86 minutes in and this is awful and utterly pointless.
Ok, so David was kinda sketchy in the first Prometheus. I mean, totally sketchy if you judge deliberately infecting a human being with some random bioterror for no reason. Sure. But otuside of maybe being a little fixated on the idea of creators/creations (something he seems to get from Weyland in part, right?) he’s not a walking Saw movie or anything. And his actions with the fake scientist he infects could be construed as moving things along in service of Weyland, I guess. But in the sequel he’s pure evil when he’s not making out with himself (which, what. . ). I don’t feel like his arc from Prometheus to Convenant makes sense. Entirely isolated to Covenant, ok sure he’s a murderous robot. But I think this movie just makes Scott’s previous ret-conning even worse. And how many freaking Alien embreyos can he fit in his body?
I can’t decide if I think the characters here were dumber than the ones in Prometheus. I mean they are pretty dumb. “Hey, let’s walk into a random world we know nothing about and take zero precautions against, you know, someone catching something and wiping out the entire crew” is really basically as dumb as “we took all these precations in investigating a strange new world but I’m going to ignore them and start doing things like licking the local fauna” from Prometheus. OTOH, nobody sits here and is completely unperturbed when a randomly bloody person walks by with massive new scar on her womb. Nobody here is outsmarted by the donut ship rolling on it’s side. I don’t know which crew would win in a stupid fight.
The writing and plotting is awful. Things like what’s-her-face locking Carmen Ejogo into the med bay with the alien. “I have to contain the infection!” btw you have blood from that thing coming out of the dude ALL OVER YOU. Or her leaving and coming back repeatedly. And then trying to come in and kill it with a gun even though we already tried to quarantine the room (and failed, but it’s not like she noticed that she was doing the worst quarantine job ever).
I have a hard time imagining being excited at the prospect of a Ridley Scott movie ever again.
Scott has killed the Alien franchise (or double-killed it? triple-killed it?) but in standalone projects there’s no reason why he can’t still deliver. I won’t say I loved The Counselor, but it was… umm… certainly interesting. It really just comes down to whether he ends up with a good script to shoot, IMO.
He’s just become a sort of grizzled seasoned pro who can crank 'em out. Sometimes that’s what you want when the script and casting fall into place. I don’t think he ever geeked out on Alien lore the way fans did, and he’s just sort of rampaging all over that universe because he can. We are all at liberty to make our own headcanon. (Mine contains Alien, Alien: Isolation, Aliens, and the John Hurt bit in Spaceballs)
Man, I am glad I buckled down and cranked through that game. It kind of wore out it’s welcome by the time it was over but it was such a ride. Totally worth a look if you love the movies, especially the first one.
The Martian was really great, imo. Just don’t let him fuck with the Alien franchise anymore, please!
The visuals in Alien Covenant are ok, I guess. The action was mediocre, uneven really. They weren’t on the level of Prometheus (or even close, at least for the visuals). But who cares if the visuals and the action directing are good if the rest of the movie is such shit? It’s like baking a cake and getting the look of the icing on top right but the cake tastes like yeti-ass. You’ve failed on a very fundamental level.
For every “success” like The Martian, it seems like Scott’s “recent” (let’s say this millennium, or Black Hawk Down onward) output is at least matched by a crap movie like A Good Year. Depending on my mood I might argue he’s got more stinkers than good movies in this time.
Batting average is what it is, but in the end the good movies remain and the bad wash away.
I had actually forgotten about the Martian. I’d thought Ridley’s last unambiguously good movie was Kingdom of Heaven, but I liked the Martian quite a bit. Not bad for an old codger.
He just doesn’t give a shit about what fans like about the Alien franchise. I’ve accepted that.
Extended version, please. Still ticked the theatrical release had so much cut from it.
Agreed.
Pretty sure they die eventually, but they can survive for some amount of time in a hard vacuum. If nothing else they’d just freeze solid since most of space is like 3 Kelvin or something insane and they DO breathe as seen rather dramatically by the Alien Queen in Aliens at her reveal, so presumably they’d suffocate after a while.
Yeah.
So I hated this movie outside of the ending scene, which was good stuff, but just signature moment surrounded by shit. Sad. Prometheus was superior in every way. And to call out specially the auto-doc scene which was actually great.
In the end though I don’t give…
I thought the backburster scene was nicely gruesome.