Honestly my biggest question on re-watch was: What do they do with the cat when everybody’s in hypersleep? Is he alone on the ship? Who scoops his litter?!! :eek:
My friend joked that the cat had a little mini-pod to sleep in and sure enough, at the end of the film…
I’m with others that think the movie was predictable and repetitive. Perhaps to be fair to the series, I should mention that I’ve only seen Alien, Aliens, Prometheus, and Covenant. But it all seemed so predictable and done better in previous films in the series (or even by other films entirely). I would have preferred either of these “twist” endings:
[spoiler]1. It really is Walter. He’s still good, and the colony ship goes on to the designated planet. Their report back to Earth helps set up Weyland-Yutani knowing about the xenomorph in Alien. Reasonably happy end of film.
Anyway, where is “A kind world, if we are kind” come from? (Apologies if I mangled the quote.) It sounds too stilted to be anything other than a quote. (Frankly, I think it sounds like something that should be in The Tempest.)
Sounds like a good description of Deathworld, in the Harry Harrison novel of that name (the first in a trilogy), believe it or not:
I rewatch Alien now and then, as it’s one of my favorite movies. It seems like it plays on a continuous loop on IFC, so why not. I’m always blown away by how many little things that Ash does which foreshadow that he’s the plotting bad android. Virtually everything he says, every little action he takes, is for the purpose of getting the bug on board and letting it feast on the crewmembers. I see something new and nuanced in his performance every single time I rewatch the movie.
Well, it’s where I came down on the issue, which is why I put the descriptor “dumb” in quotation marks.
As for Covenant, TV Tropes does its usual bang-up job summarizing the progress of the Idiot Ball, and it’s passage downfield:
I think that in the original Alien the crew’s “stupidity” is much more “natural,” in that “space-truckers” on a bog standard commercial deep space tug are not suited, mentally, emotionally, by education, training, experience, or inclination, for dealing with the Xenomorph. Add in the “inside man” in the android Ash, working covertly against the crew, and I think the story flows quite naturally.
Likewise with Aliens, where the Marine’s experience and capabilities works against them; they dismiss/underestimate the Xenomorphs because, in their experience, no such thing existed, and they were (overly) confident in their technology and firepower. Hilarity ensues.
Alien3 and Resurection seem to repeat the patterns of the first two movies.
But with Prometheus and Covenant we have trained and skilled specialists, in their respective fields, scientists and such, who should know better than space-truckers, Marines, or lifers on a penal colony, yet do incredibly stupid, reckless, and irresponsible things anyway.
When they inevitably and all-too-predictably die by their own stupidity, I get a grim, smug, mildly annoyed, “I-Told-You-So” sense of satisfaction, and disappointment in the story.
Yeah, that’s actually a pretty compelling argument. Especially seeing TV Tropes lay it all out like that.
For a second I thought the thread title was Alien: Thomas Covenant.
The protagonist wears a white gold ring and complains about being a leper while the aliens attack. He can’t help because he’s too conflicted with himself.
Carry on…
I thought people in this thread might enjoy [today’s Cracked article:
](http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-super-dumb-decisions-characters-make-in-alien-covenant/)
It’s easily MST3k with a higher budget.
Hahaha, great.
I actually liked the blood slippage, though. That’s the kind of realistic dumb-shit thing someone would do when terrified.
I see psychological profiles will be a thing of the past in the future.
“Hey cowboy, wanna helm this colony ship?” “Sure you can take your wife as part of the crew. There’s no chance you’d choose finding her to your duty to the ship and the other 2000-3000 souls entrusted to you.”
“Quarantine, smarantine! That’s just boilerplate the insurance adjusters make us throw in.”
We saw it yesterday afternoon and liked it okay. We saw Prometheus too and liked that okay, but that was five years ago, so there was something puzzling us. In this new Aliens, Did David admit to having released the weaponized alien virus on purpose back in Prometheus? Because that’s not how we’re remembering it, although admittedly we’ve not spent much of the past five years pondering over the movi
Saw it at the dollar theater on a whim last night and my 15yo daughter leaned over and whispered “Daddy, these characters are so dumb it’s ruining my enjoyment of the movie.”
I’ve never seen any of the Alien/s moves that came before this one, but got talked into watching this yesterday with someone who really wanted to watch the blu-ray. Are all the characters in the Aliens franchise this stupid? Okay, so they weren’t quite as stupid as the crew in Life, but damn.
Starting with what is considered one of the worst of the franchise probably wasn’t the best move.
The first Alien is definitely worth watching. They don’t act stupidly, but they are out of their depth. It’s structured pretty much like a horror film, but is very gritty and realistic. The second one, Aliens, is considered the best by most fans, and is very different, more of a military movie. They’re not so much stupid as cocky.
I suggest you try to wipe your mind of Alien: Covenant and go watch these two, maybe as a Halloween double feature next month. I am confident that you’ll get something out of them that will be worth your time.
The earlier Alien movies featured people who did dumb things because they were completely out of their element and utterly incapable of being able to deal with what they were facing. The latest two Alien movies feature people who are complete failures at the most basic requirements of their actual jobs before the Alien even shows up.
maybe if theres a directors cut, now that the DVD is out. we may get to see a better cut.
An hour or so into the film, my fetus daughter popped out of my wife’s abdominopelvic cavity and said exactly the same thing!
I finally saw it last week. It was ok. I think I’d place it at a distant 3rd after Alien and Aliens. Slightly better than Alien3. I share the frustration of everyone at how dumb the characters were, but they were arguably less dumb than in Prometheus.
The sad thing is that it’s so easy to fix many of these problems with a little bit of writing. They already have a rogue wave that damages the ship. Instead of having them hem and haw over whether to stop at the close planet, just have the ship be disabled enough that they can’t keep going to the original destination.
A single line could also explain the lack of protective gear: they don’t have it because their planned destination had already been thoroughly vetted. Or it got incinerated in the fire.
The other thing that I disliked, and they have done this in basically every bad Alien-related movie, is that the in-world timeline for growth of the xenomorphs is far too accelerated.
In Alien, the facehugger stayed on for hours, and the bug came out hours after it fell off. It grew quickly, but only after finding the food stores. In Aliens, the delayed implantation/impregnation cycle is even a plot point, as Burke intends to take Ripley back in stasis.
Covenant shows the captain get face-hugged into xeno into fully-grown in, what, under an hour? It also shows a facehugger successfully implant after a few seconds of attachment. But that one mysteriously takes longer to hatch. The inconsistency is dumb.
I cosign all the complaints Reply put in spoiler tags. Plus the TV Tropes stuff, the inconsistencies iamthewalrus points out, and pretty much all the other complaints people had. I do disagree with most of you about earlier installments, though: I loved both the original Alien and also Prometheus, and disliked Aliens (I was appalled at the time that they made the sequel to a moody ‘70s sci-fi/horror film into a dumb ‘80s action shoot-em-up).
You sure about that? I thought the captain’s gullibility was much worse. After all, he had already seen alien critters on a killing spree, while the scientists approaching the “snake” had not yet seen anything do anyone harm.
What drives me nuts is that Scott apparently decided to “fix” a bunch of stuff people disliked about Prometheus, but he “fixed” the stuff I liked and doubled down on that “stupidity” flaw. Otherwise, it was mostly just a rehash of what happened in earlier movies. Bleah. I would love to know what this movie would have been like without all the audience and studio feedback that it needed to go back to action-horror with the same old xenomorphs. (The massive success of The Force Awakens is killing any chance of originality in other franchise sequels.)