Alien Convenant

Anybody who saw Alien Covenant last year, what did you think of this movie. I really enjoyed this movie and thought that it was pretty good, definitely better than Prometheus.

https://www.movieforums.com/communit...alien+covenant

Thanks didn't see this before!

It was a piece of ****, just like Prometheus.

Prometheus and Aliens are my favorite ones, but I haven't seen Covenant yet.

One of my favourite films of 2017 and probably my third favourite in the series after the first two.

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Covenant isn't in the same ballpark as Alien, Aliens or even Alien 3... but it's way better than Prometheus and far superior to Alien Resurrection.


Saying that though, even Twilight and Transformers are far superior to Alien Resurrection, so it's not saying much.


Covenant captures some of the mystery of the original, and adds some extra depth to the origins of the original Xenomorph.
I'll be interested to see where they go from here to lead into the original movie.

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Resurrection still runs circles around AVP Requiem, though.

So it's Alien > Aliens > Alien 3 > Alien Covenant > Prometheus -> Alien Resurrection > AVP: Requiem.

Amazingly we actually have six reviews (!) of Requiem. I even wrote one of them.

Just realized I forgot Alien vs. Predator, though maybe that's okay because that ended up feeling way more like a Predator film than an Alien film.

Anyway, I'd probably slow it just after or just before Prometheus. I think it's a better overall movie but Prometheus, for all its flaws, does some cool stuff and sure aims a lot higher.

And you seem to have written the most accurate of the bunch, too.

My current ranking:

Alien
Aliens
Covenant/3 (still a bit undecided on this one)
Resurrection
AVP
Prometheus
A slap in the face
AVP Requiem

It's interesting that you put the two together because I was reminded a lot of the desperate feel of Alien 3 when I saw Covenant.

By the way – hadn't we better merge this thread with the main one?

https://www.movieforums.com/communit...alien+covenant

We can always retitle it as Alien: Covenant now that its way after the film's release.

I have a question about Ressurection. What's with the weird look to the movie? You know how when you watch movie trailer's from the 90s and they have this unfinished yellow/brown tint to them... That's how Ressurection looks in it's actual movie form. It looks like a trailer from back then, color wise. Anyone else think so?

It's fairly typical to color tint certain films or scenes to evoke a certain mood. There's some interesting stuff about this on one of the many DVD extras/documentaries of the The Lord of the Rings films.

Watching it now. Had to pause it after a series of supposedly expert characters making long strings of astonishingly bad decisions, in ways that can only come from lazy writing imo (are spacefaring badasses just too cool for follow-up questions?) - culminating in a protracted sequence at ~ 1:18:00 to 1:21:00 where one particularly unbelievable character becomes the poster child for how to insult the audience’s intelligence. I thought I’d seen enough of this kind of cynical writing to numb me to it, but Scott (or whoever) managed to shock me into quiet rage with those 3 minutes. And the recurring pseudoscientific drivel about human origins (at least come up with a more robust fantasy idea than to parrot tired neolithic non-sequiturs) that continues a lame philosophical thread begun in Prometheus, basically cheapens whatever beauty lies in the rest of the mythology... which is otherwise pretty cool and compelling.

As an action movie, it’s decent. The cast is solid. It’s pretty. The kritters are lovely. Just needed to unmoor itself from the unimaginative navel-gazing that most of its predecessors did without (and were better for it).

I mean, neutrinos? Come on...

I diverge from most, in placing Ressurection above 3 - the cast, the overall look, and the kritters (and general avoidance of terrible cgi) I think made for a more satisfying ride. This was also a Ripley that felt wholly different but (to me) 100% compelling. I was in love with Sigourney by the time of Aliens, and I felt she did us proud in Ressurection (despite the camp in that movie).

So... Alien -> Aliens -> Resurrection -> 3 -> (probably) Covenant -> Prometheus

You're going to have to be more specific about what happens in those three minutes. Use spoiler tags if you have to, like so:



Besides, is there even that much "beauty" to the rest of the mythology beyond it being a space monster (which was arguably already watered down in Aliens when it got turned into a "bug hunt")? Having them be the sort-of-creation of an insane android raging against his human creators is far from the worst way to expand the existing mythology (such as it is - is it really that much worse than the human-alien hybrid from Resurrection?).

As for characters making bad decisions, that's hardly new to this franchise. Might as well call John Hurt stupid for sticking his face into an egg.

Thanks for the pointer!
I almost labored to describe the scene - but later it’s obvious you identified it by way of comparison. It’s the face-hugger scene... Well, it’s actually the entire 3 minutes leading up to it, with all the inane implications of what he does and doesn’t do in those long 3 minutes.

I should’ve edited the post but I was lazy. What I meant was the rest of the Prometheus-Covenant mythology... which was probably the most interesting part of Prometheus, for me.

I thought the solipsistic, non-scientific motives of the ‘seeking’ character in each movie, cheapened that mythology. To be a scientist, on a cutting edge science mission, in space, with a crew under your command, and to entertain so fuzzy a notion about human biological exceptionalism... is bizarre. And not in a speculative-fiction-cool kind of way. It’s embarrassing. I’m embarrassed to think any hard-sci-fi writer doesn’t cringe at a non-ironic portrayal of such a character.

The world-building race was fine, the android and his motives are fine... it’s the humans who are sometimes just lame.

It’s in the context... so, there’s a more or less pure unknown in the John Hurt instance. There are several glaring knowns in the Covenant scene that should have yielded a frantic, hostile reaction, and not a lamb being led to slaughter. Chasm of a difference, imo. One is believable, the other is offensive.

I figured it was about Oram and the facehugger. I think that's an instance of where the actions don't make "logical" sense but it makes sense for him. He's the acting captain whose own doubts about himself have manifested in him leading the crew (including his own wife) into a lethal situation on a leap of faith. The fact that they mentioned him being a Christian in a future where Christianity is apparently not as popular as it used to be (to the point where he's actively worried that the other crew will doubt his ability to captain because of it) feels like it feeds into his psychology there, almost as if he's letting himself die out of atonement as well (in addition to wanting to find out what was really going on just so he didn't die knowing why his crew got killed). There's a complex mass of reasons at play here that do ultimately feel like they explain why his character in particular makes the "bad decision" that he does.

I think this does come down to what you personally think is "bizarre" and what makes sense given a character's development. In Prometheus it makes sense for Dr. Shaw to want to find the Engineers and prove how humanity had flourished only to be disappointed by what she found (which also overlaps with notions of faith in a higher power and her relationship with her archaeologist father). It's also worth noting that most of the characters in Covenant aren't scientists (especially not Oram) so that at least makes some sort of sense. I think that push and pull between the scientific and the humanistic has been in the franchise since the beginning (e.g. Ash versus Ripley in the original) and each film in the series has offered its own variation on that for better or worse. In the case of Covenant, I didn't find it bothersome.

I think the movies get that now, which is why Covenant ends the way it does.

You're right, it's in the context, which is why I outlined above how there's more context going on with the instance in Covenant than you'd think.