Alien Covenant

[Marco]

Nothing's been removed here, Paul....

Marco.

[rigger67]

Nothing's been removed here, Paul....

Marco.

Weird.

I thought I'd posted a review I'd written for my column in a free-paper down here

I must be going nuts

Here it is anyway - SPOILER-FREE


ALIEN COVENANT
Sixth movie in the popular sci-fi horror series which picks up the story eleven years after the events in Prometheus. Directed by Ridley Scott and starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston and Billy Crudup.

Although Captain Scott himself is back at the helm, the first hour of this 122min sci-fi adventure really doesn't feel like an Alien movie at all. There's lots of scene setting (catching up from Prometheus), early character development (crew banter), drama (boom!) and so on, but it still doesn't feel creepy enough. Or scary. Or violent. Or even tense .. and what you really want from an Alien film is the ultimate in nail-biting, edge of the seat, looking through your fingers, pant-wettingly horrifying tension : it's why we love them.
Obviously, the original and the arguably superior sequel, Aliens, are masterpieces of the sci-fi-horror genre. Films three and four are also eminently watchable but for different reasons. They're more like ensemble movies that moved away from the traditional stand-off between Sigourney Weaver's Ripley and the monsters themselves. Charles Dance and Winona Ryder respectively make for two very interesting characters while Brian Glover makes anything he's in watchable for me and I really loved the prison setting for Alien3.

Prometheus dialled it all back, focusing instead on a lone female heroine battling one big, angry xenomorph : back to basics if you like. I love that movie. If you watch the original Alien immediately afterwards everything just clicks into place : that massive chair in the spaceship, all the unanswered questions .. everything just feels even better than it did first time round.
Which brings us to the question of why Covenant was made in the first place.
Well, putting aside the obvious financial element, it appears Ridley Scott still has some answers he wants to present to the world even if we don't yet know what the questions are.
To me, the series works as it stood before the movie was released and having sat through it my overwhelming response was that it was all a bit uneccessary. I've spoken to a few other people who've seen it and their views were mixed : some loved it, thinking it added greater detail to the creatures themselves, while others thought it was all a bit pointless and hoped there weren't any more. Well, Mr Scott has revealed already that there will be at least one, probably two and possibly four more films in the series, with the sequel to Covenant due to be released in early 2019. He's not hanging about, is he ?

The story itself focuses mainly on the synthetic android character, Walter, played absolutely dead straight by Michael Fassbender. Somewhat androgynous in appearance, Fassbender has nailed this role in both Prometheus and Covenant and here he actually plays both synths in the same movie. Don't worry - it's easy enough to tell them apart what with one having an American accent and the other sounding like a 1950s BBC newsreader, plus there's some messing about with hairstyles which also helps. It's not much of a spoiler to reveal that one of the synths has been fiddling with the evolution of the alien xenomorphs in a way not dissimilar to Dr Frankenstein himself. There's lots of lab scenes, anatomical drawings, bits of bodies in jars, that kind of thing ..
The crew of the Covenant are glad to find him and discover what happened to the Prometheus, which had disappeared a decade prior to their own mission launch.

.. and that's where we have to leave it for the plot, I'm afraid.
As usual with a horror movie, to say anything more would give the game away.
The second hour is a lot better than the first and the movie does finally begin to feel like a proper Alien picture should, though the ending is signposted way before it arrives, which again makes me wonder if everything's been dumbed down deliberately.
Generally, sci-fi and horror fans are switched on, passionate movie buffs who know their stuff, both about film-making as a whole and more specifically the canon of any given series, so what with that rather flat first hour feeling like sixty minutes of "Previously on Alien .." and then the obvious finale I was very disappointed.
I'd still recommend the film, don't get me wrong - it's way better than most of the pap on offer these days - but it could and indeed should've been much more than it was.

[Spectral Morn]

Saw it today. I hate movies that pick all other previous ones up and dump them in the bin, this film does that. It was fine as far as it goes, but only if the others didn't exist, which they do. So it was annoyingly frustrating.

[narabdela]

Saw it today. I hate movies that pick all other previous ones up and dump them in the bin.

Does it? I've seen all the others, at least twice, and I don't have a problem.

[Spectral Morn]

Does it? I've seen all the others, at least twice, and I don't have a problem.

Yes I feel it does, and I am not alone. First movie Space Jokey was logically an Engineer, but how can it have been as in the new film the Engineers have been wiped out before what we see in Alien + if David is the progenitor, then that ship could not have fully developed aliens as we know them to be on board, because the Space Jokey ship was old and abandoned thus probably pre dating the incidents in the new film, and if doesn't pre-date them, then where did that Engineer come from and how did he/they have fully developed aliens as we know them on board ?

For the new film to work, all the others must be forgotten about.

I dislike reboots.

The Alien vs Predator + Requiem film's + Predator 2 can't have happened now - new Covenant film doesn't support them.