Prometheus was not a great movie. I know some people utterly despise it, but I thought it was still unique, featured a few truly horrifying moments and came up with genuinely fascinating ideas that had a lot of potential in this crazy futuristic setting.
It seems that, rather than risk another mixed reaction to a faithful continuation of that movie, Ridley Scott just decided to make another Alien sequel that abandons pretty much all of the potential seen in Prometheus, and instead throws a bunch of Xenomorphs at an even more obliviously reckless group of space adventurers.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't the worst movie or even the worst Alien knockoff you'll ever see. Ridley Scott's directing, so it looks great and all the actors are at least trying.
But let's go through it's problems:
Flimsy characters. There was apparently a short movie released before the actual film that fleshed out the crew of the Covenant during their journey, including James Franco's character. I don't think it's a spoiler to reveal that he dies in the first 3-5 minutes of the movie without a line of dialogue; I didn't even know it was Franco at first. On top of this misstep, every character is one dimensional: there's the Ellen Ripley stand-in, the naive religious guy, his wife the doctor lady, the down-to-earth pilot, the pilot's wife, etc. I can remember the names of pretty much every character from the first Alien. Not so here.
Speaking of characters, we catch up with the two surviving protagonists of Prometheus. One is written out before the film begins. The other goes from being the most morally ambiguous and fascinating character in that movie to being a comically insane Evilutionary Biologist in this one. Lame.
That said, Michael Fassbender does a good job with what he's given here. He's the best part of the movie, even if quite a few of his scenes are laughable.
The aliens. First of all, they aren't even really aliens anymore. They're genetically-engineered mutants. In Prometheus, it can be argued that the one vaguely Xenomorph-ish thing we see is alien to the two creatures that end up spawning it, a freak of nature (but still of nature) at the very least. Not this time. They're just unnatural killer mutants. Secondly, they're all CGI and the CGI is not very good.
Only a couple scenes in the movie could be called "good" or "scary", and both of them are still style over substance.
I know every reviewer has mentioned this, but the Friday the 13th style shower scene really can't be overlooked.
While the ending of Prometheus left some wonder as to where it might go from there, the one here has no mystery whatsoever. And it's a Downer Ending. In spite of this, it's also slightly hilarious.
I didn't enjoy this movie. There's a lot of wasted potential here and not much else. The end result feels more like an over the top Resident Evil movie set in space.
More like Alien: Cop-out
Prometheus was not a great movie. I know some people utterly despise it, but I thought it was still unique, featured a few truly horrifying moments and came up with genuinely fascinating ideas that had a lot of potential in this crazy futuristic setting.
It seems that, rather than risk another mixed reaction to a faithful continuation of that movie, Ridley Scott just decided to make another Alien sequel that abandons pretty much all of the potential seen in Prometheus, and instead throws a bunch of Xenomorphs at an even more obliviously reckless group of space adventurers.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't the worst movie or even the worst Alien knockoff you'll ever see. Ridley Scott's directing, so it looks great and all the actors are at least trying.
But let's go through it's problems:
I didn't enjoy this movie. There's a lot of wasted potential here and not much else. The end result feels more like an over the top Resident Evil movie set in space.