Frans
09-25-17, 04:04 PM
I didn't get the opportunity to view Alien Covenant upon release here in South Africa and only made the effort to tick it off my list yesterday. Admittedly, a partial reason for this is because of the blatantly negative reviews that the film raked in.
I started watching it and was immediately confused as to why this film received such overtly negative reviews. After having finished it, I did understand why. It still frustrated me a lot though and this is what I'm about to address in this piece.
Not only did I like it, I loved aspects of this tremendously. Other parts of it were admittedly dull and shallow. My understanding of this is because our both brilliant and terrible director Ridley Scott probably attempted to cater for single dimensional fanboys who just care to see Giger's perfect organism rip a space crew up one by one, as well as the more self-proclaimed philosophers who know of Ozymandias and what it would mean if we found out that there's no meaning to be found through the search of a celestial creator, or that ruin is the only result of building at the cost of the other.
I'm a big fan of the guys at Screen Junkies' Honest Trailers. They often help me to create a more developed opinion of a film. They openly destroyed the integrity of the film based on – as they put it themselves – multiple forgettable single dimensional characters, a really shallow plot, flat acting as well as fairly undeveloped problem solving solutions. They used the fact that two people slip in the same puddle of blood twice as a means of disarming them within a very short time and the thirty minutes of flute playing classes as examples of how badly the story is written. It bothered me too. A director with this reputation should come up with more creative ways to complicate the characters' developments. I just found it laughable that a large part of what they complained about is the action action action that they wanted – and as they complain, they use scenes from the film in which they praise the kind of action they long for in such a genre.
I also have criticisms. Oh my goodness, there are so many plot holes, it's crazy. Is it unforgivable? Not even close! Context is vital when watching film. 1970's Alien was a friggin amazing hit and people lapped it up immediately. Honestly, how remarkable was the acting from the crew of the Nostromo really? How lame are the lines in the first Star Wars Trilogy? If we're honest, the acting was sometimes beyond dull and the characters barely stayed within character. We simply don't care, because the purposes of the movies were met. Holes? Sure. Do we love them? Absolutely!
Then why is Covenant a critical flop? In recent years, both Lucas and Spielberg predicted the implosion of the film industry, because films are required and forced to grow bigger and louder, Think Death Star Vs Starkiller Base. Oooh – bigger and better; this one sucks suns dry! Ultimately people will realize that the movies just don't pack the same punch anymore, and the treason is with the sacrifice of narrative and character development in order to fulfill the masses' drugged-like lust for the epic-kick. Truthfully, Covenant had the elements of trying to feed this lust, with enough risk taking girth to actually still be something more than a safe bet franchise sequel. The reason why Scott is a brilliant director is because he didn't forget the fundamentals of great filmmaking, while most modern'-day filmmakers play it safe and push out another predictable sequel, telling the same story with a bigger boom. The cost of this is also visible in the array of flops he's directed. It's the cost he pays to be able to pull original stories off and make successes of them.
The plot holes? What about what's done right? What is the theme of Promethius one and two? It's the quest of finding our origin and through that determine our purpose as humans. Covenant opens with a creation that happened – very much like a Beckett or a Frankl existence piece. We have forgotten to ask these questions that was triggered by the horrors of the World Wars, but these horrors still happen every day. In an otherwise blank room, we view the world through a letterbox ratio window with nature on the outside and human creation on the inside; Art, music, engineering and poetry. This theme carries though the film, despite the shallow majority of characters, which in my opinion serve their purpose well. Scott didn't waste time on them and focused on the theme.
He gave us the thought provoking analogies of babel – destruction completed though our creations – equipped with our own paranoid-developed death machines as a reminder of the current destruction we cause on each other daily. He gave us amazing landscapes, an epic score the likes of few modern pieces, the original xenomorph and new weird plantbased white killers.
Remember what film is meant to be. Maybe we can save the industry from itself.
I started watching it and was immediately confused as to why this film received such overtly negative reviews. After having finished it, I did understand why. It still frustrated me a lot though and this is what I'm about to address in this piece.
Not only did I like it, I loved aspects of this tremendously. Other parts of it were admittedly dull and shallow. My understanding of this is because our both brilliant and terrible director Ridley Scott probably attempted to cater for single dimensional fanboys who just care to see Giger's perfect organism rip a space crew up one by one, as well as the more self-proclaimed philosophers who know of Ozymandias and what it would mean if we found out that there's no meaning to be found through the search of a celestial creator, or that ruin is the only result of building at the cost of the other.
I'm a big fan of the guys at Screen Junkies' Honest Trailers. They often help me to create a more developed opinion of a film. They openly destroyed the integrity of the film based on – as they put it themselves – multiple forgettable single dimensional characters, a really shallow plot, flat acting as well as fairly undeveloped problem solving solutions. They used the fact that two people slip in the same puddle of blood twice as a means of disarming them within a very short time and the thirty minutes of flute playing classes as examples of how badly the story is written. It bothered me too. A director with this reputation should come up with more creative ways to complicate the characters' developments. I just found it laughable that a large part of what they complained about is the action action action that they wanted – and as they complain, they use scenes from the film in which they praise the kind of action they long for in such a genre.
I also have criticisms. Oh my goodness, there are so many plot holes, it's crazy. Is it unforgivable? Not even close! Context is vital when watching film. 1970's Alien was a friggin amazing hit and people lapped it up immediately. Honestly, how remarkable was the acting from the crew of the Nostromo really? How lame are the lines in the first Star Wars Trilogy? If we're honest, the acting was sometimes beyond dull and the characters barely stayed within character. We simply don't care, because the purposes of the movies were met. Holes? Sure. Do we love them? Absolutely!
Then why is Covenant a critical flop? In recent years, both Lucas and Spielberg predicted the implosion of the film industry, because films are required and forced to grow bigger and louder, Think Death Star Vs Starkiller Base. Oooh – bigger and better; this one sucks suns dry! Ultimately people will realize that the movies just don't pack the same punch anymore, and the treason is with the sacrifice of narrative and character development in order to fulfill the masses' drugged-like lust for the epic-kick. Truthfully, Covenant had the elements of trying to feed this lust, with enough risk taking girth to actually still be something more than a safe bet franchise sequel. The reason why Scott is a brilliant director is because he didn't forget the fundamentals of great filmmaking, while most modern'-day filmmakers play it safe and push out another predictable sequel, telling the same story with a bigger boom. The cost of this is also visible in the array of flops he's directed. It's the cost he pays to be able to pull original stories off and make successes of them.
The plot holes? What about what's done right? What is the theme of Promethius one and two? It's the quest of finding our origin and through that determine our purpose as humans. Covenant opens with a creation that happened – very much like a Beckett or a Frankl existence piece. We have forgotten to ask these questions that was triggered by the horrors of the World Wars, but these horrors still happen every day. In an otherwise blank room, we view the world through a letterbox ratio window with nature on the outside and human creation on the inside; Art, music, engineering and poetry. This theme carries though the film, despite the shallow majority of characters, which in my opinion serve their purpose well. Scott didn't waste time on them and focused on the theme.
He gave us the thought provoking analogies of babel – destruction completed though our creations – equipped with our own paranoid-developed death machines as a reminder of the current destruction we cause on each other daily. He gave us amazing landscapes, an epic score the likes of few modern pieces, the original xenomorph and new weird plantbased white killers.
Remember what film is meant to be. Maybe we can save the industry from itself.