adherence to the rules established in the first two films. How did David grow eggs without an Alien queen? How long does it take for a face hugger to plant an embryo in a host, then for the embryo to develop into a chest burster? In the first two movies it was clear you needed a queen to lay eggs and that an embryo took some time to grow within the host. In Alien 3 Ripley walked around for most of the movie with the critter growing inside her, but in Covenant the time from impregnation to birth to full grown alien is, what, an hour? This feels like a cheat to get the plot and the monsters up and running faster - and one wonders if Ridley Scott should have known better.

Lastly, it doesn't ever really "link up" with the established Alien series - as I would reasonably expect a prequel to do. The movie ends with the remaining crew drifting off into space...towards another sequel.

 

They currently have all of them on HBO Go (minus Prometheus).

 

got the steel book will watch this tonight! can't wait...

 

I disagree. What made sci fi fans hate Prometheus is that the scientists were cast as the idiots. This actually made it refreshing and not a rehash of the other sci fi. It also set up a beautiful plot device of empiricism vs faith.

Likewise, Pixar movies are not just throwing in adult humor. In many ways, they are actually made for grownups. For example, in Toy Story, the toys actually take on the voice of parents, being afraid of mortality, of no longer being needed, obsession about their kid growing up, etc.

There is some degree of depth and thought in films that goes unappreciated.

 

I finally saw this on HBO the other night. I liked it about as much as I liked Prometheus, which is to say not at all. Predictable, pretentious and full of disposable characters. Everything Alien was not. But hey, the backburster was pretty cool!

 

Got the blu ray (slipcase).
Why ?
Cheap!!!

 

Game over man, game over. I have no idea why 20th Century Fox released a new trailer for Aliens.

 

I recently saw a video on Youtube that claimed (from the book or something) that the Captain hired only the worst science people she could because she wanted the mission to fail, just to spite her father.

Not sure if this was a later excuse or not, but if true, it should have been mentioned during the movie.

Even in Covenant we get a dumb as rocks crew that had watched Star Trek a few too many times and did not wear environment suits AND HELMET to protect them.

 

The thing that bothered me most about the Engineers, is that in the first Alien movie, the dead "space jockey" they found was around
16 FEET TALL.

Why did the Engineers shrink in Prometheus?

 

And the chest buster inside the Engineer must has been equally bigger.

 

Maybe it’s for a forthcoming No 4K release.

 

There's a million reasons this film is terrible, but the worst in my view is taking the focus off the raison d'etre (the aliens) and putting it instead on something few people cared about (the androids). Are we really to believe the alien threat of the previous 4 films was the result of an amoral, pretentious android with a serious set of daddy issues?

I feel about this series the same as I do HALLOWEEN. The original needed no sequels. We got them anyway. The first followup is close enough in spirit to give it a pass, even a thumbs-up. The rest are varying degrees of money-milking trash, although in both cases the third entry gained a (masochistic) cult following.

 

got a steelbook UHD BD for a couple of bucks...