Alien: Covenant |SPOILER THREAD| With more Christian subtext than BvS

Sub_Level said:
I'd say Alien 1,2,3, and as much as I hate to say it even Resurrection all have a crew that makes mistakes but they also have members who are competent.

Tennessee was that guy in Covenant. But he was the only one. Daniels comes close but her failure to identify David despite getting up close and personal to him disqualifies her in my eyes.
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What, Tennessee takes the ship into the storm when he shouldn't. He risks everyone. Dumb!
 
Fancy Clown said:
I get the complaint...but I feel like picking at what amounts to background aesthetics for a entry in a series that's made several decades later and is telling a totally different story is like the least important thing to criticize. It's like people who complain how Gotham doesn't look the same in any of the Nolan Batman movies. It's like....okay, but how does that affect the story at the end of the day? Is it bad on its own terms, or is just bad because it's impacts nerdy head canon stuff about timelines not matching up. At the end of the day each individual movie is its own production and has its own set of creative guidelines that superced the unimpeachable fan canon. And Alien is already a series where literally every single entry has been wildly divergent in look and tone since it's very first sequel, so I think we're like 30 years late to be complaining about that sort of thing anyway.

I could get behind the argument that the new movies look to clean and lack the gritty atmosphere that was so key to the horror or something..but I'm not about to fret about touchscreens and shit on a spaceship in a movie made in 2017, or that the guns don't make pew pew noises anymore. Like, there are much more substantial things you can peg Ridley Scott, especially if you're gonna compare him to Lucas in a derogatory way.
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The first three Alien films, and much of the video game franchise have not been wildly different in look and tone.

As I type an argument towards what you've said here, I come to realize that all your statement exists as is an effort to downplay the priority of aesthetics in a series canon. Unless I am understanding you incorrectly, I border on finding this factually incorrect.

I also invite you to watch this
 
I hated this movie today after allowing myself to get a little hopeful due to the decent-ish reviews and it is affirming and comforting to see this thread is largely a hate-fest.
 
jstevenson said:
What, Tennessee takes the ship into the storm when he shouldn't. He risks everyone. Dumb!
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Why does everyone on Covenant fly directly into the nearest, biggest cloud?

I swear one of the heads up displays shows a model of the atmosphere & the storms happening in it, and there are LARGE AREAS where the ship can enter without having to fly through a MASSIVE CYLINDRICAL STORM and yet each time a ship enters the planets atmosphere, they bomb straight through weatherdeath
 
Saw it again and still liked it.

I noticed something, though. Why is the Engineer ship David and Shaw were on crashed when David unleashed the parasite s? I didn't catch it on first watch because David lied about them crash landing, which obviously is not true.
 
I wondered why anyone wouldn't do a full planetary scan before landing.. Or hell just take a look in orbit for a couple of days. I imagine there had to be some procedures for where they were supposed to go.. Something more than "fuck it, let's land".

I enjoyed the movie for what it was, but still sad that it could have been something better. No idea how they connect this back to Alien.
 
More_Badass said:
Is this what we're classifying as "dumb"?

Reckless, sure. Driven by emotion rather logic, definitely. But dumb?
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you're right, Tennessee isn't the idiot here.

it was the other two idiots on the bridge who let him do it.


Maybe I was more easily triggered by that scene because of all the idiots on the ground who had already made a bunch of terrible decisions leading up to that.
 
If only the third film reveals that just being near the black shit vastly decreases the amount of oxygen being carried to the brain. It would explain so much.
 
Timeaisis said:
Saw it again and still liked it.

I noticed something, though. Why is the Engineer ship David and Shaw were on crashed when David unleashed the parasite s? I didn't catch it on first watch because David lied about them crash landing, which obviously is not true.
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No answer to it, just like why is the "homework" only one city with one dock? How did Shaw (I assume it's Shaw), send the message and why?

Captain Zyrain said:
I wondered why anyone wouldn't do a full planetary scan before landing.. Or hell just take a look in orbit for a couple of days. I imagine there had to be some procedures for where they were supposed to go.. Something more than "fuck it, let's land".

I enjoyed the movie for what it was, but still sad that it could have been something better. No idea how they connect this back to Alien.
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What would the scan or observations show that wasn't apparent from their arrival in orbit? They knew the atmosphere was breathable and that it was a BETTER fit than the planet they were heading to that they weren't confident to even reaching.

No amount of scanning would have told them David and his menagerie would be there to cock things up.

A lot of these "bad decisions" are being overblown outside of the context of the scenes.

Honestly, the only out of the blue, legit terrible decisions were by Oram not lighting up David and listening to him after revealing not only being fond of the creatures, but having created them at the expense of everyone including Dr. Shaw.
 
Or just don't give it to incompetent people. It seems like they had great ideas in production but basically said let's do a money grab.
 
ArkkAngel007 said:
What would the scan or observations show that wasn't apparent from their arrival in orbit? They knew the atmosphere was breathable and that it was a BETTER fit than the planet they were heading to that they weren't confident to even reaching.

No amount of scanning would have told them David and his menagerie would be there to cock things up.

A lot of these "bad decisions" are being overblown outside of the context of the scenes.

Honestly, the only out of the blue, legit terrible decisions were by Oram not lighting up David and listening to him after revealing not only being fond of the creatures, but having created them at the expense of everyone including Dr. Shaw.
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I imagine they should have been able to see the Engineers dead city, and realize this planet had other inhabitants and at least taken things a lot more carefully. We only see a teeny tiny part of the planet, surely there were other settlements? Or areas where the plague didn't infect? Underwater? Altitude.. Etc.

With all the rules and regulations you'd need to get there in the first place, I would think there would be something similar for finally getting to your destination.

I am fine with waving it away with them being excited or whatever, but it's still not smart. I don't watch movies to see smart people do smart things though, so it is what it is.
 
I saw it a few days ago and all I could think was why the fuck didn't they wear helmets onto the new world. You know, to protect themselves from potential pathogens.

So dumb. Just like this dumb movie.


I liked Pirates way more than this.
 
What did he mean by this? said:
I think the chances of Blade Runner/Alien crossover film are way stronger than anyone thinks right now
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I did think of David as Roy Batty during some of the scenes; this kiss followed by a sudden, violent attack and the fight with Walter (like the fight with Deckard).

Also, it only just occurred to me about the parallels between the black goo in Prometheus/Covenant and District 9.
 
i'm watching the behind the scenes featurettes of the original Alien film and it just ocurred me that the producers of the original movie were called David Giler and Walter Hill. then i remembered David and Walter in this new movie and chuckled a bit.
i wonder if the reason Walter was named that was to create this reference.
 
Madao said:
i'm watching the behind the scenes featurettes of the original Alien film and it just ocurred me that the producers of the original movie were called David Giler and Walter Hill. then i remembered David and Walter in this new movie and chuckled a bit.
i wonder if the reason Walter was named that was to create this reference.
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Yeah it's an obvious reference to Giler and Hill. I'm sure Dan O'Bannon would've loved it
 
Terrible film.
Fassbender's character somehow got turned into a bad one.

I won't be seeing another Alien movie in the cinema.
 
-Plasma Reus- said:
Terrible film.
Fassbender's character somehow got turned into a bad one.

I won't be seeing another Alien movie in the cinema.
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By "bad" do you mean "evil" or "terrible"?
Because his character was already evil in Prometheus. Nothing much changed, except that he got even more crazy.


Personally, I liked the film. But I also found it incredibly stupid.
I would recommend it to fans of the Alien franchise only. And even among those only to people who enjoyed Prometheus.

There are some things I liked in Alien Covenant, but there are equally as much where I was just shaking my head thinking "What the fuck am I watching?"

I'd still give it a 6.5/10. Not bad. But not particularly great, either.

I can accept the origin story of the Xenomorphs. That one seemed okay and plausible.
 
Dumbest part is when Oram see's big alien eggs and decides to get closer. Despite seeing David doing crazy shit a few mins earlier.
 
Horse Detective said:
The first three Alien films, and much of the video game franchise have not been wildly different in look and tone.

As I type an argument towards what you've said here, I come to realize that all your statement exists as is an effort to downplay the priority of aesthetics in a series canon. Unless I am understanding you incorrectly, I border on finding this factually incorrect.

I also invite you to watch this
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Aesthetics matter for the story being told. Alien at this point is telling a wildly different story than it did in its inception. Aliens production design doesn't really look any more similar to Alien than Alien: Covenant, and its tone is totally different. Technology changes, and Ridley Scott and his team probably weighed the options and thought it would be more distracting to have the CRT technology than what people have come to expect the future to look like, pretty much every sci-fi movie ever has done this.

The Alien Isolation developers decided to use the CRT stuff because they were trying to slavishly recreate the experience of the first film, which is obviously not something Ridley Scott tried to do. All the Alien games are slavish to the first movies because they aren't telling stories of their own, they are fan altars to the design of the first Alien or, more frequently Aliens (which has a quite different look and especially tone, to the first film despite what you have said. Nobody can confuse which movie is the inspiration for each game).

I'm not saying that the CRT retro future stuff (and it's important to note, it wasn't considered "retro" future in 1979) isn't cool, and I'm obviously not saying aesthetics don't matter, but when your argument about the aesthetics comes down to "the display technology doesn't fit the timeline for my series canon"...then I'm sorry but that's a dumb argument. That's not how movies are made. The Alien series was never, ever a tightly nit universe that lent itself to nerdy lore discussions built around merchandising like Star Wars, and it's not one continuous story (or production) like Lord of the Rings where strict continuity matters. It's 8 horror movies made over a bunch of years by a bunch of different people trying different things. Trying to make them all fit together in a tangible reality that doesn't exist down to every last set design choice is an exercise in madness and pedantry. It looks at stories in the most banal way possible, which is why you never see film critics getting bogged down by dumb stuff like that but internet fandoms lose their minds over it.

Each Alien movie takes a certain set of core fundamental pieces of iconography people expect from the series, and then does what it will with the rest.

I'm not downplaying aesthetics in a series canon, I'm downplaying the idea of "series canon" in the first place.
 
I haven't seen nearly as much discussion on the chest-burst and Alien cycle.


Why is the chestburst a mini-alien instead of a worm-like creature?

How are they becoming full-sized so fast?
 
hawk2025 said:
Why is the chestburst a mini-alien instead of a worm-like creature?

How are they becoming full-sized so fast?
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Because Ridley Scott decided that's what he wanted it to look like and behave like for the convenience of the story. There's no logic behind it beyond him needing the alien to grow really quickly otherwise the colonists would peace out before it had time to chase them and do that set-piece with Daniels hanging from the ship.

And he couldn't do the David/Alien arm stretch scene if the chestburster were a wormy looking thing. I think I read somewhere that that's what he wanted it to look like in the original movie but it was too complicated to get working, but I'm not sure.
 
I think there's a fantastic divergence between people who wanted more Prometheus and those who wanted a more typical monster flick.

Beefy said:
Dumbest part is when Oram see's big alien eggs and decides to get closer. Despite seeing David doing crazy shit a few mins earlier.
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I don't think anything is going to top the actions of the two soldiers who a) walk off to smoke a spliff on a fucking unknown planet while separated from the group and b) nudge cave spores open while sniffing.
 
Beefy said:
The slipping on the blood on the floor over and over is another bit. I actually laughed at that part.
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Loved it. Girl was so untrained and jumpy she wasted two shotguns. That shit is valuable! As soon as the lander explodes, I knew the movie was going to be great. Oh, they're not wasting time with this one! Shit is happening. I love that kind of pacing in sci-fi / horror.

Really I just think this is my bizarro world version of Forbidden Planet now, to an extent. With some of the leftover sets from Stargate for the temple interiors. :lol
 
Was that really the Engineers' homeworld though?
It's highly unlikely that they didn't have at least some means to defend themselves from the goo... and the planet is far too devoid of artificial structures to be the home of a super high-tech civilization. Its aesthetics clashes too much with their ships.

Just thinking about this broke any suspension of disbelief I could have watching the movie
 
Whatever I can say about the movie, everything once the two crew members are infected until the landing ship explodes is incredible.
 
Tawney Bomb said:
Maybe I should give that comic a read.
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The only comic legitimately worth reading is the first Aliens Vs Predator series by Dark Horse. It's perfect and I cry black tears wishing for a proper adaptation.

latest
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Tawney Bomb said:
The more I think about this movie the less I like it. They need to just stop with Alien movies.
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They just need to stop with the continuing series shit. The last true sequel should have been Aliens. Everything after that should have been an anthology style entry. Just stop trying to tell a continuous story line based around penis and vagina monsters.
 
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