Thoughts after watching Alien:Covenant
I'm not gonna meticulously dissect the movie, but rather just give my basic questions about it. I'll assume everyone reading will have watched the movie. So SPOILER ALERT.
What was Good about it?
I liked the visual design. The set pieces were great.
I cannot complain about the music either. It was really good at setting the mood.
I liked that this movie wasn't a mindless horror/action flick. It dabbled in serious philosophical questions and showed how a lonely mind can go wicked, even if it's artificial.
I liked the first scene in this movie, with David and Weyland.
The androids/Fassbenders were great.
That's about it...
What I thought was bad about this movie
I'll divide these into two groups.
Bad things
I didn't like how the second in command ditched the original plan to go to Oriega...[something], simply because they found a mysterious transmission. Would you really send someone with so little discipline and rational thought to a colonization mission? No way!
Even though the colonists see that there is life on the planet they go out without any protection. I would be running around in a hazmat suit for at least a month before starting to think about letting alien lifeforms into contact with myself, but not these brave colonists. They happily jump out of their ship as if they were on earth.
Black matter puffballs. Granted, I don't know exactly how that works, but it was my understanding this black substance kills all animals and creates new lifeforms from them. So why are there mushrooms and how can spores move intentionally through air and force themselves through someone's skin???
How is it that humans evolve over 9 months before birth, but these aliens hatch basically after... a few hours? And how is it possible for that alien to push itself out of the host like it did?
So we have this newborn alien and it's automatically ready to kill. Meaning it has a fully developed brain with implanted knowledge: how to run, who to attack etc. Seems very unbelievable.
How come this small alien can take on a grown woman? Why didn't she just stomp on that aliens head when it was on the ground? How can that alien break through thick glass? How can this alien be so powerful and agile, when it has tiny muscles, an oversized head and it's made from organic matter just like its host(human) was? They are even resistant to bullets in the beginning or the colonists are really bad shots. ...I could go on, but nothing about these aliens makes any sense.
The movie is kind short, but still manages to waste almost 50 minutes. There's simply nothing happening in the first half of this movie that would be of any real importance. They could have easily condensed it down to 15 minutes.
The Engineers. Why would anyone think highly advanced civilizations have a very simplistic lifestyle (like the middle ages) mixed with spaceships? This doesn't make any sense. Who built all those things? Or was this just a small colony of engineer hippies?
I didn't find it believable someone would risk the lives of over 2000 people because a searching party went missing. I also found the spaceships capabilities a bit funky - a neutrino blast can cause failures yet they can easily descend into that stormy atmosphere to around 40km?
It's quite convenient everyone has gravity on a spaceship.
The way that xenomorph hatched from that guys belly and made a weird gesture. Remember how it looked like in 1979? Nothing like it and the hatchling looked way different.
No character growth or good characters what so ever. No wonder I can't remember any names.
The characters made really stupid decisions. The two guys infected didn't tell they felt sick. I mean can't they connect the dots? Alien planets + feeling sick shortly after landing. I'd let everyone from the first itch.
Then afterward they rest in Davids creepy necropolis. I wouldn't go anywhere alone in that place knowing that are killer aliens sneaking around. I'd have someone always with me and my finger on the trigger.Very bad CGI xenomorph movement.
The way Riddle Scott spoiled the ending. The last scene with the two androids fighting, laying on the ground was nothing but a spoiler. The moment you saw David reaching for the knife, uttering his rhetorical question and the camera cut out, I knew what will happen and it did. A real bummer.
Unforgivable things
Science fiction should be based on REAL science + new technologies. What bad scifi movies do is break general physics and introduce its own. Alien:Covenant has the spaceship get hit with an neutrino blast. Neutrinos don't interact much with matter. There are billions of them flying through the Earth as we speak. For an neutrino blast to have such an effect as seen in the movie you should be quite close to an supernova, but if you are, you should be dead really soon anyways because there's an freaking supernova explosion heading your way maybe a few minutes behind.
Even though we see the xenomorph get crushed and the "cargo ship with a crane" not having any other aliens on them, somehow one xenomorph finds its way into the spaceship. How? Teleportation? And how can it move freely around the ship? Were all the doors right into the shower open?
Conclusion
Alien:Covenant is a good looking movie with an awful script just like Prometheus. It's like Ridley Scott didn't care one bit about the criticism of Prometheus.
Ridley Scott has also said he wanted to scare people with this movie. I'm sorry, I wasn't scared for not even a single moment in this movie. This is not a horror film, but a somewhat boring scfi-action-thriller.
What this movie really shows is that Ridley Scott isn't good anymore and I'm terrified of him ruining Blade Runner next.
Funny thing
If we were to embrace these new shit movies the AvP universe would fly right out the window and Predator 2 should not have a xenomorph skull in it.
Fun review :D