You have to think that there's an official codename kicking around in a W-Y server somewhere. By the time Resurrection rolls around, corporations have been trying to harness the things for like 300 years.
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
Also, the thing is, even real science is populated by dumb names that have no actual meaning for what the thing they are naming is or does, they just stuck around.
Like "chromosome" just means "colored body", and has nothing to do with DNA or anything. The xenomorphs having scientific names that everyone disregards in favor of the first thing someone called them is probably one of the most realistic things about the entire franchise.
You have to think that there's an official codename kicking around in a W-Y server somewhere. By the time Resurrection rolls around, corporations have been trying to harness the things for like 300 years.
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
Also, the thing is, even real science is populated by dumb names that have no actual meaning for what the thing they are naming is or does, they just stuck around.
Like "chromosome" just means "colored body", and has nothing to do with DNA or anything. The xenomorphs having scientific names that everyone disregards in favor of the first thing someone called them is probably one of the most realistic things about the entire franchise.
That's what bugs me (ha!). The first thing they were called was a general term for an unclassified alien species. So, do they stop calling everything else xenomorphs? It's silly. It's like calling great white sharks capital 'f' "Fish".
HUDSON
Is this going to be a stand-up
fight, Sir, on another bug-hunt?
GORMAN
All we know is that there's
still no contact with the colony
and that a xenomorph may be
involved.
WIERZBOWSKI
A what?
HICKS
(to Wierzbowski;
low)
It's a bug-hunt.
Apparently they're identified specifically as Xenomorph XX121 in the Weyland Yutani report, which I kinda want now.
The black goo also has an incredibly long official designation that no one could possibly remember. "Chemical A0-3959X.91 – 15"
A dot, a hyphen and a dash. Fuck off.
Forget the dot, what kind of monster uses two kinds of dash in one compound? How about a pipe? Who knows how those dashes are going to render in a given character set.
Or better yet, just make teams of synthetics to do the exploration. Okay, still would be really shitty if you made them sentient, while treating them as expendable, but at least they wouldn't be suitable hosts for deadly parasitic aliens.
Or better yet, just make teams of synthetics to do the exploration. Okay, still would be really shitty if you made them sentient, while treating them as expendable, but at least they wouldn't be suitable hosts for deadly parasitic aliens.
But then you have to worry about their AI going rampant and deciding that Humanity has had it's day.
Then you've got Skynet, only the synthetics have the ultimate in high ground advantage.
+2
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Or better yet, just make teams of synthetics to do the exploration. Okay, still would be really shitty if you made them sentient, while treating them as expendable, but at least they wouldn't be suitable hosts for deadly parasitic aliens.
But then you have to worry about their AI going rampant and deciding that Humanity has had it's day.
Then you've got Skynet, only the synthetics have the ultimate in high ground advantage.
But this film has the kind of "humanity" where I would always root for the machines, so Skynet taking over and killing all the moron humans before they can turns into xenomorphs is pretty okay with me.
I'm kind of disappointed that none of the new Ridely Scott films even come close to capturing the design aesthetic of the originals. They don't feel like the same universe.
Alien: Isolation does this so well. It's a love letter to the design of the original film.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I imagine they don't go for it these days because it would make the sets incredibly more expensive. All that beige plastic and monochrome green stuff was easy enough to find in the 70s/80s, but it's almost all been trashed or broken by now. Trying to replicate that stuff for a set would cost a fortune.
Heck, look at something like Stranger Things. Does a great job of set design for a small 80s town, but the TV screens are just props with the video part filled in digitally. Though at least that show genuinely makes the effort. But this is all stuff from a Fox movie studio; the meddlers there really don't give a shit about continuity or believability, as long as they can force out something to make some money with.
+1
HonkHonk is this poster.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I imagine they don't go for it these days because it would make the sets incredibly more expensive. All that beige plastic and monochrome green stuff was easy enough to find in the 70s/80s, but it's almost all been trashed or broken by now. Trying to replicate that stuff for a set would cost a fortune.
Heck, look at something like Stranger Things. Does a great job of set design for a small 80s town, but the TV screens are just props with the video part filled in digitally. Though at least that show genuinely makes the effort. But this is all stuff from a Fox movie studio; the meddlers there really don't give a shit about continuity or believability, as long as they can force out something to make some money with.
Most TV screens and computer monitors in any show/movie are filled in digitally. But point still stands, it's tough to even find a CRT to use as a prop now.
I think the biggest problem with this, and with Prometheus, is that they're all about asking the question of who we are, and repeatedly telling us that, rather than using the far superior theme of humanity as defined by empathy and compassion vs alienness as defined as cold, emotionless exploitation. It's a bit woolly, haphazard and tell rather than show.
Also the people in this movie are egrariously stupid to the point where the movie feels very contrived and by the numbers. It's a very obvious narrative and in a bad way, too.
Or better yet, just make teams of synthetics to do the exploration. Okay, still would be really shitty if you made them sentient, while treating them as expendable, but at least they wouldn't be suitable hosts for deadly parasitic aliens.
But then you have to worry about their AI going rampant and deciding that Humanity has had it's day.
Then you've got Skynet, only the synthetics have the ultimate in high ground advantage.
But this film has the kind of "humanity" where I would always root for the machines, so Skynet taking over and killing all the moron humans before they can turns into xenomorphs is pretty okay with me.
Am I missing something? The crew seemed pretty sympathetic to me. The worst person in the whole movie
Or better yet, just make teams of synthetics to do the exploration. Okay, still would be really shitty if you made them sentient, while treating them as expendable, but at least they wouldn't be suitable hosts for deadly parasitic aliens.
But then you have to worry about their AI going rampant and deciding that Humanity has had it's day.
Then you've got Skynet, only the synthetics have the ultimate in high ground advantage.
Now you mention it I'd have liked to see the Android Wars referenced in Alien: Resurrection. Go totally Blade Runner with that direction and
they might even have a leader in David, who seems to be the sort of fellow who'd be up for that sort of thing.
Harry Dresden on
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GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
I'm kind of disappointed that none of the new Ridely Scott films even come close to capturing the design aesthetic of the originals. They don't feel like the same universe.
Alien: Isolation does this so well. It's a love letter to the design of the original film.
Whereas a lot of us fans view the 70s chunky SF aesthetic as great design, it seems like a lot of Hollywood disagrees, or at least would rather use newer film tech.
I haven't seen this yet, but I always though Prometheus largely fit into the look of Alien/Aliens. It doesn't look precisely the same, but that's ok with me.
Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
They had a pretty good excuse with the Prometheus being a one of a kind exploration vehicle that was Weyland's pet project. Makes sense that it had all the craziest tech available at the time, and that a decades later mass produced piece of shit like the Nostromo wouldn't have any of those shiny hologram interfaces. I dunno if that flies with the Covenant though.
Maybe we can go with the Nostromo does have all that hologram stuff built in, but it's broken and our illustrious mechanics Brett and Parker don't know how to fix it.
Another thing that jumped out was Mother having voice commands on the Covenant, the crew could speak aloud and have conversations with it, but on the Nostromo it seemed like she was relegated to prerecorded messages and couldn't give 'active' responses outside of the text interface on her computer terminal. That could be incongruous tech levels, or again just an example of the Nostromo being broken.
They had a pretty good excuse with the Prometheus being a one of a kind exploration vehicle that was Weyland's pet project. Makes sense that it had all the craziest tech available at the time, and that a decades later mass produced piece of shit like the Nostromo wouldn't have any of those shiny hologram interfaces. I dunno if that flies with the Covenant though.
Maybe we can go with the Nostromo does have all that hologram stuff built in, but it's broken and our illustrious mechanics Brett and Parker don't know how to fix it.
Another thing that jumped out was Mother having voice commands on the Covenant, the crew could speak aloud and have conversations with it, but on the Nostromo it seemed like she was relegated to prerecorded messages and couldn't give 'active' responses outside of the text interface on her computer terminal. That could be incongruous tech levels, or again just an example of the Nostromo being broken.
I chalked that up to the Nostromo being the space equivalent of a semi-truck, while the Prometheus was a space cadillac that had been worked over by a high end custom car shop that had been given a book full of blank checks.
Haven't seen Covenant yet, but I think a major problem with the Alien film as a franchise is that their experimental nature has brought out some of the worst impulses in their creative teams. Alien and Aliens are very straight-forward as stories - down-to-earth horror/action films about regular people dealing with a monstrous threat whose dimensions exceed their capabilities.
After 3, it seems the mandate to become more experimental/philosophical crept into the franchise, and we get a ton of films with aliens as metaphors, human characters as caricatures, and a loss of focus on what made the original films great. Prometheus was the nadir of this so far - a movie filled with cyphers acting like idiots so the director could tell a theologically tinged grand story about life and creation. It sounds like Covenant falls into this trap too.
The franchise needs another installment that is just a solid, grounded story about a group of characters who feel real dealing with a threat that they are barely able to survive. No greater meaning, just them people who feel like people versus a bunch of insectoid monsters.
Haven't seen Covenant yet, but I think a major problem with the Alien film as a franchise is that their experimental nature has brought out some of the worst impulses in their creative teams. Alien and Aliens are very straight-forward as stories - down-to-earth horror/action films about regular people dealing with a monstrous threat whose dimensions exceeds their capabilities.
After 3, it seems the mandate to become more experimental/philosophical crept into the franchise, and we get a ton of films with aliens as metaphors, human characters as caricatures, and a loss of focus on what made the original films great. Prometheus was the nadir of this so far - a movie filled with cyphers acting like idiots so the director could tell a theologically tinged grand story about life and creation. It sounds like Covenant falls into this trap too.
The franchise needs another installment that is just a solid, grounded story about a group of characters who feel real dealing with a threat that they are barely able to survive. No greater meaning, just them people who feel like people versus a bunch of insectoid monsters.
Covenant is the best take on this aspect I've sen since Aliens. Alien vs Predator movies don't count, and they're terrible.
Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
I had a real problem with Daniels going from "grief stricken but capable" to "ultimate action badass" with nothing in the middle to inform that change. It just seemed like getting attacked by David flipped some switch and now she's gonna carry a gun and dangle off a chain.
I did really enjoy Tennessee though. He had that amiable vibe, was very easy to like. With so many characters losing spouses and grieving with such colourful variety, he still managed to stand out; he cried for a minute, and then decided he was gonna do whatever it takes, no matter how suicidally risky, to save everyone else. Coolguy.
Haven't seen Covenant yet, but I think a major problem with the Alien film as a franchise is that their experimental nature has brought out some of the worst impulses in their creative teams. Alien and Aliens are very straight-forward as stories - down-to-earth horror/action films about regular people dealing with a monstrous threat whose dimensions exceed their capabilities.
After 3, it seems the mandate to become more experimental/philosophical crept into the franchise, and we get a ton of films with aliens as metaphors, human characters as caricatures, and a loss of focus on what made the original films great. Prometheus was the nadir of this so far - a movie filled with cyphers acting like idiots so the director could tell a theologically tinged grand story about life and creation. It sounds like Covenant falls into this trap too.
The franchise needs another installment that is just a solid, grounded story about a group of characters who feel real dealing with a threat that they are barely able to survive. No greater meaning, just them people who feel like people versus a bunch of insectoid monsters.
It's interesting that I kind of have the opposite problem with the franchise, as a whole. I think Alien holds up shockingly well to analysis. Like, if you want to read it as an allegory for modern anti-feminism, that shit works. You have a psuedo-intellectual (literally, a synthetic scientist) backed up by an oppressive corporate/industrial atmosphere who finds an emotionless, cruel, violent, invasive dick-monster that reproduces without needing women and goes "that's it boys, we found the perfect organism". It's the sort of richly textured, evocative movie that begs to be seen through different lenses over time, but it also stands great just as a straightforward adventure. It's like a good book.
Each of the first four movies is a unique, but genuine feeling experiment in directorial vision. Sure the latter two kind of suck, but they still feel like they were honest efforts at making a whole new piece. They feel honest. Everything since then has felt like a retread, trying to capture something without understanding it.
I think this even happened to Prometheus. Ridley Scott, I think, understood that his first movie was both a working genre flick and something that could be held up to deeper thematic analysis, and wanted to recapture that lightning by trying to ensure that both things happened in the movie. What we ended up with is a movie that feels like two halves that don't gel well together, and on top of that, neither half is particularly well-executed by itself. On top of that even the Alien thing doesn't feel well integrated, with all of the recognizable franchise bits feeling like a cut up of concept art from the first film rearranged and sort of decoupaged onto the surface.
I haven't seen Covenant yet, but the trailers looked almost worse for that. The bits I saw were very "look guys! I'm doing the first Alien again!" Down to nearly reshooting scenes from the original. I can't say this is a fair assessment of the movie as again, I'm only going off the trailers, but it's definitely why I haven't seen it in theaters yet.
Haven't seen Covenant yet, but I think a major problem with the Alien film as a franchise is that their experimental nature has brought out some of the worst impulses in their creative teams. Alien and Aliens are very straight-forward as stories - down-to-earth horror/action films about regular people dealing with a monstrous threat whose dimensions exceed their capabilities.
After 3, it seems the mandate to become more experimental/philosophical crept into the franchise, and we get a ton of films with aliens as metaphors, human characters as caricatures, and a loss of focus on what made the original films great. Prometheus was the nadir of this so far - a movie filled with cyphers acting like idiots so the director could tell a theologically tinged grand story about life and creation. It sounds like Covenant falls into this trap too.
The franchise needs another installment that is just a solid, grounded story about a group of characters who feel real dealing with a threat that they are barely able to survive. No greater meaning, just them people who feel like people versus a bunch of insectoid monsters.
It's interesting that I kind of have the opposite problem with the franchise, as a whole. I think Alien holds up shockingly well to analysis. Like, if you want to read it as an allegory for modern anti-feminism, that shit works. You have a psuedo-intellectual (literally, a synthetic scientist) backed up by an oppressive corporate/industrial atmosphere who finds an emotionless, cruel, violent, invasive dick-monster that reproduces without needing women and goes "that's it boys, we found the perfect organism". It's the sort of richly textured, evocative movie that begs to be seen through different lenses over time, but it also stands great just as a straightforward adventure. It's like a good book.
Each of the first four movies is a unique, but genuine feeling experiment in directorial vision. Sure the latter two kind of suck, but they still feel like they were honest efforts at making a whole new piece. They feel honest. Everything since then has felt like a retread, trying to capture something without understanding it.
I think this even happened to Prometheus. Ridley Scott, I think, understood that his first movie was both a working genre flick and something that could be held up to deeper thematic analysis, and wanted to recapture that lightning by trying to ensure that both things happened in the movie. What we ended up with is a movie that feels like two halves that don't gel well together, and on top of that, neither half is particularly well-executed by itself. On top of that even the Alien thing doesn't feel well integrated, with all of the recognizable franchise bits feeling like a cut up of concept art from the first film rearranged and sort of decoupaged onto the surface.
I haven't seen Covenant yet, but the trailers looked almost worse for that. The bits I saw were very "look guys! I'm doing the first Alien again!" Down to nearly reshooting scenes from the original. I can't say this is a fair assessment of the movie as again, I'm only going off the trailers, but it's definitely why I haven't seen it in theaters yet.
That is almost word for word my brothers comment to me after we got out of the movie.
I could only respond "That's what the audience said they wanted after Prometheus, more Alien, less not Alien."
+2
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
The first two movies are where the films were able to be made without getting hosed by studio interference. As far as I know, pretty much every Alien film after the first two has been either an obvious cash-grab or heavily diddled with by studios.
Ridley Scott directed The Martian, so I have no doubt the guy can still make good films when a studio bothers to let him.
Prometheus and Alien Covenant are both excellent movies, they're just shit as Alien sequels. It's an extended universe the franchise didn't need.
For me it's worth it because the whole 'search for creation' theme has been treated well, with interesting subtextual support and with the help of the best performance of an android since Data. I was really impressed - but I liked Prometheus so much that I assumed a sequel could never do it justice, so I'm weird.
bsjezz on
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Eeeeeeh, Prometheus had some nice special effects and CG with decent-to-great acting, but it was a pretty second-rate film otherwise. Any film shackled to B-grade horror movie tropes of having characters make insanely stupid choices just can't ever be an excellent film.
I would at least consider watching Resurrection because, as weird as it gets, it's a decent action Alien flick and the characters are not stunningly idiotic as a rule. No way could I sit through Prometheus again, cringing past things like supposed "scientists" picking up and handling utterly unknown alien lifeforms.
I'm fascinated that so many people find dumb characters such a clutch point. I never even thought about it. It's just the convention we're working in, here.
edit: it stems from horror more than sci-fi - the sense that the next death on the horizon is foreshadowed by an obvious mistake. It's important to the internal logic of films with high body counts or it comes off as arbitrary...
edit edit: Maybe I've just grown more forgiving of cliches in my old age
To be fair, the only person in the series who didn't stumble stupidly into their own demise was Ripley, who didn't even want to let Kane back onto the Nostromo, much less everything else that followed.
One could argue that Ripley did stumble stupidly back to her own demise by accepting the mission to LV-426 in Aliens.
I mean I guess she had her reasons, but if I'd gone through what she'd gone through and managed to make it back to Earth I'd never fuckin' leave again.
And she didn't even make a difference in the end. Nobody made it out of Acheron alive. (Thanks, Alien 3).
I did really enjoy Tennessee though. He had that amiable vibe, was very easy to like. With so many characters losing spouses and grieving with such colourful variety, he still managed to stand out; he cried for a minute, and then decided he was gonna do whatever it takes, no matter how suicidally risky, to save everyone else. Coolguy.
I'm still of the opinion that even with so little screen time Danny Mcbride gave the second best performance of the film behind Fassbender.
+9
-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
To be fair, the only person in the series who didn't stumble stupidly into their own demise was Ripley, who didn't even want to let Kane back onto the Nostromo, much less everything else that followed.
I'd really have to argue against that. In Alien, the situation arises from a combination of human compassion overriding protocol (to let the facehugger-bearing crewman onto the ship), the danger being outside of human experience, and the synth actively sabotaging the crew's efforts to destroy the xenomorph. Pretty much nobody makes a decision that is in any way inhumanly stupid, they all make very human and realistic choices. Ripley survives not because she is the only person who actually has a brain, but because she manages to stay alive long enough to learn to get the hell away from the xenomorph. She's tough and smart, but also lucky. Even the original xenomorph infection there is the result of completely normal human behavior; there was virtually no indication of the eggs holding hostile lifeforms, especially since they were on a rock that was completely lethal to all known life.
In Aliens, Ripley's choice is a mix of facing her own fears and being reassured by simply advising for a military force going out to destroy the threat outright. The only dumb people are the officer and the Burke, and both of them are dumb in very, very normal ways. The officer is simply inexperienced and green (which is a pretty typical, and common, recipe for people in the military) so he gets manipulated by Burke. Burke is greedy, which makes him terribly shortsighted and unimaginative; again, this isn't unrealistic stupidity, this is pretty normal crap from career corporate types. The Marines are all experienced and trained, they just get fucked by bad info and bad orders; none of them does stupid shit like being in a hostile environment and poking something very obviously unknown.
After Aliens, people get really stupid, really hard. The inmates in Alien 3 were morons down to almost the last person, which was pretty stupid; being a prison inmate doesn't make you brain-damaged or idiotic, it just means you're in prison. The Resurrection folks were decently intelligent, but that was just kind of a weird move. The AvP movies are crammed with stupid people. Prometheus seemed to be almost entirely filled with morons.
The good Alien movies are filled with people that act like people. The shitty ones are filled with bloodbags there only to get brutally murdered in awful ways instead of putting any actually worthwhile horror writing in the movie. They're the equivalent of replacing human characters with emojis.
I'm fascinated that so many people find dumb characters such a clutch point. I never even thought about it. It's just the convention we're working in, here.
edit: it stems from horror more than sci-fi - the sense that the next death on the horizon is foreshadowed by an obvious mistake. It's important to the internal logic of films with high body counts or it comes off as arbitrary...
edit edit: Maybe I've just grown more forgiving of cliches in my old age
The problem with dumb characters is that later movies used to damn many of them.
Like Alien worked because you essentially had space truckers on what appeared to be a run down piece of shit. Wayland-Yutani probably underpaid the staff of Nostromo. Also probably overworked as well. I mean we know that Wayland-Yutani really does's give a shit about the crew. So perfectly plausible that a when some guy gets infected by the parasite, that no one says "Hey, on earth we have bugs that do this shit. Kane is probably dead, we should leave him and nuke this alien ship before some dumbass brings these fucking awful things into contact with anyone else." Hell, Ripley didn't want to let Kane back on the ship and tried to follow protocol.
Aliens works when you consider Wayland-Yutani's motives and that a corporate goon was put in charge of the operation. I suspect that Wayland-Yutani probably setup the mission to fail enough, but not completely, so that they had a shot at another specimen. I suspect that the company probably through in some dudes that would normally get discharged and then withheld a fair bit of information. Yes, they had Ripley, but she didn't have to deal with a hive of these things and probably didn't know that they could form hives, had queens and would get even more out of hand than dealing with a single drone.
After that they just through too much stupid into the movies. Prometheus is has not excuses. Underpaid space truckers and space marines, led by someone that doesn't give a shit about them. Yeah, not surprised when things go fubar quickly. Then you get Prometheus, "we have the best, the very best scientist, but they are fucking idiots." My response is fuck you Ridley Scott, that is hack writing. I also think it takes away from the horror factor when the incompetence clearly exists to facilitate the body count. Good horror has the incompetence in plausible scenarios, so that it's like "well fuck, that could legitimate happen" and that also has the factor of "shit, they were being fairly competent and this thing is still picking them off with ease!"
I did really enjoy Tennessee though. He had that amiable vibe, was very easy to like. With so many characters losing spouses and grieving with such colourful variety, he still managed to stand out; he cried for a minute, and then decided he was gonna do whatever it takes, no matter how suicidally risky, to save everyone else. Coolguy.
I'm still of the opinion that even with so little screen time Danny Mcbride gave the second best performance of the film behind Fassbender.
There are no other options. So, this praise, while earnest, is faint.
Apothe0sis on
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
An example of good scifi/supernatural horror is Stranger Things. Pretty much everybody is an actual person, which makes the whole situation infinitely more engaging. If you fill a scifi horror movie with inhumanely-stupid idiots, you've done nothing more than make the equivalent of Jason X where the whole movie is pretty much just a bunch of stupid reasons to murder people in horrible ways.
Except a movie like that is at least aware of how campy it is, instead of trying to take itself seriously. Dumber-than-dirt characters in a serious movie make the whole flick a pointless waste of time. It's lazy and there's no need at all for it.
I can't help but feel like this is Ridley trying to recapture the magic that went into Alien and what made the movie something different and subsequently special. Except that I don't think he knows what made Alien different and special. Given the themes he's attempting (and failing to the point of almost parody) to address in Covenant and Prometheus he doesn't even seem to understand Alien. Most of all he doesn't seem to understand the basic premise of the title. The title "Alien" is succinct and apt to the entirety of the film. There's nothing more needed to explain what's going on.
With David becoming the source of everything alien, it's going in the exact opposite direction of Alien.
With the switch of terminology from the Space Jockeys to that of The Engineers, I got a bad feeling as to how this set of movies was going to play out. Covenant confirms it.
All opinions are my own and in no way reflect that of my employer.
this review pretty much sums up my appreciation for the film. i'm not surprised to see ebert's protege enjoy it so much, since roger himself loved Prometheus and i really think it's a fantastic sequel of at least that movie, if not Alien & Aliens...
As in all of the “Alien” films, characters do tremendously stupid things with such regularity that you pretty much have to stop judging the movie by real-world logic. Instead you have to judge it by the standards of a fever dream or nightmare, a Freudian-Jungian narrative where the thing you fear most is what happens to you, and where you’re doing stuff like going to work naked or trying to climb across the face of a skyscraper or accepting someone’s invitation to look into, say, the sticky maw of a xenomorph egg that just opened (the latter actually happens in “Covenant”)...
As you can tell, I Ioved this movie so much that its flaws—which include a cannon fodder sameness in the minor characters and a puzzling failure to develop the religious dimension laid out early in the script, except as it relates to science—barely registered for me. “Covenant” has its own personality and rhythm, a remarkable achievement on its own considering how many “Alien” films have been made over almost four decades. And it touches on so many of the recurring obsessions in Scott’s long career (he turns 80 next year) that it feels like a summation of everything he’s about. The macho Ridley Scott, the unexpectedly tender Scott, and the maker of Biblical epics, conspiracy thrillers, fables, and unabashed eye candy advertisements are all represented here.
there's a point earlier in the review about how it bridges the newer movies not just with Alien but with Blade Runner, which i actually mentioned to my mate after we saw this - it almost felt like it was deliberately teasing the upcoming sequel at times. i am usually skeptical of trying to find compelling characterisation in robotic characters, but for my money Scott's mastered it. that's a far more important factor to me than deciding not to bother with the majority of the human grunts, at least in this series
Posts
A dot, a hyphen and a dash. Fuck off.
Also, the thing is, even real science is populated by dumb names that have no actual meaning for what the thing they are naming is or does, they just stuck around.
Like "chromosome" just means "colored body", and has nothing to do with DNA or anything. The xenomorphs having scientific names that everyone disregards in favor of the first thing someone called them is probably one of the most realistic things about the entire franchise.
That's what bugs me (ha!). The first thing they were called was a general term for an unclassified alien species. So, do they stop calling everything else xenomorphs? It's silly. It's like calling great white sharks capital 'f' "Fish".
Apparently they're identified specifically as Xenomorph XX121 in the Weyland Yutani report, which I kinda want now.
https://www.amazon.com/Alien-Weyland-Yutani-Report-S-Perry/dp/160887866X
Forget the dot, what kind of monster uses two kinds of dash in one compound? How about a pipe? Who knows how those dashes are going to render in a given character set.
It'll be fine without.
If you like slow moving movies that try pull off suspense while simultaneously telegraphing every plot point, then dive in.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
But then you have to worry about their AI going rampant and deciding that Humanity has had it's day.
Then you've got Skynet, only the synthetics have the ultimate in high ground advantage.
But this film has the kind of "humanity" where I would always root for the machines, so Skynet taking over and killing all the moron humans before they can turns into xenomorphs is pretty okay with me.
Alien: Isolation does this so well. It's a love letter to the design of the original film.
Heck, look at something like Stranger Things. Does a great job of set design for a small 80s town, but the TV screens are just props with the video part filled in digitally. Though at least that show genuinely makes the effort. But this is all stuff from a Fox movie studio; the meddlers there really don't give a shit about continuity or believability, as long as they can force out something to make some money with.
Most TV screens and computer monitors in any show/movie are filled in digitally. But point still stands, it's tough to even find a CRT to use as a prop now.
Also the people in this movie are egrariously stupid to the point where the movie feels very contrived and by the numbers. It's a very obvious narrative and in a bad way, too.
Am I missing something? The crew seemed pretty sympathetic to me. The worst person in the whole movie
Now you mention it I'd have liked to see the Android Wars referenced in Alien: Resurrection. Go totally Blade Runner with that direction and
Whereas a lot of us fans view the 70s chunky SF aesthetic as great design, it seems like a lot of Hollywood disagrees, or at least would rather use newer film tech.
I haven't seen this yet, but I always though Prometheus largely fit into the look of Alien/Aliens. It doesn't look precisely the same, but that's ok with me.
Maybe we can go with the Nostromo does have all that hologram stuff built in, but it's broken and our illustrious mechanics Brett and Parker don't know how to fix it.
Another thing that jumped out was Mother having voice commands on the Covenant, the crew could speak aloud and have conversations with it, but on the Nostromo it seemed like she was relegated to prerecorded messages and couldn't give 'active' responses outside of the text interface on her computer terminal. That could be incongruous tech levels, or again just an example of the Nostromo being broken.
I chalked that up to the Nostromo being the space equivalent of a semi-truck, while the Prometheus was a space cadillac that had been worked over by a high end custom car shop that had been given a book full of blank checks.
After 3, it seems the mandate to become more experimental/philosophical crept into the franchise, and we get a ton of films with aliens as metaphors, human characters as caricatures, and a loss of focus on what made the original films great. Prometheus was the nadir of this so far - a movie filled with cyphers acting like idiots so the director could tell a theologically tinged grand story about life and creation. It sounds like Covenant falls into this trap too.
The franchise needs another installment that is just a solid, grounded story about a group of characters who feel real dealing with a threat that they are barely able to survive. No greater meaning, just them people who feel like people versus a bunch of insectoid monsters.
Covenant is the best take on this aspect I've sen since Aliens. Alien vs Predator movies don't count, and they're terrible.
I did really enjoy Tennessee though. He had that amiable vibe, was very easy to like. With so many characters losing spouses and grieving with such colourful variety, he still managed to stand out; he cried for a minute, and then decided he was gonna do whatever it takes, no matter how suicidally risky, to save everyone else. Coolguy.
It's interesting that I kind of have the opposite problem with the franchise, as a whole. I think Alien holds up shockingly well to analysis. Like, if you want to read it as an allegory for modern anti-feminism, that shit works. You have a psuedo-intellectual (literally, a synthetic scientist) backed up by an oppressive corporate/industrial atmosphere who finds an emotionless, cruel, violent, invasive dick-monster that reproduces without needing women and goes "that's it boys, we found the perfect organism". It's the sort of richly textured, evocative movie that begs to be seen through different lenses over time, but it also stands great just as a straightforward adventure. It's like a good book.
Each of the first four movies is a unique, but genuine feeling experiment in directorial vision. Sure the latter two kind of suck, but they still feel like they were honest efforts at making a whole new piece. They feel honest. Everything since then has felt like a retread, trying to capture something without understanding it.
I think this even happened to Prometheus. Ridley Scott, I think, understood that his first movie was both a working genre flick and something that could be held up to deeper thematic analysis, and wanted to recapture that lightning by trying to ensure that both things happened in the movie. What we ended up with is a movie that feels like two halves that don't gel well together, and on top of that, neither half is particularly well-executed by itself. On top of that even the Alien thing doesn't feel well integrated, with all of the recognizable franchise bits feeling like a cut up of concept art from the first film rearranged and sort of decoupaged onto the surface.
I haven't seen Covenant yet, but the trailers looked almost worse for that. The bits I saw were very "look guys! I'm doing the first Alien again!" Down to nearly reshooting scenes from the original. I can't say this is a fair assessment of the movie as again, I'm only going off the trailers, but it's definitely why I haven't seen it in theaters yet.
That is almost word for word my brothers comment to me after we got out of the movie.
I could only respond "That's what the audience said they wanted after Prometheus, more Alien, less not Alien."
Ridley Scott directed The Martian, so I have no doubt the guy can still make good films when a studio bothers to let him.
For me it's worth it because the whole 'search for creation' theme has been treated well, with interesting subtextual support and with the help of the best performance of an android since Data. I was really impressed - but I liked Prometheus so much that I assumed a sequel could never do it justice, so I'm weird.
I would at least consider watching Resurrection because, as weird as it gets, it's a decent action Alien flick and the characters are not stunningly idiotic as a rule. No way could I sit through Prometheus again, cringing past things like supposed "scientists" picking up and handling utterly unknown alien lifeforms.
edit: it stems from horror more than sci-fi - the sense that the next death on the horizon is foreshadowed by an obvious mistake. It's important to the internal logic of films with high body counts or it comes off as arbitrary...
edit edit: Maybe I've just grown more forgiving of cliches in my old age
I mean I guess she had her reasons, but if I'd gone through what she'd gone through and managed to make it back to Earth I'd never fuckin' leave again.
And she didn't even make a difference in the end. Nobody made it out of Acheron alive. (Thanks, Alien 3).
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But the point is that she got away. Then went back in.
Maybe not a "stupid" decision so much as a tragic one.
I'm still of the opinion that even with so little screen time Danny Mcbride gave the second best performance of the film behind Fassbender.
It was a space station but they never said what planet it was orbiting. You saw a planet in a few shots.
I'd really have to argue against that. In Alien, the situation arises from a combination of human compassion overriding protocol (to let the facehugger-bearing crewman onto the ship), the danger being outside of human experience, and the synth actively sabotaging the crew's efforts to destroy the xenomorph. Pretty much nobody makes a decision that is in any way inhumanly stupid, they all make very human and realistic choices. Ripley survives not because she is the only person who actually has a brain, but because she manages to stay alive long enough to learn to get the hell away from the xenomorph. She's tough and smart, but also lucky. Even the original xenomorph infection there is the result of completely normal human behavior; there was virtually no indication of the eggs holding hostile lifeforms, especially since they were on a rock that was completely lethal to all known life.
In Aliens, Ripley's choice is a mix of facing her own fears and being reassured by simply advising for a military force going out to destroy the threat outright. The only dumb people are the officer and the Burke, and both of them are dumb in very, very normal ways. The officer is simply inexperienced and green (which is a pretty typical, and common, recipe for people in the military) so he gets manipulated by Burke. Burke is greedy, which makes him terribly shortsighted and unimaginative; again, this isn't unrealistic stupidity, this is pretty normal crap from career corporate types. The Marines are all experienced and trained, they just get fucked by bad info and bad orders; none of them does stupid shit like being in a hostile environment and poking something very obviously unknown.
After Aliens, people get really stupid, really hard. The inmates in Alien 3 were morons down to almost the last person, which was pretty stupid; being a prison inmate doesn't make you brain-damaged or idiotic, it just means you're in prison. The Resurrection folks were decently intelligent, but that was just kind of a weird move. The AvP movies are crammed with stupid people. Prometheus seemed to be almost entirely filled with morons.
The good Alien movies are filled with people that act like people. The shitty ones are filled with bloodbags there only to get brutally murdered in awful ways instead of putting any actually worthwhile horror writing in the movie. They're the equivalent of replacing human characters with emojis.
The problem with dumb characters is that later movies used to damn many of them.
Like Alien worked because you essentially had space truckers on what appeared to be a run down piece of shit. Wayland-Yutani probably underpaid the staff of Nostromo. Also probably overworked as well. I mean we know that Wayland-Yutani really does's give a shit about the crew. So perfectly plausible that a when some guy gets infected by the parasite, that no one says "Hey, on earth we have bugs that do this shit. Kane is probably dead, we should leave him and nuke this alien ship before some dumbass brings these fucking awful things into contact with anyone else." Hell, Ripley didn't want to let Kane back on the ship and tried to follow protocol.
Aliens works when you consider Wayland-Yutani's motives and that a corporate goon was put in charge of the operation. I suspect that Wayland-Yutani probably setup the mission to fail enough, but not completely, so that they had a shot at another specimen. I suspect that the company probably through in some dudes that would normally get discharged and then withheld a fair bit of information. Yes, they had Ripley, but she didn't have to deal with a hive of these things and probably didn't know that they could form hives, had queens and would get even more out of hand than dealing with a single drone.
After that they just through too much stupid into the movies. Prometheus is has not excuses. Underpaid space truckers and space marines, led by someone that doesn't give a shit about them. Yeah, not surprised when things go fubar quickly. Then you get Prometheus, "we have the best, the very best scientist, but they are fucking idiots." My response is fuck you Ridley Scott, that is hack writing. I also think it takes away from the horror factor when the incompetence clearly exists to facilitate the body count. Good horror has the incompetence in plausible scenarios, so that it's like "well fuck, that could legitimate happen" and that also has the factor of "shit, they were being fairly competent and this thing is still picking them off with ease!"
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Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
There are no other options. So, this praise, while earnest, is faint.
Except a movie like that is at least aware of how campy it is, instead of trying to take itself seriously. Dumber-than-dirt characters in a serious movie make the whole flick a pointless waste of time. It's lazy and there's no need at all for it.
I can't help but feel like this is Ridley trying to recapture the magic that went into Alien and what made the movie something different and subsequently special. Except that I don't think he knows what made Alien different and special. Given the themes he's attempting (and failing to the point of almost parody) to address in Covenant and Prometheus he doesn't even seem to understand Alien. Most of all he doesn't seem to understand the basic premise of the title. The title "Alien" is succinct and apt to the entirety of the film. There's nothing more needed to explain what's going on.
With the switch of terminology from the Space Jockeys to that of The Engineers, I got a bad feeling as to how this set of movies was going to play out. Covenant confirms it.
there's a point earlier in the review about how it bridges the newer movies not just with Alien but with Blade Runner, which i actually mentioned to my mate after we saw this - it almost felt like it was deliberately teasing the upcoming sequel at times. i am usually skeptical of trying to find compelling characterisation in robotic characters, but for my money Scott's mastered it. that's a far more important factor to me than deciding not to bother with the majority of the human grunts, at least in this series