Yeah… so this movie was not very good. It felt more like a vehicle for the albeit talented Michael Fassbender to showcase his acting chops rather than being a good Alien film. The sad part is, I gave Ridley Scott huge passes with Prometheus because I chocked it up to him being rusty and respected what he was trying to accomplish conceptually, along with the nice cinematography. However, there was absolutely no excuse for this film repeating the same glaring flaws as its predecessor. It literally felt like I was watching the same story architecture with a different facade.
First off the objectively bad stuff:
[details=Spoiler]-The moronic “specialists”. So here we have people who are supposed to be prime candidates for a monumental voyage only to have a captain who peers into Alien pods after trusting a android who’s clearly doing suspect shit and avoids answering the most basic queries upon introduction. Other idiotic activities include- staring dumbfoundedly at a newly hatched hellspawn that emerged from your buddy’s corpse, as it slowly composes itself into a murder machine, not checking the source of the xenomorph’s location before entering hypersleep, inspecting unknown lifeforms up close without knowing their makeup and endangering thousands of lives by dropping a ship in proximity to a hellish planet-wide hurricane.
-These almighty Engineers somehow lacked any process to discern whether or not a ship was harboring friend or foe? Considering that it’s heavily implied that there are 2 rival factions within their race, I find it hard to believe that David was clear to land above what looked to be thousands of denizens who just happened to gather in one place like a bunch of plebs. Which leads to…
-So if the infection of David’s virus turns all non-botanical life into some host, why isn’t the planet flooded with competing neomorphs, or at the very least one species that survived the global orgy of violence to becoming an apex predator? Why aren’t there any trace of dead host fauna other than the Engineer carcasses in the city? Are we supposed to believe that in just a few years a global extinction occurred without any pileup of biological remnants?
-Unlike Ripley, who in Alien gradually built up her courage throughout the film before being a badass near the end, Daniels, while intelligent and relatively cool-headed, still jumped into insanely high gear near the film’s climax. Riding on that carrier and blasting that xenomorph without flinching like she’s been at it her whole life. Not to mention handling all those g-forces like a pro all while adeptly controlling a crane module- successfully, mind you. I will admit it did make for good entertainment though.
-Although when under trauma humans have a tendency to do impulsive and irrational things, but considering the remaining crew members just dealt with a harrowing culling of their friends and family, somehow there’s still a mood for some sexy time in the the shower, without the hint of some emotional subtext leading up to it? The scene felt shoehorned in for the sake of gratuitous sex and violence, possibly for trailer hype footage as well.
-Somehow David is capable of overriding the ship even though he’s a now an obsolete 10-year old version who was replaced for being too “human”. If anything, a supposedly “bajillion dollar” A.I. like Mother should’ve had extensively built-in protocols to prevent all Davids (or any other androids for that matter) from having full access to the controls. Heck, why wasn’t the A.I. even capable of telling the difference between the 2 in the first place? It could have notified the crew matter-of-factly for some interesting drama.
-How in the world is a pod-based parasitic organism considered an improvement over a virulent spore-based one? A seemingly invisible-yet-deadly pathogen capable of intelligently homing into the orifices and soft tissues of an organism of nearly any size and shape is infinitely more terrifying and efficient than some pod with a springy space scorpion.[/details]
Personal gripes:
[details=Spoiler]-David being the sole architect of the xenomorphs, while clearly meant to be seen as woefully poetic by Scott, feels like a spit in the face of what made the entire franchise of Alien seem, well, Alien. The entire rebranding of the story kills the sense of wonder and “mystique” ( as @“Dangerous J” said) and makes the film centered more on an narcissistic android with a god-complex than about the Engineers, the xenomorphs, and the full scale of where they all fit in this cinematic universe.
-The whole film just felt like Prometheus now with 75% more ALIEEEEEEEEEENSSSS!!! strobe echo to satisfy his audience. This made the focus less on character building and creating an atmosphere of true terror, and more about Scott glamorizing David’s “philosophically nuanced” and yet, hazy agenda. I could tell the moments Ridley really wanted to capture were the scenes involving Davebender(s), and not the sequences involving the intense drama of dealing with the dangerous unknown that made the first 2 films masterpieces. The action sequences were merely a facilitator to deeply explore his own vision, irrespective of the audience’s expectations. That’s why much of the Covenant crew were still like- “HURR DURR What duz dis unknown lifeformz doo? ADURRR!!! Meesa gon follow the unstable android and peer in the pod- OH NOES!!!” Their idiotic actions were clearly scripted to initiate insert violent action sequence to entertain the masses here and not to actually create real cohesive tension for the sake of the plot narrative. This is much different from when Ripley or a supporting character HAD TO take a potentially lethal risk to GTFO of wherever. (i.e., a logical motivation.)
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**Honestly, Ridley Scott is doing a George Lucas with his own franchise. **
6.5/10