Alien: Covenenant *spoilers inside*

LazyLion said:
Finally watched it last night...

Visually it was pretty good... but that's where the enjoyment ends...

1) The whole thing about receiving a transmission and going to investigate is so tired now. It was in the first Aliens movie, recently it was in The Expanse, and it's been used in a thousand other movies.
2) Why would they risk 2000 colonists and an expensive ship to deviate from their course to an unknown planet. Just the first in a long line of stupid, stupid decisions.
3) Why would they take so many people down on the shuttle?
4) Why would they go out without hazmat suits?
5) Why would they leave people behind on an unknown planet?
6) Why would those people that they left behind then separate as well?
7) Why wouldn’t they immediately implement quarantine at the first sign of trouble?
8) Why would they break quarantine by opening the door?
9) etc... etc.. You get the idea.

It's the same reason why I stopped watching The Walking Dead - the writers just make the characters infinitely stupid and they always choose the worst possible decision in every circumstance.
It's an insult to your viewers.
And there are a hundred other problems with this story...

1) Why did David crash the ship after deploying the virus?
2) How did David test his creations for ten years on only one dead woman?
3) Why is the egg deployment method better than the airborne infection method?

Seriously... can you write a story to be any more dumb?
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I haven't watched the movie, but I just finished reading the book. It's also dumb, but might explain more things.

2) Why would they risk 2000 colonists and an expensive ship to deviate from their course to an unknown planet. Just the first in a long line of stupid, stupid decisions.
-> The original planet was still 7 jumps and very far away, whereas the new planet was only 1 jump away, and they wouldn't have to enter cryosleep again. The scan of the original planet from earth didn't tell much apart from it being in the goldilocks zone, having water/continents etc, so they already knew "more" about the new/closer planet from their own scans. It was potentially already a better planet.

3) Why would they take so many people down on the shuttle?
Because people wanted to go down. Hey, new planet, we want to check it out. Scans made it seem safe, so why not? My issue is 3b, why does the ship only have one lander? That seems cheap for such an expensive mission (The ship they use later is described as a cargo lifter, which is also a weird thing to have, since they were never meant to lift resources back into space).

4) Why would they go out without hazmat suits?
According to human tech their scans are 100% complete/safe and can detect all organisms etc. They scanned the planet and found nothing, so it made sense. I have a bigger issue with them not panicking because there's no animal life when there probably should have been, based on the environment etc.

5-6) In the book the woman + Ledward stop to collect samples, from their perspective it was safe; again they spotted no life for several hours. After that Ledward becomes infected outside halfway to the signal and the Sergeant a bit later in the alien ship. Ledward is being dragged back to the lander where only Faris was left working on repairs (I'd have left her a guard at least). When Ledward gives birth to the 1st alien Faris locks the other woman inside with him while she goes for a weapon. She tries to save the woman, loses the weapon but gets out. By the time she got a 2nd weapon the alien broke out of containment and she then accidentally takes out the lander while using it, stranding the big group who's just getting back (and then births the 2nd alien).

After that I can't really answer your other questions, but I also have issues with some other things
a) Most of them don't even seriously trust their own synth Walter, so why are they trusting David? (With everything he tells them, or even that the alien building is safe)
b) Once in the alien building they basically just split up every time someone goes missing or they feel bored
c) The command crew just basically ignores all safety protocols and goes after 1-6 people, putting the 2000 colonists at risk. Even worse, once they re-establish communications the ground crew is shouting for extraction too
d) David attacks Walter and puts him into sleep mode by punching him in the throat. In Walter's line of bots this "feature" has been upgraded so unauthorised shutdowns no longer work...except it does and it takes the synth 15m to reboot? Why not just totally disable the shutdown until authorisation is given? Oh no wait, that won't allow them to draw the story out
e) After they make it out no one ever questions if it was Walter who came back

The whole thing (the book being a movie adaptation) reads like a clumsy movie script where they want certain things to happen and then force the story in that direction (hey we need a jump scare at time X, better arrange for something to happen).
 
StrontiumDog said:
Saw it tonight, some parts were cool, the crew members kinda stupid (like why would you go walking around an unexplored planet without any worry to being exposed to some kind of alien pathogen or bio-hazard?), l....
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humans are stupid...just look around you
 
Granted I thought Prometheus was pretty meh as well but the supposed "tie ins" from that movie simply didn't fit with this one.

All the references they made I honestly don't ever remember happening in that movie and even reading the wiki after the fact I'm convinced most of it they simply conjured up inside Covenant.

What confused me more is that Prometheus which happened in the past is more hitech than Covenant and yet both are more hitech than the Alien movies that happen in the future which almost have an industrial vibe in space.

The GoPro product placement was also just ridiculous.

And why do people who have space travel decide to walk a foreign planet by hiking it? Where are the vehicles? For that matter where are the exo-skeletons?

Don't even get me started on the robot that even claim right there in the movie that they are much more advanced now...yet THAT predictably happens regardless.

The logic...there is none.
 
Zoopy said:
Will be interesting to hear what other people think of it once you've seen it, but for me it was very meh.

I really wish they would have just ditched the Promotheus stuff entirely and focused on the xenomorphs, The tie-in to Promotheus just makes for boring watching and hampers that which made the Alien movies so good in the first place.
Also, the fact that they simply refuse to stay faithful to the xenomorph lore. Xenomorphs being born fully formed, blegh. What was wrong with the previous snake-like baby xenomorphs? The xenos overall were more in line with AvP xenos than the one in Alien or Aliens, which sucks.

The new 'back'-bursting aliens were pretty cool though.
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i watched the original Alien and then Se and 3, then stopped.
these are prequels from what im told, i still dont understand how Prometheus to this fit in, i am actually scared the watch this Covenant movie in case i get bored.
I felt the same with Ender's Game, just didnt do it for me.
I am better off watching Die Hard which is a millions times better.
 
I used to be a big fan of Ridley Scott (if you like good photography, the Dualists must be one of the best examples of that art I've seen). In addition, Alien and Aliens are probably on my top ten favourite movie list.

But Prometheus was a big disappointment, mostly due to the fact that I was really looking forward to it and then had to try make sense of a plot that seemed to have been written by a dysfunctional committee who gave up, or got fired half way - it simply didn't make much sense at all, and felt half finished.

So it was with mixed feelings that I took out Alien Covenant last night.

I was hoping that Ridley Scott would redeem himself - but sadly, it was very weak.

I don't understand how someone who brought us the original Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator etc can make two really bad movies on the subject that originally launched his career as a major director. The original Alien was brilliant, well thought out, and very well executed. Understated but really tense, with great style, integrity and depth etc. He must still have some passion and pride in the franchise/story surely?

It seems not.

I really don't understand it.

The original heroine Ripley was completely believable as a tough, competent, resourceful, determined character. You could believe that she would be in charge of an intergallactic refinery vessel, and when driven to it, take on and kill an alien monster.

However the characters in this movie, apart from the robot David, all seem to be naive, inexperienced, overly emotional (they burst into tears frequently), and are basically useless. The words Millennial and cardboard cut out kept coming to mind. I grew to despise them all pretty quickly.

The main character is a cherubic baby version of Ripely, who goes through the motions of doing what Ripley would do, but she's not convincing IMO.

In fact the whole movie seems to be almost a story-board representation, instead of the actual movie. A one dimensional visual representation of the story, without much depth.

In comparison to Ripley Scott's great movies where the characters drove the story. eg In Blade Runner, Harrison Ford was someone who had all sorts of depths and facets. Each of the replicants where interesting characters. When the main replicant finally expired it was quite moving. When Maximus finally died in Gladiator it was also moving. Those were real stories.

I didn't give a hoot when anyone died in this movie.

So while it didn't have the fractured illogical plot problems of Prometheus, it still felt unfinished and half done to me, in much the same way. In fact it felt just plain lazy. Too many cliches where bits of the older movies where just rehashed, eg:

"Let's go investigate a strange signal from a nearby unknown planet"

"Hunt the alien through the corridors of the ship by opening and closing hatches", which was done in the first movie.

The "use of heavy industrial equipment to fight the alien" which was done in the second movie

"Some one gets locked into the medical centre with a small alien thing" from the second movie

The "lets hand out weapons to the team" scene from the second movie - this scene was actually quite jarring because in the second movie the Marines are getting ready for battle, so gung-ho handing out of automatic weapons from the locker makes sense. But in this movie we have a bunch of angst ridden Millennial type civilians who are all supposedly caring couples, who suddenly get in line and hand out weapons to each other, when no known threat yet exists. And as it turns out, they are pretty useless at using those weapons.

The last irritating thing was they arrive on an unknown planet on which an advanced human/oid civilisation is in evidence which could have been quite interesting (I certainly wanted to know more about them - the buildings and statues are all quite impressive and intriguing), but that doesn't seem to interest the characters in the slightest, they take it all completely for granted and just blunder along without much thought or comment - just cardboard cut outs moving from scene to scene.

So if you haven't seen it yet, I'm afraid I wouldn't bother. Ridley Scott really should be able to do much better.
 
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Damn, was disappointing.
I felt like turning off and watching something else, even removed the 15gb download file from the htpc, I felt like I knew the ending before it even happened.

Logan and Guardians of the galaxy 2 are my next watch list, please don't disappoint.
 
Hemps said:
Damn, was disappointing.
I felt like turning off and watching something else, even removed the 15gb download file from the htpc, I felt like I knew the ending before it even happened.

Logan and Guardians of the galaxy 2 are my next watch list, please don't disappoint.
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Both of those are better fortunately. Logan was actually good IMO...
 
Did not enjoy it at all. I endured the full show but in the end I felt it seems like a half baked interlude to the next sequel in future. The initial few minutes were the best part.
 
animal531 said:
I haven't watched the movie, but I just finished reading the book. It's also dumb, but might explain more things.

2) Why would they risk 2000 colonists and an expensive ship to deviate from their course to an unknown planet. Just the first in a long line of stupid, stupid decisions.
-> The original planet was still 7 jumps and very far away, whereas the new planet was only 1 jump away, and they wouldn't have to enter cryosleep again. The scan of the original planet from earth didn't tell much apart from it being in the goldilocks zone, having water/continents etc, so they already knew "more" about the new/closer planet from their own scans. It was potentially already a better planet.

3) Why would they take so many people down on the shuttle?
Because people wanted to go down. Hey, new planet, we want to check it out. Scans made it seem safe, so why not? My issue is 3b, why does the ship only have one lander? That seems cheap for such an expensive mission (The ship they use later is described as a cargo lifter, which is also a weird thing to have, since they were never meant to lift resources back into space).

4) Why would they go out without hazmat suits?
According to human tech their scans are 100% complete/safe and can detect all organisms etc. They scanned the planet and found nothing, so it made sense. I have a bigger issue with them not panicking because there's no animal life when there probably should have been, based on the environment etc.

5-6) In the book the woman + Ledward stop to collect samples, from their perspective it was safe; again they spotted no life for several hours. After that Ledward becomes infected outside halfway to the signal and the Sergeant a bit later in the alien ship. Ledward is being dragged back to the lander where only Faris was left working on repairs (I'd have left her a guard at least). When Ledward gives birth to the 1st alien Faris locks the other woman inside with him while she goes for a weapon. She tries to save the woman, loses the weapon but gets out. By the time she got a 2nd weapon the alien broke out of containment and she then accidentally takes out the lander while using it, stranding the big group who's just getting back (and then births the 2nd alien).

After that I can't really answer your other questions, but I also have issues with some other things
a) Most of them don't even seriously trust their own synth Walter, so why are they trusting David? (With everything he tells them, or even that the alien building is safe)
b) Once in the alien building they basically just split up every time someone goes missing or they feel bored
c) The command crew just basically ignores all safety protocols and goes after 1-6 people, putting the 2000 colonists at risk. Even worse, once they re-establish communications the ground crew is shouting for extraction too
d) David attacks Walter and puts him into sleep mode by punching him in the throat. In Walter's line of bots this "feature" has been upgraded so unauthorised shutdowns no longer work...except it does and it takes the synth 15m to reboot? Why not just totally disable the shutdown until authorisation is given? Oh no wait, that won't allow them to draw the story out
e) After they make it out no one ever questions if it was Walter who came back

The whole thing (the book being a movie adaptation) reads like a clumsy movie script where they want certain things to happen and then force the story in that direction (hey we need a jump scare at time X, better arrange for something to happen).
Click to expand...

I just finished watching this movie and came here to say almost exactly everything you have stated. Although I now see you just read the book alone. Anyway, points 1-4 are pertinent. Although, I don't recall a scan in the movie declaring them not needing suits.

The movie is quite gripping and atmospheric, but the inane disregard for the colonists and embryos survival, as well as ignoring simple biological (or other) contamination issues ruined the movie for me.
 
Splinter said:
I just finished watching this movie and came here to say almost exactly everything you have stated. Although I now see you just read the book alone. Anyway, points 1-4 are pertinent. Although, I don't recall a scan in the movie declaring them not needing suits.

The movie is quite gripping and atmospheric, but the inane disregard for the colonists and embryos survival, as well as ignoring simple biological (or other) contamination issues ruined the movie for me.
Click to expand...

I eventually watched the movie and I was just as disappointed as everyone else.
The book at least tried to cover a section here and there with some logic, but it couldn't fix up the stupid script (I believe it was adapted into book form from the script).

Too many movies coming out these days using the same lazy writing. You'd hope the director would be able to prod it into a semblance of something, but I guess Ridley just phoned this one in.
 
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