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So after viewing it did you like Covenant or not.
LIKE 29%  29%  [ 10 ]
DONT LIKE 35%  35%  [ 12 ]
ON THE FENCE 35%  35%  [ 12 ]
Total votes : 34
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PostPosted: Thu May 25, 2017 2:47 pm 
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I did see it opening weekend. Like most, I enjoyed the first half more than the second half.

-I wasn't a particular "Shaw" fan, but the off screen brutal death wreaks of Hicks/Newt. Horrifying though it may, why bother to feature characters if you deny them a proper end. Its like they learned nothing and think "oh by the way, they are dead" provides any kind of satisfaction to the viewer. I guess in this case it is all marketing. They have mid-prequel books to sell I guess...

-The kung fu robots really makes no sense. I don't mean from a "it doesn't belong in a alien movie" standpoint. I simply mean, if the synthetic people had those abilities, a newer model like Ash would have killed Ripley in 2 seconds and not needed the awkward struggle with a magazine in the mouth move. It would have been a neck snap and its over. It makes Ash look like an inferior spare from the reject pile and undermines the first film.

-The entire idea that Engineers made humans, who made robots, who made the perfect killing organism does NOT bring me into some kind of ironic circle of life (as I believe was intended). It just strikes me as inanely egotistical and cheapens the Alien creature to me. Like nothing profound in the universe can happen without 'man' getting his grubby fingerprints on it? Everything in the universe has to be a result of a diabolical man made presence? Puhhhleeezzzz. (intense eye roll).

-This struck me as a side story more than prequal to anything. This movie at its core adds very little to the setup of what we see. Clearly David didn't kill all the engineers as some must be around to provide the ship that lands on LV426. Other than knowing David is unhinged, we are literally not a single step closer to knowing what happened on LV426.

-The ending angered me. I don't hope for 'happy endings' in movies anymore, but the bad guy not only winning, but strongly suggesting he is free to brutally mutilate and experiment on 2,000 innocent souls is just crazy depressing. Not in a profound impactful artful way, just in a "seriously, that is f-d up and I am now pissed off' way.

-The one thing I will defend is I have seen a lot of people act like David having eggs is a middle finger from Ridley to Cameron. I don't believe that is the case at all. David said clearly the weapon was infinitely adaptable or something to that effect (forget the exact quote). In the 2 prequals we saw many variations of the creature, but they ultimately keep the general theme going. Clearly this weapon has a general blue print that its mutations tend to gravitate towards. While the variations can be quite drastic (trilobite in prometheus to spores to traditional face hugger) the core goal and results are roughly the same. It is easily imagined that an egg delivery system can result in numerous ways the same as variations of the facehuggers and final creatures can. Different paths in getting from A to B are clearly outlined, so it is quite easy to think David just used a different path to get his eggs where another kind of mutation might result in a queen.


-Side note, why do all the practical effects and suit aliens have their shoulder tubes seperate from the body (arcing over the shoulder not attached) but the alien on screen seems to have no shoulder tubes at all? Kinda weird. Like they CGI'd them out. Why build them if you will just CGI them out? Plus now all the action figures are wrong, because they used the separate tube look they were given prior to the film release (not that I will buy any of them. just saying. weird).


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PostPosted: Thu May 25, 2017 4:27 pm 
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Did it feel to anyone else that this was Ridley doing the smallest amount of Alien fan service (contractual obligation?) and then continuing on with his exploration of David as some sort of Modern Prometheus style Frankenstein?

There could easily have been no Giger aliens in this film at all, and perhaps that would have been preferable. Ridley continues to show a profound lack of understanding both of what made Alien great, and what a prequel is supposed to do.

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PostPosted: Thu May 25, 2017 4:52 pm 
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bigbisont wrote:
Like nothing profound in the universe can happen without 'man' getting his grubby fingerprints on it? Everything in the universe has to be a result of a diabolical man made presence? Puhhhleeezzzz. (intense eye roll).


And funnily enough that is the opposite of the Lovecraftian approach many saw in Alien where mankind is utterly insignificant in the cosmos and lucky not to be crushed like an insect by elder beings.


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PostPosted: Thu May 25, 2017 5:17 pm 
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Yes! While there were some very Lovecraftian overtones to Prometheus, this film makes the alien's origin really mundane and centered on humans.

I really don't see how this will match with the ancient crashed derelict with its "fossilized" (sic) pilot.

Also, I now hate the Covenant poster with the writhing horde of Aliens and the hint of a Queen. False advertising once again gets my hopes up with this series...

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PostPosted: Fri May 26, 2017 11:57 am 
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retrogarde wrote:
Did it feel to anyone else that this was Ridley doing the smallest amount of Alien fan service (contractual obligation?) and then continuing on with his exploration of David as some sort of Modern Prometheus style Frankenstein?

There could easily have been no Giger aliens in this film at all, and perhaps that would have been preferable. Ridley continues to show a profound lack of understanding both of what made Alien great, and what a prequel is supposed to do.


Oh, definitely. My understanding is the Alien came down from Fox. Ridley wants to play with David, Fox seems to think the only problem people had with Prometheus was the lack of Aliens so they force him to include that in some fashion. And you can totally feel it.

That said, I enjoyed the film over all, more so than Prometheus and Resurrection. However, I do think it's strengths lie in the first half and David. When the Aliens appear and get shoehorned in, the film took a turn for me.

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PostPosted: Sun May 28, 2017 3:22 pm 
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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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PostPosted: Thu Jun 01, 2017 10:34 am 
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Burner wrote:
Alien1099 wrote:
It was ok. Like Resurrection and Prometheus before it, there was so freaking much wasted potential. Ridley Scott is the new George Lucas. Nobody seems to tell this man "NO RIDLEY, this doesn't make ANY sense. We need to rewrite this part.


"OKAY" "Like Resurrection and Prometheus before" ...okay? Oh man, there was nothing "okay" with these movies...in case "okay" is another word for "absolutely bullshit" you are right!

There was a separator there for those two ideas. Covenant is ok as a film, but of course is completely out of the league of the first two movies which were amazing, Aliens of course being my favorite movie of all time. Covenant was merely ok.

The last 3 alien movies have squandered all of the potential of the series though.


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PostPosted: Thu Jun 01, 2017 11:18 pm 
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It was very pretty, but over the next couple of days the stupid caught up which undermined it, and then I began to shred it. It really made me cross, and I'm someone who likes AVP!

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PostPosted: Mon Sep 10, 2018 7:18 am 
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I finally saw it.


Really good scenes, sets, dialogue, ideas and possibilities wasted. I know this has been covered, but really...

Who sanctioned a crew that would endanger an entire expedition of thousands of lives over and over?
Who allows their team to fracture and split up over and over when they lose someone every time?
Who vetted a whole crew that won't wear space suits into an unknown ecosystem?
Who chooses a second in command that no one seems to like or trust?
Who splits up less than 10 minutes into an unknown world?
Who smells unknown flora on an alien planet?
Who doesn't fortify a safer position?
Who doesn't ask any questions?
Who doesn't regroup?
Who hires fools?


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PostPosted: Mon Oct 08, 2018 6:11 pm 
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I think given all those amazing set pieces, props, costumes,crew and filming equipment, any average dude could have made a better movie.


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