Alien: Covenant

[implanted_microchip]

The last thing I want out of this franchise is a prequel to a sequel to a prequel

[Piko]

The last thing I want out of this franchise is a prequel to a sequel to a prequel

When I first saw that, I was intrigued. After seeing Covenant, I kinda want it more now. I kinda get the feeling that Covenant is the way it is for a reason. Give the more straight up alien movie. Then hit us with what he really wants to do. This one was pretty safe, imo.

[Archive_Reports]

I'll admit, there would be a certain charm to never knowing the origin of the Xenomorphs, but I've enjoyed both Prometheus and Covenant. So far they've done a good job at building the mythos and it's left me highly interested in where they're going with the story.

(Not that there haven't been missteps, but still.)

[dlb]

I gave in and watched it a second time today and well, I liked it a bit better, but my points are still the same as in my post earlier. Although I appreciate Fassbender's performance even more after a second time.

What intrigues me is not only where they take this story next but if the tone of the movie and the visual style will be different once again. Prometheus was very open, wide and polished with greater themes included and a sense of adventure, whereas Covenant feels like a dirty little cage with not alot of grandeur but nasty details, a very dark and brooding atmosphere where all is very tense. So I'm wondering what a third film will look like or if they will keep the tone they established in Covenant.

[Shadaloo]

Spoiler:
Not a single interesting character in the lot of them. Everyone still acts like an idiot, except this time they take the time to justify their idiotic decision before they make it. It felt to me like one dumbass decision followed by the next in order to advance the plot. James Franco dying was a deliberate move to introduce an unfit captain who made poor choices over and over again to guarantee the death of everyone serving under him. The film relies on stupid meatsacks, not relatable characters.

hurr duhhh that's my friend's decapitated head duhh hurr what's goin on heer sure i'll follow you into the basement and look into this thing you tell me to look into because it's safe because you told me so huhh hurrr

Not a cast of characters. Meatsacks and a disposeable Ripley mk.II who'll probably be dead by the time the next one rolls around.

I barely learned anyone's name before they got offed. Everyone and everything except David the goddamned border-line-Mary-Sue/extension-of-Ridley Scott-as-playing-god-with-his-own-franchise android was utterly disposeable. It's his story, nothing more. Ending pretty much goes out of its way to feel unsatisfying. Walter twist was predictable as fuck.

Way to dispose of the only two things out of Prometheus worth a damn - the engineers and Shaw.

Speaking of which, how does the beginning of the original film make sense now if they're all supposed to be dead? This requires David to locate or be tracked down by one last surviving Engineer in order to get offed and have his facehuggers stolen.

This story never needed to be told. Fucking eight-foot-tall rape metaphors don't need origins; they are terrifying simply because they exist, and out goes the notion of fear of the unknown having any relevancy; the Alien is no longer Alien - it's an artificially bred organism made by a creation of humankind's. How is it still alien if it's derived from an extension of ourselves?

Fucking midichlorians all over again IMO

PS: Also anybody else surmise that if you sat on those spore buds it'd be exactly like Stephen King's Dreamcatcher or what

[mfte]

Spoiler:
Not a single interesting character in the lot of them. Everyone still acts like an idiot, except this time they take the time to justify their idiotic decision before they make it. It felt to me like one dumbass decision followed by the next in order to advance the plot. James Franco dying was a deliberate move to introduce an unfit captain who made poor choices over and over again to guarantee the death of everyone serving under him. The film relies on stupid meatsacks, not relatable characters.

hurr duhhh that's my friend's decapitated head duhh hurr what's goin on heer sure i'll follow you into the basement and look into this thing you tell me to look into because it's safe because you told me so huhh hurrr

Not a cast of characters. Meatsacks and a disposeable Ripley mk.II who'll probably be dead by the time the next one rolls around.

I barely learned anyone's name before they got offed. Everyone and everything except David the goddamned border-line-Mary-Sue/extension-of-Ridley Scott-as-playing-god-with-his-own-franchise android was utterly disposeable. It's his story, nothing more. Ending pretty much goes out of its way to feel unsatisfying. Walter twist was predictable as fuck.

Way to dispose of the only two things out of Prometheus worth a damn - the engineers and Shaw.

Speaking of which, how does the beginning of the original film make sense now if they're all supposed to be dead? This requires David to locate or be tracked down by one last surviving Engineer in order to get offed and have his facehuggers stolen.

This story never needed to be told. Fucking eight-foot-tall rape metaphors don't need origins; they are terrifying simply because they exist, and out goes the notion of fear of the unknown having any relevancy; the Alien is no longer Alien - it's an artificially bred organism made by a creation of humankind's. How is it still alien if it's derived from an extension of ourselves?

Fucking midichlorians all over again IMO

PS: Also anybody else surmise that if you sat on those spore buds it'd be exactly like Stephen King's Dreamcatcher or what

/\/\/\/\

Pretty much that.

It was entertaining I suppose. I think it has made me appreciate Prometheus a little more.

Spoiler: David communicating with the Aliens? Kinda stupid. It's a bunch of stuff that happens and amounts to BLOW IT OUT THE AIRLOCK.

As with Prometheus there are interesting little kernels that do not get enough attention. What i would have liked would be that the movie spend more time and more thematic musing on what David has been doing all this time, his time time the occupants of the Covenant. Ironically, the thing that weighs down Alien are the aliens. Fassbender's David has always been the most interesting part of this new franchise and i wish that the movie was about that/him. Instead it again feels like 2 movies crammed into one. The gestation period of the aliens is also confusing here and only written in to server the plot devices to have more aaallliiieeens

[Substance242]

Google translate review:
https://translate.google.com/transla...tml&edit-text=

"Are the people in Covenant as demented as in Prometheus?" :-)

[Rdm]

SPOILER

I just finished alien isolatuon last week and saw prometheus for the first time 2 days, I literally didn't know it was connected, Prometheus and the Alien franchise
So as you would imagine I was excited to see this .

I thought it was decent and would score it a 6.5/10 if I had to give it a grade. I appreciated the story line but I just thought there was too much action and I was hoping they would make it more" minimal " and play off the sounds like in the video game, alien isolation, where you thought the alien was always right around the corner or it's behind you, maybe I'm nitpicking. IDK. My favorite scene was when they were first exploring the planet and the Neomorph, http://avp.wikia.com/wiki/Neomorph, makes its first appearance, the blank face is kind of terrifying and would be neat to see in another alien game maybe with the queen .

I have a question- That scene where David is flying over the Engineers and kills them all by infecting them- Are they in the engineer's planet or are they in the planet LV-223? The reason I thought that is at the end of Prometheus Elizabeth talks about flying the ship back to the Engineers planet to ask them what the humans did wrong .

[Vertigo]

That's the planet in Covenant, which as far as I know has no name. It's probably the Engineers' homeworld, or at least a major colony.

LV223 is the planet in Prometheus. There aren't any living Engineers there during the films' timeframe, aside from the one in stasis.

[mfte]

What happened to that floating thing that David docked to? Why did his ship crash? So many questions.

[Vertigo]

There's a book called Alien: Origins due out in September that bridges the 10 year gap between Prometheus and Covenant, it's written by Alan Dean Foster who does the excellent script novelisations. But yeah, a lot of this stuff should really have been explained within the film.

[mfte]

[aggroculture]

SPOILERS


I saw this twice to understand it. First viewing I thought it took place on the same planet as Prometheus, and was thus confused: why would Shaw be dead on that planet if she left it at the end of Prometheus? I think a better effort could have been made to distinguish the two, visually.

I like the aesthetic Scott is going for, but it does seem that these films are unnecessarily frustrating. Covenant is better than Prometheus, but still it denies us the pleasure of what we want see more of: the Engineers' planet and society, for example. Who are they and what do they want? I don't mind about David tinkering with the xenomorphs: he didn't invent them, but if I understand correctly, he added the egg/facehugger/chestburster aspect. This is fine, the alien is always evolving and being messed with. I don't think the spores are as bad as midiclorians (Vader not having a dad is way stupider), but I do agree with @Shadaloo that the characters are unnecessarily stupid: in Alien, Ridley Scott had respect for the expertise of the Nostromo crew and for them as people, here has nothing but contempt for these dumb young punks, and the films suffer. Crudup's character was too bad to be true: a genuine idiot, I guess embodying some ham-fisted anti-faith message on Scott's part. I do feel the film hung together more than Prometheus, but it was essentially a remake of Alien with a more convoluted android role.
Also, if the android is awake when the others are in hypersleep, why isn't Ash in Alien, and if the Covenant crew know Walter is an android, why doesn't the Nostromo crew know about Ash? That seems a strange inconsistency.

I think the next film should be some massive Aliens-style shoot out on Origae-6 with some Engineers thrown in. We need at some point for some explanation of how Weyland-Yutani get to know about xenomorphs so they can direct the Nostromo to the planet in the original Alien. I don't know if a film documenting what happens with David/Shaw/Engineers would be sustainable, given we know how it turns out: maybe a flashback sequence could go into that in sufficient detail.

[halo eighteen]

^
I assume that the actions of David in the decades prior to the original film probably gave a certain stigma associated with androids, hence the need to keep Ash's identity hidden? Plus Ash had ulterior motives as well. For whatever reason, Bishop's identity was known right off the bat, but Call in Resurrection was also kept secret from everyone else, too.

[Vertigo]

I saw this twice to understand it. First viewing I thought it took place on the same planet as Prometheus, and was thus confused: why would Shaw be dead on that planet if she left it at the end of Prometheus? I think a better effort could have been made to distinguish the two, visually.

I don't really get the confusion on this - the planet in Prometheus is an LV426-like rocky dustbowl wracked with gigantic death storms; the planet in Covenant is essentially Earth-like, replete with ferns, trees and grasses.

I like the aesthetic Scott is going for, but it does seem that these films are unnecessarily frustrating. Covenant is better than Prometheus, but still it denies us the pleasure of what we want see more of: the Engineers' planet and society, for example. Who are they and what do they want? I don't mind about David tinkering with the xenomorphs: he didn't invent them, but if I understand correctly, he added the egg/facehugger/chestburster aspect.

Yeah, one of the most irritating things about Prometheus was how the antagonists' motivations went unexplained, the ending basically shouting "wait for the sequel". Sequel's come, and that's still not explained, so Prometheus still feels narratively unsatisfying. Regarding Spoiler: David creating the aliens though, there's a major debate in the community about this. Ridley apparently wants us to think David's solely responsible, but the novelisation (based on a pre-filming draft of the script) shows that David was just replicating the Engineers' earlier work.

Personally? I hate pretty much everything that both Covenant and Prometheus have added to the Alien backstory. I wish they were entirely unrelated.

Also, if the android is awake when the others are in hypersleep, why isn't Ash in Alien, and if the Covenant crew know Walter is an android, why doesn't the Nostromo crew know about Ash? That seems a strange inconsistency.

Ash and Walter had entirely different roles on their respective ships. Walter was there to help the crew, a key role in the novelisation script was that he explores the surface ahead of the squishy humans and assesses for airborne hazards. On the Nostromo, Ash was a Weyland-Yutani sleeper agent, he's there to pretend to be part of the crew rather than to help them. The reason for that isn't clear, either the company knew about the LV426 signal before the Nostromo shipped out and tasked Ash with bringing back a sample, or they'd added him to the crew for an unrelated purpose such as to sabotage hijacking attempts.

[r_z]

I liked the vibe of this movie. Very dark, strange and also horrific. Which is a testament to the production design. Compared to other sci-fi horror movies out there, it's a really weird one (in a good way).

On the other hand, I didn't like how it tried to sell the stupidest shit just to get ahead with a story, while also leaving open a lot of seemingly important stuff. Most movies today seem to be made that way, but I feel like lately it's becoming a trademark of Scott, isn't it? Many of his recent films seem to suffer from being too crowded. It feels like they need to cut a lot of stuff out just to keep it around the two hour mark. Well, maybe there will be a director's cut.
Anyway, applied to an Alien movie the whole thing felt more like a nightmarish dream than a coherent narrative.

I wish Denis Villeneuve would try his hands at this franchise.

[aggroculture]

Just re-watched Prometheus today after seeing Alien: Covenant, and enjoyed it a lot more than when I saw it back in 2012, I guess now that I knew what to look out for. Hopefully we don't have to wait five years to see the next one.

I wish Denis Villeneuve would try his hands at this franchise.

I find him hit or miss. Love Sicario, The Arrival was meh; lately been watching his older films: Polytechnique is great, Incendies not so much. The new Blade Runner looks like a complete waste of time.

[bobbie solo]

That Red Letter Media video explains away many of the reasons this movie was terrible from a story perspective. I could have prolly overlooked all that and the purposeful telling/not showing of what Shaw was seeking out if the action scenes/Aliens were badass. Instead we got garbage looking CGI creatures instead of practical effects. They all looked fake, the blood looked fake & they moved like the Flash bc they were CG. And why the fuck did the baby xenomorph mimic the Jesus Christ pose that David was doing? I was loling hard there. Garbage movie, don't waste your time.

[captainbeyond]

Also, if the android is awake when the others are in hypersleep, why isn't Ash in Alien, and if the Covenant crew know Walter is an android, why doesn't the Nostromo crew know about Ash? That seems a strange inconsistency.

I assume that the actions of David in the decades prior to the original film probably gave a certain stigma associated with androids, hence the need to keep Ash's identity hidden? Plus Ash had ulterior motives as well. For whatever reason, Bishop's identity was known right off the bat, but Call in Resurrection was also kept secret from everyone else, too.

That's the beauty about androids. They can be programmed to be used as tools in completely different manners. I always gathered that Ash was programmed to be on a covert mission, assigned by Weyland Yutani, to ensure the ship lands on LV-426 and the creature is brought back alive. Not only does Ripley start figuring this out when she deciphers the signal to be a "warning," she eventually confirms it when talking with Mother about Special Order 937. Yeah, they could have hired a human to do this undercover mission, but as we have come to discover, the xenomorphs don't give a shit about androids and prey on humans instead (with the exception of Queen vs Bishop). There's no chance that an android would betray his directives for the sake of saving human lives, whereas a human sleeper agent might have a change of heart. David also had hidden agendas although knowledge of him being artificial was not kept secret, his directives or even just outright curiosity (which could be considered a flaw) brings the demise of the crew due to his quest for scientific knowledge of the Engineers and their black substance.


With Bishop, much like David and Walter, he is used more as a worker/servant/helper so there's no reason to hide his android identity. With Call, I think her purpose of hiding her identity was mainly to keep her from being deactivated/destroyed.

[acidpits]

I hated everything this movie did to the canon of the Xenomorph - full fucking stop. I loved the cool Neomorphs and the idea behind them but at this point Alien needs to either just die as a franchise or get a full on reboot.

I should add something to this though. I absolutely love the work that went into the concept art and design for both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, despite how the movies hold up themselves, I have been fascinated with the creatures and environments that have been created because they are incredible and inspiring. As somebody who creates concepts as a hobby the sheer amount of talent these artists and designers have is astounding.

[Kodiak33]

That Red Letter Media video explains away many of the reasons this movie was terrible from a story perspective. I could have prolly overlooked all that and the purposeful telling/not showing of what Shaw was seeking out if the action scenes/Aliens were badass. Instead we got garbage looking CGI creatures instead of practical effects. They all looked fake, the blood looked fake & they moved like the Flash bc they were CG. And why the fuck did the baby xenomorph mimic the Jesus Christ pose that David was doing? I was loling hard there. Garbage movie, don't waste your time.

That alien pose thing was just...incredible in the worst way. The characters acted like fucking idiots too, I thought they would've learned from Prometheus when that was the only bad thing about that movie IMO (then they turned the stupidity even higher). I was incredibly disappointed, I loved Prometheus besides the idiot scientists.

[bobbie solo]

Yeah the characters acting like idiots was covered by the RLM video above so I didn't want to repeat it. But yes, they were just as moronic at the Prometheus ones, if not worse. YEAH LET'S WALK AROUND WITH NO HELMETS! LET'S NOT LOOK WHERE WE WALK! LET ME LOOK DIRECTLY INTO THE DRIPPING WET, SUSPICIOUS ALIEN BREEDING POD! None of that tops the moronic scientist in Prometheus who decided to play nice with the clearly hostile alien snake thingie in the cave. The fucking thing rears up into a combative cobra-like stance and this asshole gets even closer and has a smile on his face. Lazy, garbage writing. You could have killed both those scientists in much cooler ways that don't involve making them morons.

[implanted_microchip]

The baby pose scene really made me think Ridley grabbed an action figure of a Xenomorph and stuck it in a bucket of fake gore

[neorev]

Finally watched this. It was alright. Honestly, my girl and I both felt Prometheus was better. Too bad the CGI xenomorphs looked pretty crappy. Pretty much predicted the ending as soon as David was revealed on the planet. So Ridley has another two or three movies left? This sure didn't leave me that excited for more.

[Substance242]

Excuse me, that mountains, waterfall, water - is that a real location here on this planet? (hint: Earth) Because for the life of me it looked 100% real, something like Vietnam...

Otherwise, good movie but wasn't impressed that much, what I like the most about Prometheus and this is the colors, especially holographic lights, beautiful. Silly, I know.

[Jon]

Excuse me, that mountains, waterfall, water - is that a real location here on this planet? (hint: Earth) Because for the life of me it looked 100% real, something like Vietnam...

New Zealand

EDIT: I guess I've seen the LOTR movies too many times.

[bobbie solo]

[SM Rollinger]

Really dig this film, especially the score/sound design. The opening musical que, and how it starts back up after the crew lands, increasing in frequency during the neomorph scenes. REAL cool!

Also love how some of the other music numbers call back to the first film.

Been a fan of the Alien films since 3, and this one gets a thumbs up from me. Better than 3 and Resurrection for sure. On par with Prometheus.


STILL, disappointed Neil Blomkamps Alien 5 isnt going to happen

[Findus]

Jed Kurzel's score is great. Also check out his soundtracks for Assassin's Creed and Macbeth (also Michael Fassbender films).

[thelastdisciple]

Aliens > Alien > Alien 3 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Prometheus > Covenant > Resurrection