It's a long one, with spoilers, got alot to say, what can I say? I saw it Friday at a 7:15pm showing, probably around 10 people in there. Certainly a polarizing film looking at all the comments from various sites! I’m probably sitting on the fence, I kind of love it and hate it in equal measure.
The great thing about Alien, Aliens and Alien III – even the horrid Resurrection to some degree – each movie once it ends, the franchise could stop there. Viewing Alien, it’s a great standalone film. If they hadn’t made Aliens, it could have ended there assuming The Network eventually picked up Ripley…likewise Aliens, if Alien III had not been made, it could have ended there. Survivors go to sleep, Sulaco returns home. Alien III, the same. But neither Prometheus or Covenant are like that, and I keep hearing the word ‘niche’ – as each movie in the franchise is released and rapidly eclipsed by the next Marvel, DC, Star Wars or Pirates movie, it’s frustrating – I cannot help but think that because both Prometheus and Covenant end the way the way they do with each installment, I am therefore left hanging because as a viewer I don’t know if any more will be made, especially when each is blatantly set up for the next movie.
For Alien designs, I thought the Neomorph was good – the part where it is standing in its ‘adult’ form and about to attack Rosenthal was genuinely creepy as hell, but I was less impressed with the backburster sequence. The leading up to it with the Ledward and Karine characters was great – Ledward is in a bad way, he is helped to Medical then – he shakes around a lot, then the creature emerges like a cow giving birth. Schlooomp…splat. Thinking back to Alien and Aliens, there were screams from the victim, cracking of sinew, the audio track in Alien gave us the panicked heartbeat sounds as the scene took place…just pure violence when the creature burst its way out, forcefully, painfully. Here it was…schlooomp…splat. Overall the scene was really good if a little dumb, I don’t know why Faris locked Karine in there with Ledward rather than help her escape. I don’t understand why the Neomorph immediately went on the attack, and it acted like a cougar or something rather than something Alien that ran off to hide and grow. And Sgt. Lope – wtf happened there? He didn’t even have the facehugger on him for barely 10 seconds. By that reasoning, the cocooned colonist desperately pleading ‘kill meeee’ in Aliens was literally just placed there by an alien maybe an hour or two before Cpl. Dietrich found her.
The same can be said for the ‘Protomorph’….it’s as though they took all of the comments about the appearance of the Alien in Alien: Resurrection, AVP movies – all crap – and did the complete opposite of what the fans wanted. I sorely missed Giger’s work, the biomechanics. I wasn’t all that enamored with the change in designs in Prometheus – but I went with it. I don’t know why they changed the look of the derelict design in that movie, shaping it like a donut to suit a certain scene, they would have been better off using a whole different design / shape altogether. Before Ridley returned to the franchise I really wanted to see a biomechanical world, terrifying, alien. Think Giger’s other art he did. The origins of the Space Jockey, huge, four times the size of a human, growing out of the chair for purpose and function in the bomber he pilots. Two more films in and I’m still waiting to see that world. Instead I get giant bald Engineers just slightly bigger than a human and oh by the way what you saw in ‘Alien’ was a suit not a fossilized creature, Aliens that apparently are no longer Alien as they were created by humans via the android and run or crawl around and growl like tigers on LSD….why does everything have to be connected to ‘humans’? Why do the Engineers live on an Earth-like planet, in buildings so similar to ours? Are they even Engineers, because again the bald guys on this planet don’t look like they do in Prometheus….? Just….so…confused….
I loved some of the hardware and costumes. The lander was a really great design and loved the interior of it, but the Covenant I was less impressed by. The bridge looked great, and the garage looked very good; the layout of the crew hypersleep capsules laying flat looked similar to early Scott sketches of the hypersleep chamber for Alien. But the corridor designs sucked and were uninspiring. Just tubular and plain, with a ladderwell that one could easily fall down by mistake. And I wasn't impressed by the CGI 'animal' that ran through these well-lit corridors. The problem with the movie is that because of the way it ended, we’ll possibly see the same ship and therefore this look in the next movie if there is one. Another seven years will pass until the ship reaches its destination so it’ll be harder for them to connect the design aesthetic to what we see in Alien/s. But the crew, I could believe they are colonists, I thought all the characters were really good.
David and Walter were superb I thought; we had Walter who seemed innocent and loyal, kind of similar to Bishop in Aliens. As for David, the opening scene with Weyland was very good. We saw more of who Weyland is, a brilliant, wealthy genius pushing the new frontiers, but selfish, self serving and looks down upon on others, including his newest creation. And David later in the film takes on those characteristics, learned from his own ‘Father’. I thought that was well done. But I really wish Walter would’ve won. David though great has outstayed his welcome.
After the killing off of Hicks and Newt in Alien III, I don’t understand why Shaw was given a similar bumping off behind the scenes. This was stupid, and I wonder what Noomi Repace thinks of it all. I wanted to see the continuation of that character.
The franchise now is so far removed from what we saw in Alien and Aliens it's a little worrying. In Alien the titular creature was slow, calculating and lethal; seeing what it did to Dallas and Brett in the Director's Cut is horrible. The whole concept of ‘changing’ could be far more terrifying in these newer movies. I find the idea of humans, captured, and either cocooned (Alien, Aliens) or enduring the egg-morphing process – horrible. They did it for the Fifield character in Prometheus, but they replaced that with the inferior version we got in the movie. The egg-morphing process in Alien: Directors Cut I loved, and one interesting take on it was that it was developing the Queen Egg. That’s the trade-off for the Alien - no Queen, so it has to make one to continue the cycle, but it crawls away to hide in the Narcissus and die in the process. That was the horror. Instead now it’s way less horror, even less sci-fi, more fx-laden action. In Aliens, the action worked because we still had the horror, seeing what happed to the colonists.
The marketing on the movie was poor. Waaaay too much that gave things away. Was there really a need to show as much as they did in the trailers? We pretty much knew the fate of most characters before even seeing it. Even now key scenes have been up for a week on Youtube, taken by some idiot pointing a camera at the screen. Has Fox worked to take them down…? Nope. Merchandise has been poor. I have the Art Book on order but hear there isn’t much art in it. I was in a bookstore yesterday (they are still around) and saw they had the Covenant novelization there. Great, I thought. I turn to the back and the scene where Daniels realizes Walter is in fact David is not there. WTF? I thought and left without buying it. Apparently the NECA figures don’t look like the creatures that are in the movie according to folks on the Sideshow Freaks forum, and we continue to wait eons for Hot Toys to get their thumbs out their asses and give us new Alien franchise figures, and when they do – judging by early shots – it looks like the 1:6 scale Ripley is too short and amounts to the actress being 5 foot tall if converted to lifesize. It’s great now if you love bobbleheads, poptoys and fake posters printed in Thailand; instead I’m left to hunt down old Halcyon kits from the 1990’s. F&%K.
I really hope we get back to these ideas in the next movie. I really hope we don’t have another snarling, growling alien hopping around. I want a return to the horror and I’m hoping we haven’t seen the true Space Jockeys yet, and what we’ve seen so far is David trying to recreate the Alien rather than create it, and the Engineers so far a species attempt to steal the technology from another they are at war with, harkening back to the original Derelict being a bomber carrying tools of biological warfare.
Alien: Isolation is I think the only continuation of the series I like other than Alien I-III. I love how the Alien is depicted, how it appears and stalks, there is a real attempt to give you the familiar environments and worlds within the franchise. Even members of Seegson Security who you encounter later in the game wear basic Colonial Marine armor. It’s respectful of the source material without giving the kind of stupid ‘homage’ lines repeated in Alien: Covenant like ‘Walk in the park’. So for now, I’ll just continue to play that and keep my fingers crossed the next movie, if made, gives us what we are hoping for.
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