Alien: Covenant

[Ghambit]

Prometheus was better than this thing.  
Caveat: obviously there will be a BladeRunner tie in, but

[MediumHigh]

Simply put, this movie gets a solid C. If you can ignore how stupid it is and somehow tolerated Prometheus due to a un-diagnosed head injury. Otherwise its a D, because Prometheus is stupid and about as ignorable as the rest of the alien franchise past Aliens and its sequel doesn't remotely fix that.

[calapine]

Another Red Letter Media video about, this one isn't really a review but a 5 minute long pointing out of idiotic plotpoints.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmwyWerz5KI

[Hoax]

sadly not at all a good movie, probably not even worth a netflix watch idk where these are going so wrong but damn. Prometheus was a better movie even though not much happened and what did happen was kinda ??

Super by far and away the worst movie I've seen of four in 2017, also the only one I didn't catch in imax because it didn't warrant being shown in imax. I worry I might have enjoyed Baywatch despite its flop status more.

[Samwise]

Another Red Letter Media video about, this one isn't really a review but a 5 minute long pointing out of idiotic plotpoints.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmwyWerz5KI

I hope the next movie gives us some backstory on the alien barber species.

[Sir T]

The next movie will be a crossover between Alien and Doctor Who which explains why the Aliens were created thousands of years in the future and yet exist thousands of years in the past. Also the android thought they were great bieng made of  Silicon and acid because boobs.

[jakonovski]

Wow what a shit movie!

[schild]

Wow what a shit movie!

Having just watched all the Alien movies, none of the crews in any of them were ever not idiots. Except maybe Resurrection. They still weren't tipping the scales of "smart" though.

[jakonovski]

Well I suppose, but

[Ironwood]

It was Ash that allowed Kane in. And he was an android acting under orders.  So. You know.

Also, spoilers.

[jakonovski]

Better? I thought of that more as a PSA than a spoiler. 

[schild]

Humans being stupid in the face of an unknown danger is pretty much the trademark of this entire franchise. Ripley was cast as a survivor, not a brilliant aggressor. The only beings in any of the Alien franchise that fought against them with any measure of real intellect was the temple trialists in AVP1.

[jakonovski]

[schild]

Well, if you were faced with a xenomorph on a routine exploration mission and the android didn't give you the deets, how smart would you be?

Edit: This is not an argument FOR the Alien movies. Stupid researchers and soldiers are part of why I think the movies aged so fucking badly.

[jakonovski]

[Ironwood]

Better? I thought of that more as a PSA than a spoiler. 

Lol.  No, I meant I was giving away spoilers about Ash.  But I didn't give a fuck.   

[schild]

Sure there is. Xenomorphs are everywhere in the universe and only the stupidest among us will find them. That's the routine. It's actually a very short script, they wrote it in perl.

[01101010]

It was Ash that allowed Kane in. And he was an android acting under orders.  So. You know.

Also, spoilers.

Very true, but I still take issue with the god damn captain barking at Ripley to let them in. Dallas really should have had a handle on it. Then again, they were miners and he was probably more the foreman than an actual ship captain.

[Ironwood]

Also, his friend had a fucking alien on his face.  That affects ya somewhat.

[Sir T]

Ya, I don't have a problem with them bringing him in for medical, what they should have done was slap him in quarantine and Cryosleep for the journey home to let actual doctors deal with whatever the fuck happened to him. That would have sat fin with Ash's programming so I don't know why he didn't suggest it. Thats the only part - Ash not suggesting Freezing him - that never sat right with me in the first film. Its perfectly logical and gets the Alien back to the Company.

[Ironwood]

No, that does make sense.  There would be little reward in bringing it back like that only to find out the life-cycle is that the facehugger just melts into goo after five minutes with no actual benefit.

He wanted to see what would happen.

A theme carried over to that FuckAwful film Prometheus with Magnetos actions.

[Threash]

Humans being stupid in the face of an unknown danger is pretty much the trademark of this entire franchise. Ripley was cast as a survivor, not a brilliant aggressor. The only beings in any of the Alien franchise that fought against them with any measure of real intellect was the temple trialists in AVP1.

There is a huge difference between a bunch of space truckers completely out of their element and a group specifically chosen to colonize a planet that wouldn't survive a camping trip.  This people were stupid with regards to thing that were not even alien related and the whole plot revolved entirely around that stupidity.

[HaemishM]

I point you back to the goddamn geologist in Prometheus who brought along a map bot then promptly got fucking lost in the very area his map bot had already mapped. Also was doing recreational drugs while in the belly of an alien cave system.

Acting like an utter numpty in spite of all prior established expertise seems like the only thing besides the xenomorph that all the Alien movies have in common.

[Threash]

Prometheus was just as bad, but once again i argue that their stupidity is different from prior movies.  You shouldn't expect any better from the space truckers from Alien or the prisoners from Aliens 3, and even the soldiers from Aliens were completely unprepared for what they were facing and sabotaged from the beggining.  The idiots in Prometheus and Covenant are idiots about things they should be experts on, it's not idiocy born out of facing the unexpected but out of simply being utterly incompetent at basic shit before they even run into a single xenomorph.  The casts of earlier movies failed at dealing with an utterly overwhelming force, the cast of Prometheus and Covenant failed at being scientists and colonists from step 1.

[Sir T]

Even the prisoners from £ actually formulated a plan. it was an insane plan that involved nearly all of them getting killed to bait the monster, but it was a plan that you could see violent nutcases coming up with based on the situation. I always thought Alien 3 had a really good movie in there fighting desperately to get out...

Well trained scientists and professionals going to pieces and screaming all over the place? Um, no.

[Ironwood]

I liked Alien 3.

[Velorath]

I liked Alien 3.

The Assembly Cut is an improvement and there's such a talented cast that it's hard not to get at least some enjoyment out of it.

[schild]

I liked Alien 3.

The Assembly Cut is an improvement and there's such a talented cast that it's hard not to get at least some enjoyment out of it.

Alien 3 was 100% made watchable by the cast. Otherwise it was an abortion.

This is the only reason I find Cabin in the Woods rewatchable despite absolutely despising basically everything Joss Whedon has ever touched (I realize Alien 3 is not Whedon, Resurrection is, but this is a point about casts and that's the first thing that popped in my head).

[TheWalrus]

Fuck you. Cabin in the Woods is goddamned brilliant. You fuck off.

[Megrim]

Ya, I don't have a problem with them bringing him in for medical, what they should have done was slap him in quarantine and Cryosleep for the journey home to let actual doctors deal with whatever the fuck happened to him. That would have sat fin with Ash's programming so I don't know why he didn't suggest it. Thats the only part - Ash not suggesting Freezing him - that never sat right with me in the first film. Its perfectly logical and gets the Alien back to the Company.

Parker suggests it.

[calapine]

I point you back to the goddamn geologist in Prometheus who brought along a map bot then promptly got fucking lost in the very area his map bot had already mapped. Also was doing recreational drugs while in the belly of an alien cave system.

Acting like an utter numpty in spite of all prior established expertise seems like the only thing besides the xenomorph that all the Alien movies have in common.

The crew in Alien (1) acted pretty decent if you consider they are were just space truckers. You have to consider that in RL you do not walk around with the same mindset as someone consuming a Horror / Zombie movie.

[satael]

Watched this last night and the main thing I came away with was that this could have been ok for a mid-budget scifi horror if it hadn't been part of the Alien franchise (and the story could have actually had some surprises then).

[Velorath]

This movie is a train wreck of answering questions nobody really cared enough to ask with answers that don't really gel with things that were shown just one movie ago, characters doing the dumbest possible shit they could be doing at any given time, and characterization that is so thin that multiple times they have to try to give the deaths some weight simply by making the deceased the spouse of a main character. Oh, and there's a few minutes of Alien action at the end which is kinda cool if you never watched the trailers.

[schild]

I thought it was fine. Four more movies and he'll make an actual Alien. I feel like we're punishing it for being exposition when he was like "these first movies are exposition." But then, my favorite part of all the Alien movies is the posters, soooooooooo. By that metric it's the best one. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Velorath]

It's exposition that's unneeded though. Explaining that the Aliens didn't naturally evolve and instead came from some black goo biological weapon another alien race had which was then further manipulated by an Android does nothing to make any of the original movies better. It just further solidifies that prequels in general are bullshit because if any of this information were vital it would have been in the original movie.