It tried to be both Alien and Aliens at the same time and wasn’t very good at either. The plot relied too much on stupidity from people who should know better and the ending was embarrassingly telegraphed to the point where it could not have been a surprise to literally anyone except the dumbasses in the movie.
Having spent an overnight, I think it’s worse than that. It’s not so much that it tried to be both, it’s that it tried to be many.
It made some real errors.
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Killed over the star of a previous movie that, regardless of how well regarded the movie was, should have been the hook of the next movie. Alien3 did that.
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Spent so much time on world-building and exposition that it forgot to have a story. Just like Prometheus.
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Had underdeveloped characters who served only as plot filler. Just like Alien: Resurrection.
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Had mind-numbingly dumb characters. Just like Prometheus.
It’s not a good idea, when you’re recovering from one bad movie, to decide to recapitulate bad things from prior movies.
It had stupid scenes too, eg. two different people slipping over on the same blood. Just looked comical to see it back-to-back like that. And the whole third of the movie (in between David firing his flare gun and the Mortal Kombat David vs Walter fight) had everyone stuck in the same gloomy dark sets splitting up for no good reason other than to do daft things to drive the plot. And the shower scene, every stalk’n’slash has to have murder in a shower.
Ridley Scott has form though, how many stupid decisions were made in Alien(1979) because of the cat? “Let’s split up and look for the cat” over and over and over.
There is a difference between a bunch of space truckers doing stupid shit when completely out of their element and people who are specifically there to colonize a planet being total bumbling fools while doing the one specific thing they were chosen to do. The crew of the Covenant should be a lot more competent than the crew of the Nostromo.
So I caught up on Prometheus last week and agreed with most here that it was a pretty but largely incoherent mess. So I didn’t have very high hopes going into this.
I thought it was okay. By no means a cinematic masterpiece, but a decent enough story competently, and sometimes beautifully, told. I’m not sorry I saw it (or embarrassed for cast and crew afterwards), but I don’t think it will stick with me for long.
I think it’s notable that this is the first Alien franchise movie where the Alien is not the monster. It’s a monster, certainly, but its villainy is secondary to the primary villain, similar to how Ash or Burke or the military nutjobs in Resurrection were all bad guys, but not the principal bad guy.
I liked parts of the film, and its got fewer stupid people than Prometheus, but it doesn’t have the sweeping visual imagination of that film either. I was hoping this would represent some continuity to the first film (making it Scott’s trilogy), but it seems more of an offshoot. Question: Do we know what happened to David’s “batch”? Wasn’t the planet from Prometheus where the Nostromo eventually went? So what happened to David’s biological tinkering and his huge colonist clan of likely guinea pigs? Why open this whole thematic can of worms about his god-complex when it doesn’t have much to do with the large Alien arc? Am I missing something?
Sorry there weren’t more interesting actors–Fassbender is great as always, but Crudup was wasted and Bichir is given little to do. McBride is very likable in a reined-in performance, and Waterston does a good job with the well-staged action finale, even if it takes too long to find her footing (more the writers’ fault than hers). But too many of the characters are too generic and bland.
And after the film’s first casualty occurs, am I a bad person to
instantly feel less bad about the captain’s death when I learned it was James Franco?Lol.
So sadly, lots of familiar stuff but nothing special.
Very disappointing. I won’t spoil anything but when two of the characters (I won’t identify them, let’s just say they’re supposed to know everything), when these two start quoting from Ozymandias and then identify the poem as being by Byron you begin to wonder just how much care was taken with this movie. (It is of course by Shelley.)
On the evidence of this production Ridley Scott needs to put the Aliens out of their misery. Prometheus was bad enough, this is worse. No inventiveness, nothing new, just the same ol’ same ol’ and it all looks very very tired. Let’s hope he does better with his Blade Runner reboot.
I’ve just had another think about this and I figure that the problem is the aliens themselves. They just aren’t frightening now. This is the perennial problem with all horror franchises. When Alien first came out it scared the shit out of people. The alien was new, it was different and it was very strange. Now all these years later it’s like a familiar relative you see every year at Christmas. Uncle Bob, with his funny ways and odd habits. Same thing happened with Jason, Freddy and all the others. Oh it’s whatsisname again, look he’s got a funny new hat on.
There’s no fear any more and without fear you need a good story. Alien hasn’t had one of those for a long long time.
That was for plot reasons, the good robot even comments on it later.
The primary villain was stupidity. It felt like one of those cheap teen horror movies, “Aliens at Camp Covenant!”. Replace the colony ship with a frat boy yacht, the bad robot with a disgruntled camp worker pissed at the stupid kids, and there you have it. It was an endless series of stupid characters making stupid decisions absent any sort of forethought or emergency preparedness, being sent into the meat grinder one at a time in glorily gory detail. So much of the movie could’ve been prevented with 15 minutes of mission planning:
Why were was there no biohazard protection for a landing team on an unexplored planet, why is there no quarantine procedure (did Apollo never happen in this universe?), why is there no authentication for the robots, why is there a fuel tank next to the weapons locker, why didn’t they just wait out the storm before landing, why would anyone assume the fortress thing was safe when it’s clearly wide open to the outside, why did a subsequent android designed to overtake the previous-gen one not have a way of shutting it down aside from hand-to-hand wrestling, why didn’t they use drones to do the scouting, why do they always travel solo when exploring dark places after seeing friends get decapitated, and how the hell did the human species survive long enough for interstellar travel if they can’t overcome the worst horror tropes?
It was okay I guess. Why can’t the Alien from a movie called Alien be an actual alien? Do we really need this convoluted back story?
Michael Fassbender’s acting was so good I didn’t even realize he was playing both characters. I loved the flute scene.
I kept wondering why nobody realized that the droid on the ship at the end was David, not Walter. I was like, ‘‘That is clearly Michael Fassbender!’’ Then during the credits I realized they both were Michael Fassbender.
Did you miss when Walter called him on that?
So I saw Prometheus for the first time about three days ago, and I thought it was a giant pile of WTF. In my view, Convenant did a lot of things right that Prometheus did wrong. The obligatory ‘‘wake up’’ scene was innovative, I liked the characters and they cared about each other. Prometheus tried and failed to be so many things, but Covenant seemed to have a clearer vision. It was a horror movie before it was anything else, and that first horror scene was a slam-dunk for me. Plus, the aliens are always awesome.
What bugs me about both films is that the writers seem to want to say something about faith and science, but won’t just pull the damned trigger. As a result it’s just a shoehorned, pointless mess, as
Captain Christian is established as having faith, but there is zero arc whatsoever to his character. His faith appears to be completely irrelevant to the plot, as well as his largely meaningless death.
If you want to say something meaningful about religion or faith, it’s not sufficient to establish that a character is religious. He has to interact with, or impact his world in some way.
I also thought there were elements of the film that were way too slasher-cheesy-tropey, really beneath the franchise. (I haven’t seen A3 or Resurrection.)
Shower scene, really?
But overall I thought it was a good film, mostly because of Fassbender, and I would give it a solid B.
Reply, I considered the things you did, but then I considered the recent conversations we’ve had about Mt. Everest on this board, and exploration in general, and it occurred to me that explorers are probably a lot more likely to take stupid risks than regular people, and have often died for the trouble. I’m not sure it’s a problem with the film, so much as human nature.
For the teens that look for R ratings with nudity 
You know, I could buy that if they were a scouting team or mercenaries, but they’re not! As even the characters themselves point out, they’re responsible for the lives of 2000+ colonists and straying from a meticulously planned mission.
If Everest explorers were bringing an entire town of immigrants with them, you’d expect them to be somewhat more careful…
[spoiler]You have a spacefaring civilization that can plan faster-than-light travel, staffed with trained scientists and armed military types, but nobody has the foresight to wear protective equipment upon encountering a planet with obvious signs of life that they’re completely unadapted for…? Even if they just saw “wheat” or that lake, there must be a whole host of foreign microbes that their immune systems aren’t equipped to handle. Now, maybe nothing on that planet evolved to attack humans either, but just the potential for allergies or unexpected chemical reactions… just crazy.
And what kind of colony ship sends the freaking captain and first officer on ground missions and rescues?
Even the ship itself is bizarre. Why did it have access codes for an outdated android that the same company purposely deprecated, why did it hang its most important cargo – the colonists – on unstabilized coat racks that would collapse and explode with the lightest stir, why did it only have one shipboard android instead of a whole crew of them, why is there no way to authenticate them upon returning to a ship, why did it not warn the crew of a foreign lifeform before left… ugh.
[/spoiler]
It’s not so much that they took great risks (which is itself a problem with a colony ship, but possibly believable in extenuating circumstances like finding an amazingly great planet), but that they took completely unfathomable, unnecessary ones. It’s like they never learned from any space program ever. Sort of a steampunk space journey put together by a bunch of amateurs, but the ship is too well put together in other ways to make that believable; it wasn’t a junked space pirate ship, for example.
Anyway, it’s just a movie… probably picking it apart too much
Well, this is the thing. If the story is good, nobody remembers all the people doing stupid shit. I had a friend remark that he thought Covenant was ‘‘lacking in character development.’’
I watched Alien earlier this week and the character development is virtually nil. There is no real reason to care about anyone on that ship. The characters also do some incredibly dumb things. Yet it’s one of the best movies ever made (IMO.) Alien only ever tries to be one thing: creepy as all hell. And it succeeds, grandly. Even the rewatch was stressful, because the tension is non-stop, even though nothing really happens for like the first half hour. As best as I can tell, the only reason we even care about Ripley is because she’s not stupid. She is the universal everyman stuck in a shit situation and we can all see ourselves there, trying to think our way to survival in the midst of pants-shitting fear. Scott manages to accomplish this without giving us a shred of information about her backstory and a bare minimum of dialog.
This is the latest craft tip I’m learning as a fiction writer: Tell a good story and it covers a multitude of sins. The more I study the stuff, the more I notice it in the media I consume. I’m trying to become more thoughtful about what makes things work and what makes them fail. To the extent that Covenant fails, I think it’s because it’s not certain what story it wants to tell.
I thought the story in *Covenant * was decent, so it only covered some sins, but it’s worth noting I rarely struggle to suspend my disbelief in a film. I don’t tend to notice the nitpicks that others do. And I just watched Prometheus, so my bar for people doing dumb shit was set pretty low.
That’s a good analysis. If there were genuine new thrills, it probably could’ve been forgiven.
But yet another facehugger? At the eggs, no less? More chestbursters? Another bad robot? The alien nanoswarm was an interesting new thing, as was the struggle over faith/religion, but both of those went nowhere. Arguably even the central struggle of “android seeks to find and surpass its once-humanity, trying to figure out where humans fit in in the midst of it all” is already better done by the Data/Lore/Borg storylines of Trek, or Her, or Ex Machina, or Blade Runner, or Automata, or Transcendence…
I can’t remember a single surprise from the film, a single scene that didn’t scream predictability 
I think you nailed it when you said the movie tried to do too much, failing at each. It felt a lot like Rogue One, meaning it was 90% fan service and 10% storyline, but with an extra 40% stupid added.
Really, though, joke’s on me: I paid $20 to see it in the theater, fully knowing I would probably be disappointed, but I would gladly do so again for the next Alien flop, because… aliens!
To be fair, aliens are pretty damned cool. They do about 90% of the heavy lifting in these films anyhow. I think the reason they are so creepy cool is because they are totally believable as biological organisms. Like in the original Alien, Ripley found it sleeping.
Jazz hands!
To be fair, they only split up to look for the cat once; as Parker pointed out, “We had to bag the cat; now we’ll pick it up again on the tracker.” (Paraphrasing from memory).
And that’s before they knew what they were dealing with; at that point, they thought it wasn’t much more than some kind of space iguana.
The final “split” was Ripley going to prep the getaway shuttle, and Parker and Lambert going to get the necessary supplies to keep them alive on the shuttle.
It was Ripley’s one “dumb” decision to go back for the cat.
And it kind of humanizes her, doesn’t it? We all know it’s dumb, but we also know it’s the one other living thing she has left.
Nah, letting anything happen to the ship’s cat would have been really dumb. That’s at least nine years of bad luck.