Alien: Covenant (sequel to Prometheus)

I more or less enjoyed it, but as others have said the reveal that David killed all the Engineers essentially makes this entire arc a "Shaggy Dog" Story. What was the point of any of this and teasing their importance?

It's readily apparent that Sir Ridley (and likely the studio as well) totally misread what people didn't like about Prometheus. They took it as "well they didn't like it because it didn't have Xenomorphs in it." And while some people probably had that viewpoint, most people who didn't like it were more annoyed by the idiot characters making dumb decisions solely because the plot needed them to, plot holes, bad dialogue, and not actually answering the questions that it set up, etc.

And the sad thing is, this movie doubles-down on most of the problems while brushing aside most of the good/potentially interesting parts of Prometheus.

Yeah. And those problems are typical of horror films in general, so it's not like they're anything new. You'd think all those tropes would have been killed by The Cabin In The Woods, but...

I mean, it's not like they're a Necessary Weasel. Not in the hands of a skillful writer.

Heck Sir Ridley managed to (mostly) avoid falling into these clichés back in the original film (as did James Cameron with Aliens). So why he's now leaning on them so heavily is beyond me.

The podcast I posted earlier had some good points about why the first two Aliens films avoided making their characters overly stupid. In the first one, it was because nobody knew what the Xenomorph could do, and neither did the audience, so every action was guesswork. In the second, the characters were basically all competent but were up against massively overwhelming odds. Having the characters be dumb when they should know better isn't just a sign of weak protagonists, but also weak antagonists, having their ineffectiveness "fixed" by luck. At the very least, if you have to make a character do something not so smart, it should be diegetically justified and in-character.

edited 21st May '17 1:06:41 PM by Tuckerscreator

Clearly, he lost his way. This is not the man who directed Alien and Blade Runner anymore. His films have become indistinguishable from those of any other technocrat director-for-hire without a distinctive style or vision.

By the time the main characters landed on the planet, I lost all hope and patience with them.

I started to actively hoping that they die, because they were so stupid that I felt they didn't deserve to live.

edited 21st May '17 11:16:09 PM by dRoy

I don't think Ridley Scott has ever "fallen" per se. Looking at his filmography he has always been hit and miss. I mean, he followed up Blade Runner with Legend of all things.

At least we got a fairly good Nostalgia Critic episode out of it.

edit

Nope, sorry. It was an Angry Joe show one. My mistake.

edited 22nd May '17 1:24:07 AM by TamH70

I think that Mark Kermode said it best in his review. Sir Ridley is only as good as the script that he's working with.

Nah. Ridley's always had underwhelming films. For every Thelma & Louise, there's 1492: Conquest of Paradise. For every Alien, there's Hannibal.

Not that he's ever turned in a horrible movie, per se, but he's delivered his share of underwhelming or "merely okay" works.

edited 22nd May '17 12:11:54 PM by crazyrabbits

I had a high hope for this movie after watching The Martian, because that was absolutely fucking amazing.

Oh well, next time.

I've seen snippets of Prometheus and from what I've read and from what you guys that've seen it are saying...Covenant sounds about what I expected. A shame too. The first Alien is easily among my top ten favorite films ever. It seems that Ridley Scott has this fascination with the origin of the xenomorph and this desire to drag the existential themes of Blade Runner and the like into this franchise when neither one of those things belong.

What makes the xenomorphs scary is that the audience and characters know absolutely nothing about them. They just appeared mysteriously and are nigh unstoppable and that's terrifying. Aliens didn't strive to answer any of those questions and if anything just raised more with the presence of the Queen and the hive system. The more that mystery unravels the less scary the aliens become, and Scott wanting to give them a definitive origin and timeline is just...oddly naive.

Fear of the unknowable is like the number one rule of the Cosmic Horror Story - and Alien's barely one of those to begin with. It's just a slasher In Space and that's all it was ever meant to be. Ridley Scott trying to tack on greater themes than the underlying horror of rape and sexuality that pervaded the original film is just...such a strange, out-of-place lost cause. "Jaws in space" is what it was pitched as, and it really doesn't need to be more complicated than that.

I just wish there could be another sequel that's more in line with the tone and action of Aliens. Covenant, while I didn't hate it, still felt too heavily flawed and with uninteresting characters. Plus, the reveal kind of cheapened the whole mythos of the Xenomorphs as well.

edited 24th May '17 12:07:02 AM by LDragon2

Best Alien sequel is Isolation.

Not without its flaw but yes.

edited 28th May '17 5:20:09 PM by RAlexa21th

It's definitely too long. They should cut about half of it. Same principle as Outlast 2. Same mistakes.

Post #3 of this thread.

"I just want to see more of Elizabeth Shaw "

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Watching it, why did everyone act like teenagers in a Friday the 13th movie? I had to pause the video several times just to point out why something was stupid.

Sex in the shower? In a horror movie? Are you trying to die?

> Best Alien sequel is Isolation.

..What sequels?

As for as I know there was only Alien and Aliens

Nah, the latter misses the point of the xenomorphs, just makes them a swarm of aggression rather than the careful sadist of the original.

Isolation is chiefly inspired by Aliens and Alien,so I wouldn't dismiss it for making them a swarm,

I took a horror lit class where we discussed the design of the Xenomorph and why they're terrifying and the sexual, phallic, and rape imagry involved with them. It really changed my opinion of the Alien series and I liked it a lot more because it was an attempt at horror with sexual undertones (or overtones depending on how obvious a person might notice it) that can and would target males as much as females in the horror.

Then I watched Covenant and it tried to explain things too much. Bah. I liked the Xenomorph as this unexplained horror. I suppose I should say I haven't seen much of the sequels, but Covenant explained them too much and made them less scary.

Agreed. As much as I enjoyed Aliens the first time I watched it, it's also when the xenomorphs started to lose what was so interesting about them. Sure it has great action scenes, but there's no easier way to desacralise à monster than have them killed by the hundreds by automatic turrets, offscreen.

Covenant explained too much about the aliens' origins, but I still prefer "they're biological weapons made by our creators" to "they're just space ants".