Alien: Covenant - 2017 - Ridley Scott

[K]

I seem to recall that Joss Whedon was very unhappy with the way his script was filmed and the changes that the director made to it, but I read an earlier draft after seeing the film, and it wasn't much better - it felt like a dry-run for Firefly spliced with a re-run of Aliens, with a crew of wisecracking roughnecks who speak like teenage girls and spend all their time making catty remarks at each other.

[Darren]

I'm also in the "never took an interest in this because Prometheus was so egregiously awful" camp, but the last page or so has got me thinking maybe I should give it a go. Is this a warning sign for impending dementia?

[Sexton Hardcastle]

No, it’s shite. 

[Stoppy2000]

22 minutes ago, Darren said:

I'm also in the "never took an interest in this because Prometheus was so egregiously awful" camp, but the last page or so has got me thinking maybe I should give it a go. Is this a warning sign for impending dementia?

I say watch it. It's better than Prometheus. It also looks nice and has Fassbender doing some bizarre stuff. I think/hope that it is eventually classed as non-canon though. 

[makkuwata]

If you go in blind Fassbender’s plot is banana’s and worth the ride for the sheer audacity of going there after the last one.

[ZOK]

2 hours ago, Darren said:

I'm also in the "never took an interest in this because Prometheus was so egregiously awful" camp, but the last page or so has got me thinking maybe I should give it a go. Is this a warning sign for impending dementia?

It’s worth a watch simply because it’s way better than Prometheus, the initial premise and start is pretty good, it looks spectacular on a decent tv and the android scenes are pretty funny mostly. I also liked how it ended, even though it couldn’t be more obvious if it tried.

 

If you want to watch it because of ‘it’s Aliens’ though don’t bother, nearly every Alien scene is garbage (apart from the very first one).

 

 

[CarloOos]

I seem to recall Joss shouldering the blame for the unnecessarily glib ‘Weyland Yutani got bought out by Starbucks’ line. 
 

In many ways I do think Covenant is worse than Prometheus though. It’s vaguely similar to Rise of Skywalker in the sense you can feel the studio cowardly trying to force in all the things they think will shut fanboys up. “You want a literal prequel to Alien? Fine, here’s Ripley, eggs, facehuggers and aliens, now leave us alone”. The David stuff is suitably bananas but the rest is so, so tired.

[PK]

Just out of interest, what was your own imagined backstory for the engineer & aliens when you first saw Alien? Or did you not really care?

 

I always thought he was like a gigantic alien space trucker whose ship had been infested en route somewhere, and he'd had his own unsuccessful version of the film play out until he'd had to ditch the ship and set a beacon to warn everyone else away.

[Exidor]

Exactly that. It was just the same story repeating itself over and over because space is an awful place full of unknowable horrors for anyone foolish enough to venture out into it. 

 

Not that some daft bullshit happened on the next planet over and by the way the space jockey guy was actually just a big bald fella who also coincidentally created all life on earth.

[CarloOos]

1 hour ago, PK said:

Just out of interest, what was your own imagined backstory for the engineer & aliens when you first saw Alien? Or did you not really care?

 

I always thought he was like a gigantic alien space trucker whose ship had been infested en route somewhere, and he'd had his own unsuccessful version of the film play out until he'd had to ditch the ship and set a beacon to warn everyone else away.

This, but tens if not hundreds of thousands of years in the past, as opposed to something that happened a few years prior when the bosses’ butler got bored.

[Pob]

18 hours ago, Spacehost said:

Alien: Engineers, yeah. It’s a nice script but it doesn’t have enough JESUSCHRIST BONESCRACK DEMONIC TUNA in it so they got Damon Lindelof in to piss in it a bit.

 

What happened there? Lindelof has since turned into a bit of a shit-hot writer so I have to assume that talent was always there and something else went wrong.

 

I also actually liked Prometheus and Covenant despite their flaws. I used to think I was just an easy mark for anything in the Alien universe but then I remembered I can't hack Resurrection at all, and have no interest in ever seeing AVP1 or 2. I think I just like any Ridley Scott sci-fi.

[Exidor]

14 minutes ago, Pob said:

 

Lindelof has since turned into a bit of a shit-hot writer

 

Citation needed.

[ZOK]

Prometheus makes Resurrection look like 2001: A Space Odyssey.

[Pob]

4 minutes ago, Exidor said:

 

Citation needed.

 

Watchmen

 

People seem to like The Leftovers but I've never seen it.

[Darren]

1 minute ago, Pob said:

 

Watchmen

 

People seem to like The Leftovers but I've never seen it.

 

You should. Everyone should! It's one of the best TV shows ever made.

[Spacehost]

6 hours ago, Stoppy2000 said:

I say watch it. It's better than Prometheus. It also looks nice and has Fassbender doing some bizarre stuff. I think/hope that it is eventually classed as non-canon though. 

The reason to watch either movie is Michael Fassbender. When I feel up to it I might edit both films into one reasonably-coherent movie about an incel robot who terrorises women because his dad was mean.

[squirtle]

I watched this and Prometheus the other night. I'd forgotten the story in them completely, but fuck me. So we created the Aliens. I mean... No. I hate this kind of shit. It makes the universe so much smaller and everything about us. Just... No.

[Fierce Poodle]

19 hours ago, Darren said:

I'm also in the "never took an interest in this because Prometheus was so egregiously awful" camp, but the last page or so has got me thinking maybe I should give it a go. Is this a warning sign for impending dementia?

Both films are absolute cat shit but Covenant somehow manages to be worse. Unless the idea of Fassbender playing the flute stirs your loins, in which case knock yourself out.

[K]

Last time I watched the films, I thought it suggested that David reverse engineered the aliens he makes in Covenant, rather than creates them from scratch. The black goo in Covenant is derived from the classic aliens we know and love rather than being the thing they are created from, and David is just carrying out some kind of biomechanical regression process to get back to the original creature. So David didn't create the creatures - he's (deliberately or unwittingly) reverting to something much older and more terrible.

 

This is all a bit head-canon, but ultimately I'm happy to interpret films my own way, and I'm particularly happy to do this with science fiction films that attempt to imply the existence of some broader universe. And there is some stuff in the films to support it. This mural in Prometheus shows the classic alien creature, and is clearly incredibly ancient, and was made long before humans' arrival on the planet:

 

 

So that suggests the alien is an ancient being, wasn't created by David, and was something the engineers were either reverent of, or shit-scared of. Or both. Interestingly (or not), the engineer artwork wasn't in Jon Spaihts' original script and was only referred to in Damon Lindelof's revisions. 

 

Back in 2012, everyone assumed that Lindelof was some JJ Abrams-adjacent clown who didn't know what he was doing, sort of like a less competent version of Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, but I'd say he deserves to be given a bit more credit these days given how mind-bendingly fantastic his recent work has been.

[Sexton Hardcastle]

No. Back in 2012 everything he wrote was garbage - EVERYTHING - so unless he has developed a time machine & taken some of his recent reappraised work back & filed it with Fox executives I think we are all pretty safe to consider it shite thats just made up on the fly.

[makkuwata]

Oh joy, someone criticising Lindelof for making stuff up as he goes. I needed a good scream into a pillow. 

[ZOK]

4 hours ago, Fierce Poodle said:

Both films are absolute cat shit but Covenant somehow manages to be worse. Unless the idea of Fassbender playing the flute stirs your loins, in which case knock yourself out.

This is the complete opposite of reality.

[Fierce Poodle]

Are you saying you found the flute scene sexually exciting?

[ZOK]

No, I’m saying Covenant is obviously better than Prometheus by several orders of magnitude in whichever way you want to compare the two.

 

That flute bit is pretty great though!

[Hawklord]

10 minutes ago, Fierce Poodle said:

Are you saying you found the flute scene sexually exciting?

This one time, at band camp...

[Fierce Poodle]

11 minutes ago, ZOK said:

No, I’m saying Covenant is obviously better than Prometheus by several orders of magnitude in whichever way you want to compare the two.

 

That flute bit is pretty great though!

I’d have to watch them again to check if you’re right, but honestly they were both so piss poor I really can’t be arsed.

[NecroMorrius]

They're both really shite. Covenant isn't worse, but it isn't better.

[ZOK]

13 minutes ago, Fierce Poodle said:

I’d have to watch them again to check if you’re right, but honestly they were both so piss poor I really can’t be arsed.

It’s not a film anyone needs to see more than once. But if you watch it up until the bit where the lander explodes (25 minutes in?), you’ve seen a decent movie!

[NecroMorrius]

19 hours ago, Exidor said:

 

Citation needed.

 

The Leftovers, Watchmen. Both absolutely fantastic. Ironically I think Lindelhof could probably make a brilliant Alien series if he broke free from all the clumpy lore and story thus far. He worked pure magic on Watchmen.

[ZOK]

Watchmen is garbage!