Well, this isn’t particularly surprising.
Never even bothered to see this after sitting through Prometheus.
Fortunately I watched it on a plane and could fast forward through most of it. It was yet again more forced script stupidity.
Please someone greenlight a Colonial Marines movie.
Don’t worry, a movie can be both beautiful and ridiculous. They are not exclusive.
I saw this on my trip to the islands. I can honestly say there are few movies I have enjoyed less than this one. The thing was, it’s not because it was bad or terribly done like say Boat Trip. It has quality, good acting, and proper coloring but wholly unpleasant to watch. I didn’t like it one bit. I liked Alien, loved Aliens… Prometheus was just… blah, the ones in between were meh, and this one… hate.
Oh and like Prometheus, these people are really stupid.
I saw this the other day. I didn’t hate it, but it felt very rote.
This news makes me sad. Not because I expected anything from a third film based on what we got so far, God no. But because it makes me realize just how difficult is to create timeless movies like the first two in the franchise, to the degree that its creator doesn’t seem to know or care about what made them great in the first place.
Who wants to see more David antics, really? What Scott maybe needs is a TV show where he can explore all this uninteresting, tangential crap at leisure.
Yeah I never left Alien or Aliens wanting to dive into into the synthetic’s mind and origins and ambitions. I am not even sure why he went there in the first place. What winds up happening with Elizabeth Shaw just makes me hate the Prometheus even more.
You must really hate Alien 3 then. I’m still pissed they killed Newt.
Yeah wasn’t a fan of that one either, but I can’t say I found it as unpleasant as I found Covenant or as disappointing as Prometheus.
I wouldn’t mind a prequel featuring more Walter antics.
-Tom
I do, kinda? I really don’t like how Prometheus and Covenant fit into the Alien series, but David’s shenanigans are absolutely the best part of these two movies. (If you disregard the violence it does to the unknowable cosmic horror part of Alien, which is admittedly really hard to do, I’d actually put Covenant down as one of the most interesting entries of the series.)
“I’ll do the fingering.”
Soren really puts my feelings into words here.
I found the David stuff really interesting and I liked the character. But one of the awesome things about Alien (and to a lesser extent Aliens) was the concept that humanity had stumbled on something completely, well… alien… and it was far, far out of our league. The prequels strip a lot of that away.
Well seeing the queen in Aliens also kind of showed that too. For the record, I’m not a huge fan of Frankenstein monster kind of movies, and since this went that route I was probably dubbed before they ended that sequel. And to think I thought couldn’t like an Aliens continuation less than I did most the AVP stuff.
Au contraire, I think she doesn’t make them any more knowable and also she’s a total badass. So much so that she can’t be killed with guns, because they aren’t cool enough.
But the one “common link” the aliens have, that we understand, is their hive like nature. This link then gets a nice pat on t he head and is told to shush and go sit down in a corner. The aliens aren’t really any less alien or terrifying because of the Queen and the defined hive structure. IMO, it highlights the rest of their alienness. Which is completely undone if they’re just an engineered bioweapon.
What I mean is in Aliens, we have a character who knows ALL about them, but the queen still adds that out of our league part in addition to the fact that the marines, with all their weapons, didn’t do any better than the space truckers.
Aliens being bioweapons, toys and perfections from an android it just… well it didn’t improve the series for me.
The alien queen does kind of demystify the aliens a bit though, at least compared to what their life cycle was going to be in the first movie (see: deleted scene on the disc about turning Dallas into an egg). I mean, we understand hives and queens. But that’s offset by the great thematic battle between Ripley and the queen, of two mothers fighting to the death to protect their young.
But having the queen never explains how they get there. It’s not indigenous, so you still had that where did these things come from moments, no matter how they worked biologically or with each other… well until now.
No, but that’s not really critical to the story to know where they came from, it works just fine as it is. We always knew they were moved about by the space jockeys, whatever those were, and there wasn’t much else we needed to know. Until we found out how absurdly convoluted that story turned out to be.
Except someone decided it was critical to the series because that’s what the last two movies are all about…
and if that was where the series was going, I wish they had made a different decision about the origin.