David's obsession with creation made sense to me for sure. But I thought it was a bit unconvincing that he talk about a perfect organism. How are those Xenomorphs perfect? How are they any better than the entities they emerge out of? If anything they're bigger, dumber, and highly susceptible to getting sucked out of spacecrafts.
[/spoiler[
I wasn't. I saw alien at the cinemas in the early 2000s and I was surprised by how on edge I was even though I had seen it many times before. Aliens use to be my favourite and I still like it just not as much anymore
While the movie was largely a disappointment, there was one detail that I liked and it was the Scott seems to be intentionally trying to draw parallels between the Alien franchise and the Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle operas.
The movie begins and ends with David having Entry of the Gods intoValhalla from Das Rheingold be played.
The thing is, in that opera the gold of the Rhine can be forged into a Ring that will give it's wielder dominion over the world, but only someone who has forsaken love can create the Ring. This is what the dwarf Alberich does in the opera.
David's story parallels that of Alberich. He forsakes his love for Elizabeth in order to steal the secrets of the Engineers and use them to forge the ultimate Weapon, the Xenomorphs.
Even after Alberich leaves the picture, during the following operas of Wagner's Ring Cycle the Ring brings only death and suffering to all those who pursue it. This is also paralleled in Weyland-Yutani's pursuit of the Xenomorphs, as every time they get their hands on them or try to, it ends in catastrophe and death.
Finally, in the operas, the Ring ends up being the ultimate cause of the Twilight of the Gods and the destruction of Valhalla. In this movie we saw that David's pursuit of his creations led to the destruction of the Engineers and the fall of their world.
While that is a cool tidbit and is fascinating, it seems like Scott is sacrificing creating quality films in favor of incorporating pretentious notions. From what I understand, Promotheus was supposed to have parallels with Lawrence of Arabia (I haven't seen it, so I don't know how accurate this statement is.) I feel Scott is out touch with his audience in that they don't care about these parallels, they want great stories and well thought out action. Not everything needs to be reference to some work of art the audience most likely isn't even familiar with in the first place.
How are those Xenomorphs perfect? How are they any better than the entities they emerge out of? If anything they're bigger, dumber, and highly susceptible to getting sucked out of spacecrafts.
Watched it today, and as a big fan of Prometheus and Aliens being my favorite movie of all time, I mostly agree with DragonLord's review and rate this movie a 6.5/10.
It's mostly a dissapointment, when compared to the potential for the movie to be awesome.
I get they were going for a slow-build for the first hour of the movie, just like the original Alien, but it was mostly wasted time and boring. Especially the whole process of fixing the solar wings on the ship after the solar flare.
I read a few spoilers to satisfy my curiosity because I was curious about the mixed reviews. But I am glad I did.
The 'twist' at the end was one of the most obviously telegraphed twists I've ever seen. Though I knew it was coming because of a spoiler, I saw the movie with two of my buddies that hadn't seen Prometheus, and they were able to figure out LONG before it was revealed.
I usually defend the stupidity of the characters in Prometheus, but the characters of Covenant are at least twice as stupid. There's so many eye rolling moments it took me completely out of the movie, and even laughed once when the tension was supposed to be sky high.
When the 2nd woman slipped on blood, within a minute, I laughed pretty damn hard.
Difficult to say she didn't deserve her fate of blowing up in the ship after locking that one chick in the room with the backburster, and saying she couldn't let her out due to risk of contamination, yet she was just in the room moments before.
This was the biggest eye-rolling sequence of the movie.
I absolutley hate the fact they didn't include the scenes that were released on Youtube to hype up the movie, especially the one with David and Shaw. Hopefully Ridley Scott will include them in the BluRay release.
On a postive note, Michael Fassbender steals every damn scene he's in, and David is the best antagonist in the history of the franchise. I'm looking forward to the next Alien movie because of him.
And the Xenomorphs didn't seem like a significant threat, because of two reasons -
One, there was only one at a time, one on the planet, and the other on the ship.
Two, the characters had guns. Sorry, but lone Xenomorphs aren't scary when they can be just shot dead.
I'm all for humans having guns, but they have to be facing a nest of Xenomorphs for the tension to be high.
The CGI Xenomorphs were alright. Didn't have much of a problem with them.
It's becoming a cliche that the main character of every Alien movie is the 'strong-female,' and always survives at the end. It was pretty obvious that she, and McBride's character, were going to be the two survivors, along with David.
In the eight 'Alien' movies, the 'strong female main character' has survived every movie, with the exception of Alien3.
Overall, it was a very beautiful movie, and without Michael Fassbender this would have been one of the absolute WORST Alien movies ever. But it's still better than Alien3, Resurrection, and the two AvP movies.
So, this sits right in the middle of Alien series rankings.
Aliens
Alien
Prometheus
Covenant
Ressurection
AvP2 (Ignore the scenes without an Alien or Predator, and it's awesome fanservice)
AvP1
Alien3
I really wonder what Ridley Scott's impressions of the final cut of the theatrical version, if this really was his best effort.
"YOU SAID YOU WANTED FUCKING ALIENS! I GAVE YOU ALIENS!"
Lets hope that this either convinced him to stop making alien movies or he changes the direction and goes back to a Prometheus style movie for the next one
Watched it today, and as a big fan of Prometheus and Aliens being my favorite movie of all time, I mostly agree with DragonLord's review and rate this movie a 6.5/10.
It's mostly a dissapointment, when compared to the potential for the movie to be awesome.
I get they were going for a slow-build for the first hour of the movie, just like the original Alien, but it was mostly wasted time and boring. Especially the whole process of fixing the solar wings on the ship after the solar flare.
I read a few spoilers to satisfy my curiosity because I was curious about the mixed reviews. But I am glad I did.
The 'twist' at the end was one of the most obviously telegraphed twists I've ever seen. Though I knew it was coming because of a spoiler, I saw the movie with two of my buddies that hadn't seen Prometheus, and they were able to figure out LONG before it was revealed.
I usually defend the stupidity of the characters in Prometheus, but the characters of Covenant are at least twice as stupid. There's so many eye rolling moments it took me completely out of the movie, and even laughed once when the tension was supposed to be sky high.
When the 2nd woman slipped on blood, within a minute, I laughed pretty damn hard.
Difficult to say she didn't deserve her fate of blowing up in the ship after locking that one chick in the room with the backburster, and saying she couldn't let her out due to risk of contamination, yet she was just in the room moments before.
This was the biggest eye-rolling sequence of the movie.
I absolutley hate the fact they didn't include the scenes that were released on Youtube to hype up the movie, especially the one with David and Shaw. Hopefully Ridley Scott will include them in the BluRay release.
On a postive note, Michael Fassbender steals every damn scene he's in, and David is the best antagonist in the history of the franchise. I'm looking forward to the next Alien movie because of him.
And the Xenomorphs didn't seem like a significant threat, because of two reasons -
One, there was only one at a time, one on the planet, and the other on the ship.
Two, the characters had guns. Sorry, but lone Xenomorphs aren't scary when they can be just shot dead.
I'm all for humans having guns, but they have to be facing a nest of Xenomorphs for the tension to be high.
The CGI Xenomorphs were alright. Didn't have much of a problem with them.
It's becoming a cliche that the main character of every Alien movie is the 'strong-female,' and always survives at the end. It was pretty obvious that she, and McBride's character, were going to be the two survivors, along with David.
In the eight 'Alien' movies, the 'strong female main character' has survived every movie, with the exception of Alien3.
Overall, it was a very beautiful movie, and without Michael Fassbender this would have been one of the absolute WORST Alien movies ever. But it's still better than Alien3, Resurrection, and the two AvP movies.
So, this sits right in the middle of Alien series rankings.
Aliens
Alien
Prometheus
Covenant
Ressurection
AvP2 (Ignore the scenes without an Alien or Predator, and it's awesome fanservice)
AvP1
Alien3
I really wonder what Ridley Scott's impressions of the final cut of the theatrical version, if this really was his best effort.
It's a better movie than some on the list, but it's unquestionably the biggest dissapointment after what was expected after Aliens.
Killing Newt and Hicks at the beginning.
Ripley being weirdly sexual without any explanation as to why.
Shitty CGI Alien.
One lone Alien... again.
No explanation as to why Ripley's chestburster takes the entire movie to develop, when in every movie they take, at most, a few hours after the facehugger falls off.
It's a better movie than some on the list, but it's unquestionably the biggest dissapointment after what was expected after Aliens.
Killing Newt and Hicks at the beginning.
Ripley being weirdly sexual without any explanation as to why.
Shitty CGI Alien.
One lone Alien... again.
No explanation as to why Ripley's chestburster takes the entire movie to develop, when in every movie they take, at most, a few hours after the facehugger falls off.
Her chestburster takes long cause its a queen. Same reason why the alien wont attack her
I like only 1 alien tbh
Some bad looking parts with the alien but also some great ones like this
You should check out the assembly cut if you haven't
Character development was virtually nonexistent. A lot of the characters were just fodder for nasty alien kills. That's sort of true to the series from movie 1, I guess, but I still think that there were previous Alien movies that made you care more about the individuals involved- Aliens being the key example.
They couldn't have made it any more obvious that David survived and assumed Walter's identity. I mean, seriously- just too, too obvious. Could have seen that one coming from a seven years' space journey's distance away and it really kind of muted the impact of the ending because it was so predictable.
Also, I thought Walter was legit so I was bit bummed to see him get absolutely murked by David. TWICE. Seriously, if that was an MMA pairing, David would just be a bad matchup for Walter. Cagey vet vs. the young gun = Frankie Edgar vs. Yair-esque destruction.
David's obsession with creation made sense to me for sure. But I thought it was a bit unconvincing that he talk about a perfect organism. How are those Xenomorphs perfect? How are they any better than the entities they emerge out of? If anything they're bigger, dumber, and highly susceptible to getting sucked out of spacecrafts.
[/spoiler[
Aren't sharks considered perfect?
IMO, David's Xenomorph were inferior to the beluga xenos. Those guys started as f'ing pollen and grew to 7' tall in 20 minutes* AND could take a ton of damage.
"YOU SAID YOU WANTED FUCKING ALIENS! I GAVE YOU ALIENS!"
Lets hope that this either convinced him to stop making alien movies or he changes the direction and goes back to a Prometheus style movie for the next one
After the luke warm experience I had watching Prometheus, I lowered my expectations and decided to watch Covenant with a desire to simply have fun seeing Xenomorphs on-screen again.
Seeing this movie in the theater was a generally positive experience and the first hour of the film was well done. I enjoyed the tone, the sets/ wide shots of the ship and planet, the cinematography and of course Michael Fassbender was captivating.
Although I did laugh at the clumsiness/ poor decision making skills of some of the characters, I did enjoy the neomorph infection/ bursting/ attack scene
Sigh... then came the third act which felt like "someone" either didn't know where to go or changed their mind and decided to tack on an ending full of cliches and anachronisms.
It seems like there was a general desire to have a character battle a xenomorph while tethered to a moving ship and they just decided to shove it into the film, even though it didn't fit. It looked to me like Ridley might have been trying to one-up Cameron as that scene is basically an update to the "get away from her you bitch" Ripley vs Queen beat down. Ripley's progression as a character and the rationale behind having that final fight was believable whereas Daniels suddenly going full Rambo just didn't fit at all.
Same with the sequence where Daniels and Tennessee trap the xeno and push it into space- it felt like a call back to the Dallas/ vent scene in Alien except the humans survive. To me, it didn't fit or seem to mesh with what the film had been building up to.
Also, I have so many issues with the David/ Walter swap and reveal. Walter is self healing yet Daniels is helping him staple his cheek??? I mean, it's not just that we could see that swap coming from a mile away, they didn't even execute it well. They had the perfect opportunity to be more subtle and have the reveal take place by showing the nail wound in David's chin. Why was the wound absent? Please!
Final issue- why spend an entire movie building up the tension/ dynamic between Shaw and David only to abandon it and kill her off? I will say that the reveal of her body, showing that David killed and dissected her, was very reminiscent of a particular scene in Blood Meridian. David as a version of Judge Holden works and I can't wait to see what he does in future films.
So, in summary I lowered my expectations and had fun watching this in the theater. I would highly recommend checking out the prologue and "the crossing" on YouTube if you haven't already as these two clips add some much needed dimension to the relationships between the characters. Even with all of my gripes I rated it a 7/10 and perhaps that's just because I'm a huge fan of the franchise and grew up watching Alien and Aliens over and over again.
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