Alien: Covenant

[SirAndrewD]

I would have killed those girls. It's people like that which make me hate people. Amongst other reasons.

I almost did.  I have a pretty long fuse on my temper, but when it blows it burns hotter than 10,000 suns.  So by the five minute mark I was literally seething to keep myself from standing up and yelling at the top of my lungs for them to shut the hell up.  Only reason I didn't was because then I'd be the guy in the wrong and get thrown out, and I really wanted to see the film. 

So, I kept quiet and just bumped to another showing that fortunately was populated with nerds and old farts like myself. 

I'm pretty sure the teens in the first showing weren't even old enough to be in there, hence my wife's theory that they were just floating between theaters on a slow day.

[Gusington]

Love me some nerds and old farts.

Exactly once have I turned around in a theater to scream at someone. It was a teenaged kid who had kicked my chair probably 100 times in about an hour until I finally could not take it anymore and I turned around and screamed 'CAN YOU STOP KICKING MY FUCKING SEAT'.

The kid looked genuinely scared and did not touch the seat again. Good thing I didn't stand because the jig would have been up for me then.

[Sir Slash]

I vote for theaters just for 'mature adults only'. Extra large screen, volume controls on the arm rests, massaging seat-backs, and tennis balls to throw at the nerdy, little theater attendants when they come in to bother us.  :clap:    Oh, and bran in the popcorn for.....  you know.

[mirth]

And free Depends with the purchase of each large soda.

[Gusington]

You mean 'for the purchase of each large apple cider vinegar.'

[mirth]

I may be getting old, but I still retain control of my bladder.

[Gusington]

Windy and Star say otherwise.

[bbmike]

Is it any wonder I don't see movies in theaters any more?*


*There are some exceptions.

[mirth]

Windy and Star say otherwise.

They also say they aren't Ghey. Do you believe that?

[Gusington]

Never.

[ghostryder]

Saw this today in beverly Hills...yes moved .....and that's Beverly Hills, Fla. Took my 86 year old mom because...it's just the type of movie she'd enjoy!

How do you review this movie without spoilers? it's mighty hard because 90 percent of everything wrong with the movie requires spoilers---as it's mainly do to the canon --- or lack of---that the movie disapoints.

There are some posatives..for one this is the first and ONLY alien film that doesn't have an "Evil Corporation" subplot....that is more dangerous to the characters than the aliens themselves. Yeah---David is there....but he isn't getting his orders from an 'Evil corporation' like all the other films. He's just broke and screwed up.

Most 'alien kills crew' actually takes place off the spaceship and not on it.

As in most alien movies 'The Right Stuff' IE: what NASA would send into space-- is, as always-as dumb as a bag of hammers doing real dumb stuff to get themselves killed. It's like every typical horror flick where you KNOW the girl that's running WILL trip! She will go look in the basement! She will open the closet! except of course here it's THE RIGHT STUFF space faring well educated moron getting him or herself killed.

There's some pretty good action scenes but my main grip is the one sentence repeatedly repeating in my head throughout the film...."you have got to be kidding!"

As I said the rest requires spoilers so I'll list them in the spoiler below:
[spoiler]Number 1-- I'm all fine with the concept the Engineers create us...then create the alien to end their failed experiment.Thus the ship crashed on LV-426 was in fact the Engineers bring those eggs to Earth to do just that but crashes before it reaches Earth. But this film takes the canon to where An Android creates the alien after wiping out the engineers. Canon wise this makes no sense--- The ship on LV-426 was CLEARLY piloted by an Engineer carrying the eggs that get John Hurt and then chase Ripley for an hour and a half. This film is supposed to be before that--so how in hell is the first film possible at all if David wipes out the Engineers? I suppose one COULD argue The engineers are a space faring race and thus would not all be located in that single city. If you argue this of course then you outline the entire plot of the third film next to follow.Engineers see what David did...believe David = humanity and now Engineers must destroy humanity on Earth for what they did in said City. Since I did read the book Alien long before seeing the movie the canon in the book is very detailed....and this totally betrays the canon as does Alien Isolation and the movies that follow Aliens. Any true tie in game wise would have you playing Noot prior to aliens. There's no way canon has them chasing Ripley's daughter. This is a pet peeve of mine...but if your going to use a franchise then respect the universe and Canon of it. And this film totally betrays that. Not to mention the message of the film prior to it.

Secondly Alien worked because it didn't try to explain everything. Crew hears signal. Alien gets on ship. Alien does what it does...just like every creature in the universe. Ignore Nash the Evil android taking orders from Evil corporation of course-but the film works because it's that bare bone about the alien. The only thing the audience needs to know is it's deadly.This string of prequels is repeatedly failing because it's trying...and rather unconvincingly- to explain it all. But it can't seem to make up it's mind what it's trying to tell you.

This is evident with 'the black goo". At the beginning of Promethius an Engineer stands on Earth in religious type cermony and drinks the black goo. Falls into the river and a cinmatic sequence shows the Engineer DNA desolve into the water---thus creating the DNA that creates us humans--which jives with the evolution theory we came from the water. In this film the black goo isn't used to create life but is displayed as a massive bio weapon that destroys all organic life on the whole planet--not just the Engineers. All organic life. If this is what it is then why bother with the alien Eggs in Alien at all when the black Goo is such a more effective weapon for the Engineers to destroy all life on earth? Shouldn't that be what ripley finds on LV-426? Who wrote this crap?

Lastly it's just not believable sci-fi...and i like sci-fi I can say, "okay I can buy that". The first Alien movie was believable. Deep space freighter hears signal.Investigates. Gets alien on board. and the alien was truely 'Alien' thanks to the design of H.R. Giger. This streak of alien movies just isn't. Nor it's plot and the actions of the characters. Imagine the massive cost of the coly ship. first it's preperation. just choosing and studying the target planet. How many Billions did that cost? Are we are to believe the captain...or any damn captain...is going to ditch that billion plus project because of some foggy message received in a space helmet? Or because the flight crew isn't feeling like getting back into cyro chambers? Really?! Are you kidding me?!

Then we got the biggiest WTF of the universe. Imagine if you will it's 300 years in the future. we have deep space travel. we can send colony ships to planets that show life. And ALL we know about virus's, the common cold, disease and the body immune system...under what fucked logic does this crew step off into an alien world teaming with all this we have never been exposed to--without suits, helmets or protection whatsoever...or any logical prodicals even us non space faring people know must exist? Are you kidding me!

The plot and character actions are so 'unbelievable' it boogles the mind. They aren't even trying to present believable sci-fi. A 8 year old wouldn't suggest some of the things that happen in this film. It's devolved to barely comic book level writing but even Batman makes more sense.

[/spoiler]


Overall I felt cheated. Aside from the visuals and sound and the CGA---they could have just had the alien kill everyone and never bother with story at all -- because trying to do story in this film fails on every level.

[Gusington]

How does it fail on every level if its Ridley Scott's story and his movie? Granted I haven't seen it yet but I haven't seen a lot of complaints in reviews about the story - the CGI and other effects definitely - but not the story or it's relation to the series' canon.

[JasonPratt]

I was going to say, the prequel series so far has a (very annoying) built-in canon pass, in that it hasn't gotten to LV-246 and the Space Jockey's ship full of eggs. But the writers (we can blame Damon Lindleof for a lot of this confusion) keep playing with their get-out-of-canon-free card, by making the planet in Prometheus and the ship there and the Engineer getting into the chair to navigate, look a lot like the situation on LV-246.

So a lot of your canon-problems, Ghosty, don't count, even though the execution of the excuses (so to speak) are kind of crappy. We don't really know yet what the (much larger?!) Engineer on the crashed ship in Alien was doing yet. It was NOT the ship going to Earth to destroy it; David and Shaw took that one, and it wasn't filled with eggs it was filled with weaponized black goo. Which then got spoilered by Spoiler on the spoiler, so it's all gone now. The black goo is clearly a (science-fantasy) mutagen which can be tweaked to do various things. Even in the prologue to Prometheus, though, it kills its host rather gruesomely. Covenant shows that the vials of goo on the Engineer deathship weren't going to turn people into Xenomorphs. The vials of goo in the Temple did have effects sort of like that, but those weren't the same vials. (Or rather, since I think the Temple turned out to be one of the death ships, the vials ready for weapon deployment weren't like that, but the ones sitting around in the testing room or whatever it was were like that. And then after that ship crashed, Shaw and David took another similar ship off planet. The writers are greatly to blame for this confusion.  :P )

While reviewers haven't complained about canon per se, they've often complained that the writers look like they're painting themselves into corners where they'll never cleanly get back to the ship on LV-246. This is an understandable if lamentable side effect of Prometheus having been originally intended NOT to be a prequel to Alien, but rather a sort of loose spiritual remake with some similar themes, like one of those Gundam series that's set in a different continuity from the main timeline of the Universal Century stories.

[mirth]

The moon from the original Alien series was LV-426. Supposedly, the Prometheus visited LV-223, another moon orbiting the same planet as LV-426.

http://avp.wikia.com/wiki/Acheron_(LV-426)

http://avp.wikia.com/wiki/LV-223

[Gusington]

What moon are you orbiting?