As an Alien fan, this movie displeased me. If you are an Alien fan, you will probably feel compelled to watch it, then wish you hadn't. If you're not an Alien fan, it's a mediocre plot horror movie that takes itself too seriously, but has pretty visuals.
Spoiler free review:
This movie irritated me for a lot of reasons. There are massive plot holes big enough to fly a starship through.
The characters sucked. I can only sort-of remember 4 (and a half) of them. There wasn't even much reason to care about those four, and all the rest there is no reason to care about.
This movie also resorts to the habit I hate in horror movies of everyone getting into trouble because they're just berkeleying idiots. Everyone is incompetent. People don't pay attention when they really should. People just wander off alone all of the time, even when they know bad things are happening. Not characters with established flaws and foibles that are believable in the situation. Just randomly losing all competence so that they can get themselves in trouble.
This movie tries to do too many things, and thus fails to do any well. It lacks the simple focus that made Alien and Aliens great. It tries to be horror and it tries to get all philosophical. But not interwoven in a psychological thriller sort of way. It's totally broken up in separate scenes. So that means the horror is rushed with no chance to build suspense, and the philosophy is ham-handed and shallow. It's playing at being scary and playing at being deep.
Finally the Lore. berkeley! If you are an Alien fan, you will probably wish you had never seen this movie. I'm just going to pretend it didn't happen because it cheapens a lot of the Alien lore, where it isn't downright contradictory. Pissed me off. Like "some Romulan miners just undid the timeline you know and love" kind of bullE36 M3 berkeleying with the lore.
I was disappoint.
So, you are saying, pretty much the same as the last movie. I liked the style of that one, the plot was a mess though.
Sad to see Ridley Scott lose his touch.
Maybe the new Blade Runner (not directed by Ridley) will be good.
I will dissent and say that I enjoyed it, although I have questionable tastes, so take what I have to say with a grain of salt.
You see the xenomorphs evolve from what you saw in Prometheus to the more recognizable form from the original movies.
If you want to complain about the events being driven by characters being idiots, realize they are no worse than the sheer incompetence of most of the characters from Aliens. The honest trailer summed it up nicely.
It wasn't great, but it was far from the worst of the 8 movies in the franchise.
A friend had similar comments about it, so not surprising.
Beer Baron wrote: This movie also resorts to the habit I *hate* in horror movies of everyone getting into trouble because they're just berkeleying idiots. Everyone is incompetent. People don't pay attention when they really should. People just wander off alone all of the time, even when they know bad things are happening. Not characters with established flaws and foibles that are believable in the situation. Just randomly losing all competence so that they can get themselves in trouble.
How about a palate cleanser? (NSFW audio)
Or, back on the other end of the spectrum: this Geico ad
Beer Baron wrote: Finally the Lore. berkeley! If you are an Alien fan, you will probably wish you had never seen this movie. I'm just going to pretend it didn't happen because it cheapens a lot of the Alien lore, where it isn't downright contradictory. Pissed me off. Like "some Romulan miners just undid the timeline you know and love" kind of bullE36 M3 berkeleying with the lore.
And lemme guess, it was done to clumsily shoehorn more references to Christianity into a story that's supposed to be about spaceborne rape monsters. Did I guess right?
I'm starting to think Ridley Scott is another George Lucas , in that he once made some good movies by accident, and will now berkeley them up if left to his own devices.
Contrast this to the original Alien. Once characters knew something was up they were freaked out and did not spread out any more than they had to. The more spread out they got, the more nervous people got. Even Aliens, when characters screw up, it makes sense for the character. The evil middle-manager cares about profits over human lives. The lieutenant is freshly commissioned wet-behind-the-ears officer who has never actually seen combat and panics and freezes when his first command mission that is supposed to be a cakewalk goes completely sideways, while the marines resort to more instinctual training that was never developed to account for xenomorphs.
GameboyRMH wrote:Beer Baron wrote: Finally the Lore. berkeley! If you are an Alien fan, you will probably wish you had never seen this movie. I'm just going to pretend it didn't happen because it cheapens a lot of the Alien lore, where it isn't downright contradictory. Pissed me off. Like "some Romulan miners just undid the timeline you know and love" kind of bullE36 M3 berkeleying with the lore.And lemme guess, it was done to clumsily shoehorn more references to Christianity into a story that's supposed to be about spaceborne rape monsters. Did I guess right? I'm starting to think Ridley Scott is another George Lucas , in that he once made some good movies by accident, and will now berkeley them up if left to his own devices.
Actually, no. That was one of my issues with it making nods at philosophy and then not really going anywhere with it. They draw your attention to a couple crew members being religious, and then... don't do anything with it. No contrasting feelings or decisions by characters who are faithful or skeptical. They spend far more time just having one character spout flowery quotes from Byron and Shelley to make them sound deep.
My issues with the lore (trying to avoid spoilers) is that they didn't really make the aliens creepy rape monsters anymore. They screwed things up to make the existence of them far less unsettling. By being soooo busy telling you how deep and philosophical they were, the whole movie succeeded in being less thoughtful and philosophical than the scene in Alien where they interrogate the android head.
In reply to Beer Baron:
I admit to not being the world's greatest Alien sequel fan, but:
If you saw Prometheus, I'm not sure what else you would have expected, and
That's pretty much the MO for every Ridley Scott movie made in the last 20 years.
As for there being worse Alien movies, I can forgive a movie that is bad and knows it. Alien: Covenant wasn't actually bad. It was just mediocre. The problem was it was mediocre but thinks it's good and thinks it's deep when it isn't.
Mind you, I've not seen it yet,but I'm curious what you mean about messing with the time line?
Isn't this one supposed to be between Prometheus and next year's movie, being specifically the ship found in the first Alien? Like the middle part of the prequel trilogy?
Honestly, once I saw that idiot from east bound and down, who I think is just annoying, I lost a lot of interest in this movie. I'll still see it eventually in hopes he's killed in an extra fun way, but I'm not going to go pay to see it in theaters.
As an aside, when both AVP movies were released on blu Ray, there was an extremely in depth guide as a bonus feature that had a huge history of Weyland corporation, the xenomorphs, and predator. I have been trying to track that bonus stuff down again since they started making prequels, because some things just don't mesh up but my memory isn't very good either.
aircooled wrote: Sad to see Ridley Scott lose his touch.
OTOH, he did a brilliant job with The Martian (directed & produced)
The problems with Prometheus (haven't seen Alien Covenant, nor do I plan to) centered around the plot. Ridley Scott directed and produced it as well, so while he didn't write the screenplay he presumably had veto authority over it.
RevRico wrote: Mind you, I've not seen it yet,but I'm curious what you mean about messing with the time line? Isn't this one supposed to be between Prometheus and next year's movie, being specifically the ship found in the first Alien? Like the middle part of the prequel trilogy?
I won't go too into it for the sake of avoiding spoilers.
Covenant pulls some things that change the lore so much that the AvP movies and comics could not have happened. It also throws a giant wrench so that it does not make sense that the crew of the Nostromo could have found the remains of the space jockey transporting a cargo of xenomorph eggs.
So almost a reboot?
Beer Baron wrote:RevRico wrote: Mind you, I've not seen it yet,but I'm curious what you mean about messing with the time line? Isn't this one supposed to be between Prometheus and next year's movie, being specifically the ship found in the first Alien? Like the middle part of the prequel trilogy?I won't go too into it for the sake of avoiding spoilers. Covenant pulls some things that change the lore so much that the AvP movies and comics could not have happened. It also throws a giant wrench so that it does not make sense that the crew of the Nostromo could have found the remains of the space jockey transporting a cargo of xenomorph eggs.
This is what bugs me (pun intended).
It's so easy these days to make movies part of a larger universe. It's already out there, all you do is fill in the blanks. Make sure one movie ends up explaining what happened in the next movie. I think that's easy, maybe it isn't.
Promotheus went too far back. You could have given it a pass if you said "the Engineers created the ooze, the ooze created the xenomorph species, but it also created us. When the events of Promotheus occurred, it was a completely separate species."
Now, from what I've been reading, some not so nice not so human individuals are largely the reason for the rather rapid evolution of our ugly bugs. Which I just don't dig. I always imagined that the xenomorph species was a classic case of an apex predator who would have not bothered us had we (or Predator or Engineer) not gone to its home planet and allowed it to spread.
Now it seems the xenomorph is just the product of some nasty ooze that has created proto-face huggers, proto-aliens and proto-eggs in the span of a few decades.
Just checked Rotten Tomatoes, Covenant and Prometheus are tied for third in the franchise at 72%.
In reply to pheller:
See that's where I'm getting confused.
What I remember from the avp bonus documentary was Wayland had a hand somehow in the xenomorphs, but according to wiki and it seems these new movies, that doesn't hold any weight at all.
I'd really like to find a good resource of the lore. All the movies have been kind of hit or miss with me,but but that story that makes them possible, on the surface, is my kind of science fiction.
I've been afraid to look in the novel direction, because like star wars, I know there are tons of things out there that are partially cannon, nothing to do with it at all, or just wishful thinking and I don't know how to sort through it all.
pheller wrote: ... I always imagined that the xenomorph species was a classic case of an apex predator who would have not bothered us had we (or Predator or Engineer) not gone to its home planet and allowed it to spread.
And that's what I always figured, too. That is more horror than what they've done. If they'd just left it uncertain and ambiguous it could have remained a very sort of Lovecraftian horror entity. Something truly and completely alien that kills not out of malice, but because it just does not care. It is a near-perfect predator and all we are to it is a stage in its reproductive cycle.
I figured that you then had other groups - Predators, Yutani-Weyland, and maybe the Engineers - who had interest in this organism for various reasons and through their hubris had allowed or caused it to spread. You could make really interesting stories about the damage caused by that hubris. But you still don't need to concoct some back story on the aliens.
You'll need to log in to post.
