For people who thought Prometheus made too much damned sense.
spoilers
Alien was a great horror movie. Aliens was a great action movie. The next three movies just sucked. Alien Covenant follows proudly in the tradition of Alien 3, Alien Resurrection, and Prometheus.
It’s not so much that Alien Covenant sucked, as it just tells the same boring story as Prometheus. A group of Red Shirts land on a planet and die stupid and meaningless deaths. Oh yeah, and David is back and he’s still a bad guy.
The setup is a colony ship, the Covenant, meets with an unfortunate event. An accident that leaves them near a previously undiscovered planet. So, was it an accident? Or did something, David or an Engineer?, disable the ship on purpose? A random event triggering the events that follow would be the height of lazy story telling. But then, the whole story is one contrived event after another.
The bulk of the story involves David and his fellow Synthetic Walter playing bad robot and good robot. So, in short, Alien Covenant is either a long episode of Star Trek The Next Generation. Or maybe even the Star Trek Nemesis, one of the worst of the Star Trek films, and that’s no mean feat. So, yeah, Alien Covenant pretty much sucked storywise.
On the other hand, the special effects were pretty damned amazing, just as they were in Prometheus. Which only serves to make you wish they had spent a bit of that money they wasted on solar sails and magnetic storms on a better screenplay.
One of the things we love about sequels is seeing old faces, watching familiar scenes, and having the general feeling of being back home. For uber nerds who have been watching Alien movies for the part forty years or so, Alien Covenant is a bit of a shock. We all know what a Xenophorm looks like. We know what it’s life cycle is and what the different phases of that life cycle look like. So…why the hell did the chest burster look like a miniature adult Xenophorm? Also, why did spores create other forms of the monster we have never seen before? And so on and so forth. This whole film is one one long…Wait? What?
But that isn’t right either. Wait, what implies that someone will care what is happening in this snooze feast. Alien Covenant wasn’t good. But it wasn’t as disappointing as the last one. I kind of knew what to expect going in to this one.
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