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[Alien: Covenant] Colony ship + xenomorphs = what could go wrong?
Harry Dresden
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Registered User regular
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svnAD0TApb8Here are the "prequels" setting up the movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkXgRlRao5I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeMVrnYNwusMeet the cast:
Walter (Michael Fassbender)
A synthetic android created by the Weyland-Yutani corporation who assist the crew on board the Covenant.
Daniels "Danny" Branson (Katherine Waterston)
The crew's terraforming expert and wife of the captain, Jacob Branson.
Jacob Branson (James Franco)
The Covenant's captainunfortunately he dies early on forcing someone to pick up the slack. You had one job, Franco Jacob!
Christopher Oram (Billy Crudup)
The second in commanduntil he takes over as captain once Branson dies, who is very religious and doesn't get along with the crew. Aside from his wife.
Tennessee (Danny McBride)
The Covenant's pilot. May have been Kenny Powers in another life.
Sergeant Lope (Demián Bichir)
Hallett's husband. Head of security aboard the Covenant.
Karine Oram (Carmen Egjogo)
Christopher's sane wife. Biologist.
Maggie Farris (Amy Seimetz)
Lander pilot, and medic. Tennessee's wife.
Ricks (Jussie Smollet)
Upworth's husband.
Upworth (Callie Hernandez)
Medic aboard the Covenant.
Spoiler character!
David! (Michael Fassbender)
What's that guy doing here?
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If I'm even 1 lightyear from a hospital, I kind of want to know that my medic has a medic.
They should all be medics.
And electricians.
And good cooks!
I kind of hate that it's become the official name for the monsters, because it depends on a misunderstanding of a line from Aliens. In context it's just a fancy word for "weird new alien lifeform," just like "bug hunt" is just lame sci-fi jargon for "goose chase".
It's a fine word for "unknown alien entity". But you'd think we'd get around to classifying these fuckers at some point.
What's the survival rate for actually seeing one?
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Space Marines were doing ok until they ran into the withering hail of plot devices.
Fuck the reactor, I'm a space Marine. You get an autocannon round, and you get an autocannon round, Everything moving gets autocannon rounds.
This spoiler literally contains the plot to the movie:
They weren't doing ok? They hadn't fought shit, they ran into the hive and got murderated because they had no idea what they were facing. Which was the point, Ripley warned people and no one listened except for Burke who fucked shit up because GOD DAMN YOU BURKE!
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I'm excited for this movie, even though I expect it to be pretty by the numbers and never reaching the heights of Alien and Aliens.
Nintendo ID: Pastalonius
Smite\LoL:Gremlidin \ WoW & Overwatch & Hots: Gremlidin#1734
3ds: 3282-2248-0453
But I'm also one of the only people I know who likes Prometheus, so I'm not too worried.
I guess if we go by movies, and ignore the existence of A4 and AVP, as one should, WY still actually has no idea of what these things are, they just want one.
There's a fair few survivors in comics though; no excuses there.
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Heck even some basic Bio-hazard/Hazmat suits like the ones in 'Arrival' would have saved them all from the spores.
Some nice action sequences, but the whole crew is scripted to be dumber than the one from Prometheus.
I too love the first two movies, but everything since has generally fallen short in one fashion or another. I might watch it when it comes to a streaming service I subscribe to, but I doubt I'll pay to see it in theaters.
They had to give up their guns and switch to flamers because of a plot device, err the expensive reactor and terraforming unit. The aliens jump them and a wayward flamer hitting the guy with all the ammo kills half the squad in one go.The two with autocannons kept ammo in reserve and were able to get the survivors back to the APC. Most of their deaths in the second encounter came down to "ran out of bullets".
But yeah, Burke was the one that made them switch to flamers, thus dooming all of them. Which was a plot device to allow the situation to go to shit.
Edit: To be clear, yeah they were still gonna get murderated because its Alien. But once they actually were able to shoot they took a shit ton of bugs with them.
While it being a valuable piece of equipment probably wasn't far from his mind, the reason they switch to flamers was because of the risk of causing damage to the system that might result in it blowing up catastrophically.
Which, y'know, is what happens. "Cloud of vapor the size of Nebraska" and whatnot.
To be clear, Burke was a shithead, they weren't remotely prepared, things went sideways for a bunch of reasons. But Burke was right about that one point. Using explosive armor penetrating bullets inside the atmosphere processor was indeed a bad idea.
Semantics
Ill rewatch but I got the idea that it was more a monetary decision than a safety one. Fitting with Burke's corporate asshole scumbag persona, and that the Marines were less valuable than the terraformer, which he reminds Ripley they manufacture. Which seems like it could be a W-Y ad slogan.
The big fuckup was sending every marine in, essentially unarmed. They had plenty of alternative weapons on the drop ship.
Also maybe leave a guard or three with the goddamned drop ship. And yknow. Close the door.
Like yeah they didn't have their ammo, but that was because they fought in the reactor in the hive, instead of trying to figure what was going on in the reactor with scouting. Like maybe send in bishop since he's a synth and thus more expendable? Sorry Bishop...
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I mean I know the more modern films try and simulate the 80's low-tech "hi-tech" look, but it just ain't the same.
Stuff like
...with its clunky mechanical keyboards and green CRT monitors and whatnot.
Also Ripley.
Anyway, I doubt I'll see this new one in theaters. It's been hard to get excited about an Alien movie since Resurrection, but I respect the attempt to do something new with the franchise.
I thought it was either the APC or the dropship crashing through everything that caused it to blow up. They mention that "the crash did too much damage."
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It was Vasquez and Drake shooting their smart guns in the reactor that caused the impending nuke.
When they decide to call down the second drop ship to evacuate, they find they can't do it from their current location, because the crash has damaged the colony infrastructure, severing whatever data lines exist between them and the dish, so Bishop has to go over there to do it manually.
Weak points of the film were definitely the Prometheus-esque parts. By this I mean the general mythology and characters being incredibly stupid for the sake of advancing the plot. I'm sure that writers can come up with a scenario in which people don't have to be mentally impaired and yet still get infected with virus/xenomorph. By introducing more and more of the mythology it reduces the scariness and dread surrounding the xenomorph
Aliens works because everybody involved is well-trained and/or smart, except for the two fuckups in charge who, through withholding information and being a shitty officer, allow for a huge catastrophe to happen. But even the fuckups are believably human. Everything after that screwup (sending the Marines in effectively unarmed instead of pulling back to re-equip and recon) is what makes the whole rest of the movie happen, instead of being a series of horrible decisions. And when the non-fuckups take charge, they do pretty well and keep adapting.
Where literally every other Alien movie falls short is that they end up populated with some of the most stunningly moronic individuals possible, nobody ever learns, and every fuckup comes from some really stupid decisions that no actual person would make. And nobody ever learns from these mistakes and instead continue to make awful decisions, so the movie is just a series of dumb decisions from dumb non-people.
This results in movies where the existence of the xenomorphs is actually less unreal than the behavior of the people getting killed by the xenomorphs, which isn't scary, exciting, or interesting. And it looks like Covenant is sticking to that formula of dumbasses dying for dumbass choices, so... ugh. Another waste of a movie.
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Don't read unless you don't care about seeing the film
The first is the decision to divert the ship from their original course (to a planet 7 years away, with 3 more jumps to make. The ship needs to stop and recharge using a nifty solar panel sail. Tennessee is outside the ship fixing the array when his helmet picks up a transmission from the Prometheus Ship. They trace the signal to the Engineer Homeworld, which has something like 90% habitibility (Stellaris fan here). The original chartered planet has something along the lines of 60-70% habitability. Everyone is unnerved by the death of the Captain, and no one wants to go back to sleep in the tubes (Captain literally burnt to death inside his chamber as they tried to break him out). Considering no one respects the new captain, he makes the decision to go to the Engineer Homeworld. He offers three reasons; investigate the source of the human voice signal, determine if the planet is a better choice for the colony, protect the crew from having to go back into hypersleep. The movie doesn't really spell out which of these reasons is the captain's primary motivation, but in my opinion it's number three. He's ultimately a coward at this point, and any decision to please the crew and keep moral up is the one he's going to make in order to protect his position. This is risk number 1; the unknown world is unknown; all the preparation the mission has done is for the other planet. The message was not a distress signal, and the stop is an unnecessary risk to both the crew and the overall mission. Danny has a confrontation with the captain and files a formal complaint (for all the good that does).
Second: The Covenant is in orbit while the majority of the crew went to the planet on a lander (there is apparently only 1 lander) The planet apparently has hurricane planet wide storms for months at a time. Everything is FUBAR, and the crew is trying to get rescued off the planet. Danny should have said fuck that, what the hell is happening. The storm could also do irreparable harm to the Covenant. He makes the decision to fly a construction vehicle down to the planet to rescue who's left alive. Again, a crew member makes a decision out of compassion for the others and ignores the primary object. Get the Convenant to the other planet, protect the colonists.
There's a third one, but it's really at the point of the film that leads down the rabbit hole to the ending. My point being that it seems that Ridley is criticizing human compassion here; any one of these instances the crew member could have taken the cold-hearted robotic choice to abandon the others and continue on. Their attempts to save each other ultimately lead to their doom.
Maybe determine if it has things like month long hurricanes, or plasma storms that will fuck your communication systems up.
Or, at the very least, wait till the storms clear up a bit before sending the lander down through in the middle of them.
Late, but there's apparently two scientific names that are floating around from various bits and pieces of the franchise, though not sure if either are any official terminology: Internecivus raptus and Linguafoeda acheronsis