Movies: Alien: Covenant (2017)

[The Gongshow]

However, there is a prologue of David explaining his experiments and what he wishes to do, its very interesting and helps flesh out the movie and possibly what will happen in the next sequel



edit: youtube link won't post because the link contains the word f v c k so it censors it

 

[chicagoskycam]

Sums it up pretty accurately.

That perfectly sums up this thrash. Hilarious video.

 

[Very Stable Genius]

I really didn't think it was that bad. Yes most of the crew were beyond stupid and it obviously doesn't compare to Alien and Aliens, but I thought it was a decent horror flick.

 

[Osprey]

I'm getting ready to watch this for the first time and realized that I watched Prometheus 5 years ago and don't remember much about it. Should I watch Prometheus again first or is that not necessary because it's pretty much a separate film that doesn't reference much that happened in the last one?

 

[ArGarBarGar]

I'm getting ready to watch this for the first time and realized that I watched Prometheus 5 years ago and don't remember much about it. Should I watch Prometheus again first or is that not necessary because it's pretty much a separate film that doesn't reference much that happened in the last one?

There are a couple references but they aren't going to significantly alter the movie for you.

I didn't watch Prometheus other than knowing the general plot and I understood them fine.

 

[Osprey]

There are a couple references but they aren't going to significantly alter the movie for you.

I didn't watch Prometheus other than knowing the general plot and I understood them fine.

Ok, thanks. I just didn't want to re-watch Prometheus because I thought that I needed to and have it tire me out by the time that I got to Covenant because it felt like one 4-hour movie. Maybe I'll just watch Covenant while I'm excited to, rather than sitting through something similar that I've seen before first and losing some of that interest.

 

[Carolinas Identity*]

sums it up pretty accurately.

lmao

 

[ProstheticConscience]

+1 for Honest Trailers. Pretty much nails it.

SO bad. Even worse then Prometheus. That bad. It's like space travel in the future involves grabbing random idiots from street corners and shoving them onto spaceships. Just amazingly stupid.

 

[aufheben]

+1 for Honest Trailers. Pretty much nails it.

SO bad. Even worse then Prometheus. That bad. It's like space travel in the future involves grabbing random idiots from street corners and shoving them onto spaceships. Just amazingly stupid.

You guys gotta stop bumping this and reminding me this movie was ever made.

I thought it would be impossible to make a worse one than Prometheus, and this was not only worse, but much worse lol.

 

[x Tame Impala]

It's doubly worse because everyone knew why Prometheus was bad and RS had to have known it too. Instead of fixing the problems he doubled down on them.

 

[ProstheticConscience]

It's just that so much of both movies is predicated on people making extremely stupid decisions. It's not the existential **** that gets me, it's people walking out onto alien planets without even wearing those little Chinese anti-smog masks. It's that guy who had the little floaty balls that could map the entire interior of the pyramid in Prometheus...but everyone just had to go inside and run in different directions and get lost anyway. It's the pilot of the lander utterly falling to pieces under stress, opening the quarantine door, slipping in the pool of blood, and then shooting her own fuel tanks. And yeah...go on Billy Crudup. Look in the alien egg. Look! See? Isn't it interesting?

So much of both movies depends on the cast doing things too idiotic that anyone with a quarter of a brain would do. The original cast of Alien had an excuse: they were literally just space truckers. Prometheus? This was a monumental expedition to learn humanity's entire past. Covenant was a one-way colony ship. These should not be crewed by idiot space truckers, dammit.

 

[x Tame Impala]

The "existential stuff" didn't bother me at all. I wish there was more of it and it was actually fleshed out in the two movies. It's like you said, the stupidity of scientists is just too much. It ruined Prometheus and it ruined AC.

It's like Scott saw the reaction to Prometheus and decided to make the sequel better by making Prometheus again with more horror scenes in it and calling it a day.

 

[The Moose]

The "existential stuff" didn't bother me at all. I wish there was more of it and it was actually fleshed out in the two movies. It's like you said, the stupidity of scientists is just too much. It ruined Prometheus and it ruined AC.

It's like Scott saw the reaction to Prometheus and decided to make the sequel better by making Prometheus again with more horror scenes in it and calling it a day.

I think both Prometheus and Covenant just don't know what they want to be: do they want to be a foundational story or a classic Alien horror movie. They try to be both and fail at each of them. The foundational story is silly and convoluted, and the horror, well, it is just not really horror anymore. The first one is by the most bone chilling of all and if you look back they barely show the xenomorph. In Covenant and Prometheus they make up all sorts of alien variations, and flesh them out in full daylight and detail, but do they really scary anymore?

IMO the time of Alien as a scifi horror flick has passed, it is hard to make something that it wasn't already covered in A1 or A2. I was hoping for a smart foundational story. Unfortunately it failed badly and we got, as the video above says, Data and Lore playing the ****ing flute.

 

[aufheben]

The existential stuff bothered me a lot. It reminds me of when our 10th grade World Lit class had to re-enact The Stranger. The subjects broached by Scott here are things that people realize as children.

 

[Goldenshark]

The Honest Trailers clip was pretty spot on, love how they make reference to Data and Lore from Star Trek TNG and Capt Picard playing his flute from the episode "First Light." I kept thinking those same things, it seems Ridley likes TNG too and is borrowing ideas.

I bought the bluray yesterday of Alien Covenant because I'm a completist and own all the other Alien films and the 17 min of deleted scenes were not that special. There was like two 1 min scenes that were interesting, but nothing cut was missed.

What is really cool about the bluray is all of the promo clips were included that have new footage which wasn't in the film. Most of these promo clips were released on Youtube already, but the bluray includes two new ones that were not and are really cool.

The first new one is called "Phobos" and is a 9 min clip showing the crew undergoing multiple discomfort tests before they get selected. Here is a 1 min teaser of that clip:


The second new one is the best of the two and is 6 min long and is called "Advent." It's a post ending clip of David sending a message from Covenant to Weyland-Yutani on Earth talking about his research and discoveries regarding the Xenomorph and using Shaw as his subject.

Here's 3 min of that clip:


Spoilers in the full 6 min clip not included above:

[spoil]David talks about the fact that he's still trying to perfect a "Queen" and when he says Queen the footage shows Daniels in her freezer implying she's going to be the test subject, lol! It seems Ridley Scott is acknowledging James Cameron's creation from Aliens that original Alien purist snob fans can't stand.[/spoil]

I think it's hilarious that the marketing for this film is actually better and more interesting than the film itself.

 

[Osprey]

I finally watched it. I rather liked the first 30+ minutes and was wondering why you guys were so hard on the film... and then the stupid decisions started and it just seemed to steadily go downhill from there. They're the cream of the crop scientists and engineers, capable of and entrusted with manning a space ship and preserving the human race, yet they seemed to make decisions not a whole lot smarter than teenagers getting picked off by Jason. Just once, I'd like a film like this to be written with smart characters who make all of the best decisions and still manage to die, but maybe imagining what smart characters would do is too challenging for the writers.

Spoiler

The final insult was the major "twist" at the end, which you could see coming a lightyear away. That is probably the biggest failure of a plot twist that I've ever seen. The whole final 20 minutes of the film was ruined by something that anyone (even a 9-year-old) who's ever watched Disney's The Parent Trap could see coming. They even hinted at it a few times (like with the cloak hoodie momentarily coming up) as if they thought that it was so clever and unpredictable that we would miss the clues and then slap our knees when we notice them on our second viewing. Just how stupid do they take us moviegoers for?

Anyways, that said, it's not so bad and is pretty watchable, maybe even intermittently enjoyable, but it's just so insulting to the viewer that it's hard not to hate it in spite of all of that. It's a shame, because it and Prometheus could've been good movies if they were actually even half as smart as they tried to be.

 

[les Habs]

Saw it on HBO last night. A few quick things:

• Film looked AMAZING to start with and throughout most of it. However the Aliens were too CGI, especially the white colored ones (smaller ones). I would think it would look better and be cheaper to just get someone in a costume. Maybe not for a few of the shots, but if Instagram has a filter can't a Hollywood studio use one to make that stuff look better? Anyway, still have to say how amazing the film looked otherwise.
• I liked David in Promotheus and he's interesting here. However I prefer the "good guys" to win and really wanted Walter to survive. Of course it can't be stated for certain he's gone, but to bring him back would be crazy. Too bad because I would have liked to see more of him.
• People complain about character development sometimes, but it's not realistic when they're all dying. That's in part why David is the most interesting character in the franchise.
• I was hoping we'd see more of the "founders" to a degree or whatever you want to call them.
• I could nitpick a lot, but two small things I didn't like were the airborne pathogens and the fact that the aliens, especially the small ones, were taking multiple shots and were barely phased. I get that they have to be tough to kill, but it was a bit ridiculous.
• Like Prometheus some good characters and performances. In addition to Fassbender of course, I like also liked the work from Crudup and McBride.

 

[Blackhawkswincup]

I also finally saw it and felt it was a major disappointment

And I hate the entire David angle and the nonsense of him just simply going and wiping out the creators with no real explanation , etc was just awful

Alien and Aliens will always be the Alien franchise to me. Everything that has come since has either been a complete disappointment or a complete piece of garbage

 

[Shockmaster]

I also finally saw it and felt it was a major disappointment

And I hate the entire David angle and the nonsense of him just simply going and wiping out the creators with no real explanation , etc was just awful

Alien and Aliens will always be the Alien franchise to me. Everything that has come since has either been a complete disappointment or a complete piece of garbage

Alien 3 is where it all started to go downhill. The franchise never recovered from that.

 

[x Tame Impala]

Still the maddest I've been in a movie theater seeing this movie. It doubled down on all of the stupid things that kept Prometheus from being great

 

[RobBrown4PM]

Both movies are terrible. I will admit though that Fassbender kills it in both. He makes the two movies a little less terrible.

 

[Blackhawkswincup]

His character was terrible in Covenant ,, Both versions

There was nothing really redeeming about movie. Even the effects were meh with the alien being too CGI

 

[Osprey]

Even though Fassbender's character is arguably the best thing about the last two films, the writers still messed up by making that the case, IMO. In at least the first three films (Alien, Aliens and Alien 3), the android was only a side character (albeit an important one). They weren't called Android, Androids and Android 3, after all. These last two films, however, seemed to me to fundamentally change the focus so that the aliens became more of a side character, instead. I don't think that anyone ever argued that the original films would've been better if they had been more about the androids and less about the aliens.

I understand that it's hard to make things fresh, but Cameron had that very problem by following up Alien and he hit it out of the park by delivering something that felt fresh but kept the focus on the aliens, while arguably fleshing out the franchise universe better than even the original did. Another really creative writer and director might've done that for the franchise again. Maybe Cameron getting the rights to The Terminator back will make him nostalgic and lead him to try his hand again at the Alien franchise afterward. That's been my dream for a long, long time. I have more skepticism nowadays, since Avatar wasn't very good, but at least that had a very clear plot, which would be nice for the Alien franchise to get back to, rather than these convoluted, pretentious plots that are hard to summarize, if even remember.

 

[Blackhawkswincup]

The fact that the crappy Prometheus made Engineers and questions around Engineers a major part of story and then this film simply wiped them out in a matter of seconds for no reason was a slap in face of people who watched the crap that was Prometheus and gave sequel a chance

 

[x Tame Impala]

To be fair, Prometheus was never supposed to be mainly about aliens. It was more of a
shared universe type of deal. The sequel fell flat on its face though when it tried to be more alien-centric