Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Quick Reviews: Alien Covenant

After the confusing mess that was Prometheus, my hopes for this one weren't high.  Was I wrong or right?
Some 40 years before Alien, the Covenant is trying to find a new home for humanity.

My issue- why they have to go is never explained.  We never see Earth in this Franchise, so...what happened?
A freak accident damages the Ship (and kills James Franco!), so when they find a habitable Planet nearby, they decide to check it out.
Bad stuff happens as little Xenomorphs kill some of the people, while others are infected and killed.
The survivors run into David from Prometheus.  If you want to know how, you have to watch a random Video Fox put online before the Film was released.  That's...dumb.
He explains that this is the Home Planet of the Engineers and that the ship 'accidentally' released a bio-weapon that killed them all.

So if you were waiting for years to see the pay-off to David and Shaw confront the Engineers, they just removed the pay-off entirely.  Nice.
At this point, the Film alternates between weird monologues between the 2 Fassbenders and some mild Action.

Who will live?  Who will die?  To find out, watch the Film.
This should be better.  While I didn't love Prometheus, the Ending was interesting enough to see followed-through on.  Unfortunately, the only follow-through you get is a shot of Guy Pearce without old-age make-up on (Scenes like this were cut from that Film).  Instead of that, we get another generic rehash of the set-up to Alien (group dynamic) that starts out interesting, but quickly devolves into two Fassbenders playing the flute.  There really is a lot of flute.  The whole thing is just way too in love with its own Mythos, which is funny considering that this is all new, made-up stuff.  Alien was about a mysterious creature picking people off.  Now by the 6th Film, they are creature created by a combination of Space Engineers and a decade of experimentation by an evil, humanity-hating Android.  Did we need this?  Do we need another Film to expand this Story any more?  The bottom line- the Film is just not interesting.  There's no way that this should be possible, but it is.  Take us away, Film Promotion better than the Film...
A bit of a boring mess.  It can't quite agree what kind of Film it wants to be, which hurts everything.

1 comment:

  1. I thought both films were pretty good myself but they seem to panned all over by people who see them themselves as "too clever" to fall for it. Both well made and more than decent enough compared to what else is available in the horror/sci-fi genre.

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