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Alien Covenant - the thread WITH SPOILERS for them what have seen it
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Even the DC can't save it. Cameron isn't as good as Fincher.
https://speakerimpedance.co.uk/?act=two_parallel&page=calculator
For those disappointed that there wasn't enough of the engineers or David and Shaw's relationship - the next film, "Awakening" is supposedly set between Prometheus and Covenant. My guess is it will focus on them and possibly what drove David to kill the engineers.
Seeing it next week so will report back then.
Den of Geek did a good article on what might come next:
http://www.denofgeek.com/uk/movies/alien/49161/alien-covenant-where-does-the-franchise-go-next
Dear Sir,
I've noticed several glaring issues with the above topics, particularly on recent missions and despite our earlier enquiry into the loss of the Prometheus. Give that it is unlikely they encountered space monsters or, black goo in pots (haha!), we can safely assume these were down to regular health and safety issues.
1. Space is a dangerous environment, full psychological assessments of ALL crew should be carried out, and if it turns out their responses to a crisis might include losing their mind, wildly firing weapons around explosive equipment, or locking their close friends in hazardous rooms, they should be rejected.
2. Leadership is an issue, as every military organisation knows, in a dangerous environment the whole chain of command should be trained to lead and take over command seamlessly in the case of casualties. We should weed out at an early stage any officer who whose first response to command is to moan about being passed over for it in the first place, or to endanger the whole ship for the sake of their significant other.
3. If we are not going to address the above to ensure a professional crew, we should AT LEAST ensure no family members are aboard to further dilute their judgement.
4. We have serious concerns about the suspension chambers where, despite being a mere 6 feet long and presumably requiring a very low concentration of oxygen, it appears they can spontaneously combust when the door jams. Additionally the only form of emergency release being a piece of cumbersome machinery, rather than the explosive catches perfected in the 20th century, seems to be asking for a horrific death?
5. Given as we have longstanding issues with artificial life forms, we should definitely consider removing the ability for advanced genetic engineering from them. It never had a purpose and it could under extreme situations lead to space monsters (haha - my little joke!)
6. We should consider FULL weapons training for anyone with access to weapons, our ships are full of fuel and oxygen! Also in a lot of circumstances sidearms make much more effective weapons than large rifles, yet we seem to carry almost exclusively massive rifles, we are usually colonists not marines!
7. For some reason, very little care is taken for the prospect of microbial infections, poisonous fauna or viruses when landing on strange worlds! At the very least it would make sense to wear space suits when exploring any world regardless of how easy it is to breathe?
These are just a few of the more obvious notes to make, who knows what we will find or create out in space, and common sense needs to prevail!
Yours
Buzz Killington
Health and Safety Manager
Weyland Corporation
PS - Thank you for the opportunity following my earlier messages to join the LV426 mission! I look forward to this exciting journey!
I love gory movies.
I left the cinema feeling physically ill at how gory it was and there was a good story behind it too.
I watched Prometheus the night before and thought Covenant would be just as bad.
"Apparently" there are another 4 Alien prequels to come. Looking forward to them.
I also watched Alien V Predator the night after - which was appalling.
Sure, it had some flaws, but I enjoyed it in spite of them.
Alien for me is a horror film, that happens to be in space. Aliens is a war/action film which is inherently sci-fi ... (Alien 3 horror, Alien Resurrection a pure sci-fi action film)
Prometheus was a sci-fi film that happened to be in a setting similar to the above, and did very little with the setting, but sci-fi'd the crap out of itself.
Alien Covenant is another Sci-Fi first, action second, plot last.
Artificial tension in the beginning - a fire killed more people than the Aliens do... it's a movie about aliens that eat people, and the set killed more people. As a brief aside - who decided that inside a sleep pod needed to be filled with every flammable substance known and not a single fire prevention system, the voice activated computer needed a second command to maybe risk the ship, but a fire suppressor where the crew live? NAH! Okay, but maybe that tension was put to good use? No. it was a reason to sci-fi the ship and the setting, it wrote James Franco out (seriously, why hire someone for that?) and then be irrelevant... how about the ship detected a signal and then woke up the crew to let them decide on a course of action... that way we can have a nice slow build of tension rather than lots of tension then throw it away before starting to build tension. Also, everyone is sad their captain is dead - their captain of exactly one trip which they have spent asleep (why?!). ... and nonsensical tech-nonsense the signal was detected by the suit because he was outside the signal blockers - why would you have signal blockers on a vessel that might receive instructions from Earth? What signals are you blocking?
So, they get to the planet at last ... Now the planet itself is the antagonist - storms and danger! It's a strange world they didn't even look at through a telescope so obviously it's safe to land in the water (nothing indicates they know it's shallow!) where any number of water-born organisms could live, they breathe the air they touch things without a seconds thought that maybe they might catch all the diseases ever found on this new world - but we're back to a good slow build of tension and then aliens, right? No now two people are killed by fungus, one by an explosion and then 1 and a half by aliens (it's unclear if the new-captains-wife is dead thanks to the alien, or to the exploding ship, so we'll give the aliens a half point here).
Right, so we've had multiple explosions, fires, gun-fights and two alien births, goodness we must be nearing the crescendo now... nope. We've decided that was too much excitement, now we're going to start the slow build of tension you expected in an Alien film. David will exposite on some plot... except never once clearing up WHY he decided that he'd be a death-dealing-arse who would kill all sorts of species to make a species only capable of killing and eating. He never explains why he decided that Shaw who he "loved" should burst open and die... he also never explained what laid the near meter high 40cm wide eggs or where that went (seriously it's a big chicken that can lay those eggs, and the life-cycle we know isn't established so what massive bum farted that out?)... he also didn't explain how he did all this genetic engineering in a cave with no apparent equipment.
OK, but we have face-huggers now, so things are back on track for Alien? Well... in Alien the face-hugger gave them enough time to walk several kilometres carrying a man between two people, get into the ship and ... FIX the ship... it's assumed at least a day... this in covenant the facehugger works so fast that the victim's companions barely have time to realise he's missing (though David had time to take the man's clothes off)... right, but now we'll have the scary, alien stalking them, picking them off one-by-one we've waited 2 movies for? NO. Now the alien will walk upright at everyone, not stalking, but instead bare knuckle boxing... David and Walter will have some fisticuffs... aaaand the Alien is dead in a sort of squishy splat that looks like it sprayed in not-Shaw/not-Ripley's way... but didn't.
On the David/Walter fight... we all knew that when it cut away instead of showing him winning that Walter died... but in that cut there was enough time for David to sever his own hand, (with a small knife) and get changed (including trousers and boots - all of the cloths having been stripped off a presumably un-cooperative other person)... utterly impossible to happen in the time it took an alien to run at the floaty-ship-thing, but somehow incredibly obvious.
So, as per the end of Aliens we missed an alien getting on the ship - it always happens... however, in the time to get everything ready for hyper-sleep (that's park the little ship, shower and get changed... ) a crew member was isolated, face-hugged, and chest bursted, the alien then grew fast enough that it was sneaking up on the shower-sex-victims before anyone even checked up on the guy they were trying to do re-constructive face surgery (well,,, putting Plasticine on the wound) one moments ago. It's an alien film, so the alien's tail has to do a sort of sexy-pervy-between-the-woman's-legs-tail-thing.
Now we then watch the end of Alien and the end of Aliens mashed into one - where leading an alien around is easy as pie ... Mother probably could have done that in Alien and only 1 person would have died, everyone would be sad, but life would have moved on and the multi-trillion dollar ship would have survived... if the massive bull-dozer had just hit the alien it would have looked less silly than having a massive spike on the front just happen to ge through it... and then the Hans-Gruber-off-the-Nakatomi-Plaza-fall scene could have been omitted...
And now it's all over, I sure hope David doesn't turn out to be David... OH MY, DAVID WAS DAVID THIS WHOLE TIME! Who knew?! Oh, and then it's revealed than in addition to changing every single item of clothing with Walter, he ALSO went downstairs whipe up two face-hugger embryos, sealed them in some sort of suspended animation plastic, and swallowed them, in the time it took for not-Shaw/not-Ripley to run to the floaty-ship-thing (which she was fairly motivated to do as the alien was running at her)
Ridley Scott's idea of building tension is worse that M Night Smamalamalamalmadingdong's was in films like Devil or The Happening (ironically titled as nothing happens)... up down, up down, up down, up down... and he didn't DO anything with the tension.
The crew is about 50% too large - too many to remember their names, or give a shit about when they died. No back-story, plot development or any other reason to emote when one or more of them died... other than not-Shaw/not-Ripley who was apparently married to a man we don't see alive in the film once, but was hired for his famous face.. her story is that she was sad her husband is dead... and that's it - though still seems a little too lovey with not-Dallas at the end (Damn, bitch! your husband and his wife only died a couple of days ago!! Take some time to mourn!). But at least they didn't have lots of sci-fi for-the-sake of sci-fi stuff... like hints at FTL travel, big space-ship-thing-recharging from solar panels (in deep space no-where near stars), neutrinos smashing space-ships, and all sorts of genetic engineering (with a pencil or flute? we don't see him with any tools more advanced than that).
Visually it looks great almost all of the time, and as virtually the entire score is a carbon copy of the Alien soundtrack the OST is brilliant.
There.
That's the film. 5/10 - better than prometheus, but otherwise massively disappointing
One of the great things about the Director's Cut of the original Alien film is the atmosphere of how ancient the alien species and the Space Jockey were.
That and the reveal near the end about the Alien's lifecycle: it cocoons victims to turn them into facehuggers - you see this when Ripley finds the room containing the cocoons of Dallas and Brett, Dallas is still conscious and says 'kill me' but you can see that Brett has already half-transformed into a facehugger.
So in the original there is no need for a queen and all the subsequent nonsense about creation myths which serve to anthropomorphise the alien. In the original film (still the best in the series) it really is a completely different form of life, and extremely old.
Where did the Aliens come from? Oh David created them? Right - and I'm guessing in the next film David is creating the Queen when the Engineers show up in a ship, shit goes down, and said ship now full of alien eggs crashes, and Oriole 7 becomes redesignated as LV426 etc. etc.
The only bit I liked was spotting the nod to Blade Runner- where the Shami Chakrabati sticks a nail into David and he says "That's the spirit" - a la Roy Batty. (But now that leaves me with a bad feeling about the Blade Runner sequel.)
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Penis-metaphor alien monsters, All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
Canon is an odd one with Alien though as it's had so many writer/director combos and all have done something different...
Alien has a scene with survivors of the Nostromo crew glued to walls - which different people interpret differently, some say they're being cocooned to turn into eggs... I'm not sure that makes sense, I think they're being cocooned so that they can be implanted - my theory on the first film is that an alien in an area without a queen will take on that roll... maybe not even as a queen... maybe they can implant directly? Remember, at this point none of what we see in Aliens has been shown or hinted at yet...
Aliens there are definite queen aliens, and they're with the eggs - though no queen is in the Engineer ship from the previous film, so did the engineers (or... David?!) gather thousands of eggs, and evenly distribute them around the ship? Did a queen wander chamber to chamber?
Alien 3 suggests implanting in different species produces different xenomorphs - something I like, and the dog-alien is certainly small and fast (and lends to pred-aliens for the games and extended universe).
Resurrection can be ignored.
AvP and AvP2 have been retconned out of existence now thanks to Covenant - if David made the Aliens himself then thy can't have been hunted in Inca cities, or present in North America
had Blomkamp got his way then 3 and Resurrection would have been retconned out too... making for possibly more confusion (would have made the boxed set very confusing)
So the alien is the least interest part of it, in my view. I enjoyed the whole Heart of Darkness/Island of Dr Moreau messing with creation theme, the best bits were with Walter/David.
But the screechy, fast moving alien stuff has been overdone now. In the original Alien, the creature was quite slow, terrifying (what might it do? eat you or rape you?), but in every Alien film since it is just another big bug to be killed, StarShip Troopers style.
The back-burster/mouth burster stuff was just splatter for the sake of it. Again, the crew were stupid, panicky and hopeless. The guy going for a fag break, classic redshirt. The chap prodding the fungi, Chris Oram peering into the egg - FFS!
The medbay panic stuff has been done way better elsewhere - see Doom or Pandorum.
I wonder if we'll ever get another Alien film where the crew are smart and resourceful.
All that said, my wife and I enjoyed it. I think she enjoyed it more than me and she's not a big Alien fan. Overall, 6.5/10
Part of the magic of the original is the audience shock of seeing the space jockey and Alien and not knowing how they came to be.
We don't need a backstory, Ash's deductions of its origin are sufficient.
The magic is in the mystery of what could lie in the depths of space, in this case truly odd and terrifying creatures.
Blade Runner rebooted:
BATTY: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. I even saw a new Ridley Scott Alien film that didn't suck balls."
DECKARD: Bullshit.
(fires weapon. Batty's head is blown to smithereens).
Myranda's review sums it up beautifully. My own review: utter cack.