Here’s a simple breakdown from the end of this side of the “Alien” franchise:
Prometheus is better than I first thought.
Alien: Covenant is worse.
So that balances it out, right?
Negative, Ghost Rider. Prometheus is better by a hair. I’m talking microfiber. Alien: Covenant is worse by a light year.
It was interesting to see my son respond to Prometheus. The scientists act like dopes with accelerating consistency. My objections from the podcast stand. The movie strives to answer questions we did not need the answers to. And having Guy Pearce in it is just silly. Just have a decent old dude play the part instead of making us try to see beyond crappy makeup. The rolling donut never fails to inspire a laugh. And did I mention that the scientists all act like dopes? I love it when one of them just reaches out to an alien life form blithely hoping for the best and saying how beautiful it is, when it looks like a weird slimy thing to me that is reminiscent of a space cobra. Also all the Lawrence of Arabia stuff. It’s so dumb.
But it’s not terrible. The acting is okay. The CG is okay. My son was okay with it. I had lowered the bar considerably, so maybe that helped.
It didn’t help with the next movie.
Alien: Covenant is beyond horrible. Which…in a sort of Alien3 way makes it better. Because it’s fun to watch a bad movie with your kid sometimes.
“She’s really dumb.”
This is about Faris–I admit I couldn’t stop thinking “Bueller’s Day Off” every time Danny McBride says her name–who runs all over the drop ship (which they call something else, a “landing ship” or some such) screaming and running into things and not doing proper quarantine and then after actually locking in her fellow crew member with the other infected crew member, refusing to let her out because it could contaminate the ship, runs in once they are both dead and slips on a ton of blood. Then blows up her own ship.
My son was not wrong. I tried to explain these were standard horror tropes. People acting illogically. Splitting up. The couple having sex later getting executed. As if I really knew those kind of things. But he wasn’t having it.
He did say this at the end of the sex/death scene though…
“Nipple!”
So. Dad of the Year award again goes to me.
I would rate this “R” for “Laughter Throughout” because we were laughing a lot during this movie. I left the room once to get my son a second helping of pasta and he started laughing. “Dad! Come back. I need to show you this!” It was Demian Bichir’s character saying, “And I know wheat.” Which I have to say, is pretty funny.
Do not get me started on the flute/recorder/whatever-that-instrument-is scene is. We were giggling through the whole thing, because it was just an entirely unaware exercise in double entendre. My son constantly says, “That’s what she says.” I have no idea where he got that. And this scene was just shot through with opportunities for that. So much so that we didn’t need to bother to respond.
“Whistle, and I’ll come.”
“Hold it like so. Nice and easy.”
“Blow into the hole gently. Like so.”
“Watch me. I’ll do the fingering.”
“Now put your fingers where mine are.”
And that scene is all that. It’s a weirdly written scene for what it is trying to convey about the story and the characters. It’s oddly structured, and what’s more, doesn’t really pay off, even in the twist. But it gave us a ton of laughs.
It is very strange to watch a movie with your son and have him constantly ask, loudly and with increasing frustration, “Dad! What is going on?”
And have to answer, “I’m telling you yet again…I don’t know!”
When David and Walter kiss themselves, which ends with his synthetic goo snotting out of his nostrils, my son said, “This may be the worst scene I have ever seen. Why is this happening?” He then allowed that the Ripley scene with the gross weird alien hybrid yuck monster might have been worse.
At any rate, it is a horrid movie. None of us can understand the online scores. But we had fun watching it together.
-xtien
“When one note is off, it eventually destroys the whole symphony, David.”