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I like the scene where the nihilistic robot tells the extremely stupid guy to stick his head above the obviously a trap egg sack.
Alien: Covenant/Alien Series thoughts.
- Thread starter Gordon Cole
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74164978231
kiwifarms.net
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Yeah hes more much out of his league than incompetent. Almost zero experience, being manipulated/mislead by Carter etc.
Exactly what im talking about. The unlikely Captain in Covenant is clearly supposed to be Gorman 2.0, but instead is just functionally retarded.
The contrast really drives home how fucking awful modern writers are now.
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- Nov 4, 2017
This is one of the things that I hate about "Aliens on earth" stories is that its basically either a complete apocalyptic event or something wide scale is discovered that can end the Xenomorphs as a threat. Like that's it, there's nothing else to be done - everything is fucked forever and you're pretty much out of stories, or they are rendered a complete non-threat and then any attempt after to tell a story is dumb or they have to waste exposition explaining why the McGuffinator 9000 won't work in this case.
Off-world colonies you have the ready-made excuse of "just get off world", but you cant do that with earth. Its much better kept to the realm of "Holy shit would it utterly suck if this happened". There was really dumb comic series about it.
Tl;dr: Make the Engineers Space Jockies again.
I meant the comic (and books to a lesser degree). The films are hot garbage, made all the worse by the fact they HAD a successful template to use - said comics.
They just had too many plot holes. Why does everyone only have one mag with no reloads - the predators should have been airdropping them ammo every 30 seconds since it was all about sport. The complete miss-use of the Predogs. Adrian Brody, who I really like, but as a special forces soldier is fucking lol. Plus how they got got wasn't really covered very well at all. And lets not get started on the retarded "civil war". Or that one predator going back on its word.
And while I usually shit on films for giving the audience no credit on IQ, a clearer explanation of Forrest Wittaker's deal earlier on would have been better.
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- Apr 22, 2015
The setup is hokey but the dialogue sells it:
"What do you believe in, David?"
"Creation."
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- Oct 20, 2019
Both of these touch on a particular beef of mine with Alien: Covenant. The muddled and messy religious themes. I presume they're going for "complex" but they don't pull it off. I also bought and read the novelisation (not great) which digs a little more on the captain's faith. It's stated that the rest of the crew don't trust him because he's religious. (Fun exercise, switch his Christian faith in the movie to Islamic faith and watch the studio execs panic).
Okay - you could work with that and say the setting is now predominantly atheist and religious people are looked upon as backwards. There's been elements that can tie into that in the movies, e.g. the prisoners in Alien 3 who in an earlier script were going to be an order of monks and that was why there were no women present until Ripley arrives. What do you get out of doing so? Well... I don't know? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ What the film does is effectively dump on religious beliefs by having them fail the Captain. But dramatically that undermines things because he's never been shown to push them on others or ignore logic because of them or anything else that would set up a pay off. In a story when you show a character trait and make it part of your themes you're usually either showing something that is thought not to have value does, or else you're showing that something thought to have value does not. What you almost never do is start off showing doesn't have value to reveal that it doesn't have value. Maybe in Tragedy (capital T) kind of.
It's not even that the film dumps on religion - though I don't really enjoy that - it's that it's such a fucking mess. If the captain set down on the planet because of some religious belief ("God has sent us this. It would be wrong to turn away") then you could make it a theme of hubris or something. But they go out of the way to show us that the decision is one based on logic and discussion. And the whole juxtaposition of the religious captain with David - what are they trying to say? I don't think they know themselves. That religion / spirituality isn't what he thinks it is but that it's what David thinks? Something else?
What I think they're going for is some frankly antiquated themes of cosmic nihilism, the falsity of religion. It goes back to Prometheus with the whole "why did you create us?" theme of searching for the engineers. They want a Lovecraftian "the universe doesn't care, you have no purpose" horror. I don't think that resonates with modern audiences at all. It's a theme come up with by old writers who maybe grew up in an environment where they felt stifled by religion around them, or that religion was the establishment. I think some elements of it are meant to be an inversion of this. But what they're trying to invert isn't there anymore. And in any case, they do such a confusing job of it that it's hard to discern the message anyway.
There's no "who is right about religion - David or the Captain?", no "my beliefs were hubris and led us to our doom," no "my beliefs were mocked but gave me strength to do the right thing," no "these beliefs reveal some cosmic truth". It's just "these lines sound profound if we make a few vague Old Testament references."
The biggest moment of horror in Covenant for me, was when David misattributes Ozymandias to Byron. For several minutes I thought the writers might actually be that uncultured, though thankfully it was deliberate. But I think the writers thought that the audience wouldn't know and that Walter's correction would be some freaky gotcha moment that undermined our trust / confidence in David's abilities.
TheHarbinger
kiwifarms.net
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The scientists and explorers in Prometheus and Covenant are some of the most idiotic 'smart' characters in probably any film ever made. They are written like C-level horror movie cheerleaders running around in circles waiting for the monster to kill them. Covenant even had the classic shower kill of a naked girl just to lower itself to a cliched slasher film. These people are leading billion and trillion dollar space expeditions with zero mental abilities.
These elite scientists are doing things like removing their helmets in foreign environments. Approaching obviously dangerous looking creatures such as that one guy petting the space cobra like a complete buffoon. Showing zero caution whatsoever. Running straight through the path of a falling ship from the sky.
Too much of Prometheus and Covenant carried the baggage of the original 'Space Jockey Jesus' storyline that Ridley Scott wanted.
74164978231
kiwifarms.net
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Want to know whats really gonna rustle your jimmies? The woman who has her head bit off and left in the uhh sink is jewish. They go out of their way to make sure you can see the star of david necklace shes wearing right before she dies.
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Huh. Never noticed that - just watched a clip of it and there it is (incidentally the character's name I am now reminded is Rosenthal).. I suspect it's more of the general muddled religious imagery mess than something overtly anti-Jewish.
Something else I noticed in that clip which I had forgotten: The captain talking about how he met the Devil as a child. I mean, what are they trying to say with any of this? I read this book a long time ago:
It has a lot to say about using religious imagery and themes in movies. I can't really make out any coherent message or theme in Covenant. @TheHarbinger has it right - there's a lot of hold over of Ridley Scott's original ideas grandfathered into these movies but the franchise and culture have moved on.
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Its because Scott, facing his end, is in a big desperate hurry to prove Christianity fake & gay. He doesn't care about Islam because his parents didn't raise him Islamic so there is nothing for him to need to refute, but Christianity he has to silence every single little niggling doubt about what awaits him after death.
This a common british take, where you can see the tongue-in-cheek examination of dogma (due to shitting on the Papists) morphs from cheeky and fun to cruel and tragic as death approaches.
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I think it was made with the idea it was going to be like The Condemned with Steve Austin or some other Battle Royale-ish thing and then you were supposed to be OH SWERVE IT'S A PREDATOR MOVIE
but that's hard to get asses in the seats for
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- Oct 20, 2019
Now that would have been fantastic. I would have lost my shit as people say, if I'd been watching a movie like this and that twist came in. My favourite Predator movie was Prey and they could have done that twist in it quite easily. It starts off purely a story about a young Comanche woman and though Sci-Fi elements creep in relatively early you still wouldn't know what you were watching until about half-way through.
I love it when a movie does a well-executed genre-twist (emphasis on well-executed) but execs rarely allow it.
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- Feb 17, 2023
I remember thinking the script and premise were good. It's wasn't poorly directed or anything.
But when Lawrence Fishburne turns in the worst performance in your cast, you've really fucked up with casting.
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Also his brother Tony's suicide fucked him up a lot
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- Nov 4, 2017
i knew too much about the Commanche to make it more than a couple minutes into Prey, to say nothing of White Man bad.
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- Oct 20, 2019
Frenchman bad, specifically though.
What about the Commanche was done wrong in the movie? Or do you mean you just dislike the Commanche in general?
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Sort of; I mean if I was a space trophy hunter Comanche would very high on list, so that makes sense. But they were extremely, EXTREMELY fucked up so I don't know that a Comanche should be a hero of ... well anything.
But mainly, a female Commanche doing anything other than squaw work is just a massive fucking lol. Women were property, so the concept of one being good enough at Injun Stuff to take on a 8-foot tall extraterrestrial big game hunter is the complete work of gender-revisionist fiction. She was going to be pregnant or on her way there; like they had such a high mortality rate (due to the fact they basically only lived from raiding other tribes and eventually whitey) they were always abducting children from anyone around them to try to keep their numbers up.
tl;dr: The Predators landing anywhere other than Nepal to go up against the Gurka is too big of a plot hole for me to ignore.
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- Sep 3, 2014
Didn't help that the film constantly made her right and her tribe brethren wrong to sow a message. I would've been far more okay with the film if it took place in say... the Genpei War period of Japan, where you had warrior women who'd defend the stead with their naginatas and so on.
Or like Seven Samurai, but it turns into Predator, and the protagonist is a lady bandit or thief.
It's specifically the Commanche that's hilarious, since it's one of the more patriarchal native societies anthropologically speaking. It's hilarious to see people try to whitewash tribes and edit their legacy, since most of it's oral tradition that had to be written down.
Also as for the Predator films being canon with Alien? Nah, that was only due to fortune and overhyping an easter egg in Predator 2. It's a neat idea, but I like it being its own franchise.
Also canonicity is nonexistent with this slop IP. It's basically "whatever the fuck I want" thanks to piss poor efforts to worldbuild since Fincher's time in the seat for Alien3, and any coherence was slaughtered by that out of touch limey fuck who thinks his midwit takes are genius since he pretends to read philosophy.
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- Feb 19, 2020
That's why it got a pass.
The filmmakers seemed really proud of the lore-accurate Comanche language in that movie. otoh, I read somewhere that none of the French actors spoke French and pretty much butcher it. I'm in no position to judge for myself, but I choose to believe that.
TheHarbinger
kiwifarms.net
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- Mar 22, 2022
The studios didn't even want this for Predator or The Thing. Hence the first scenes of those movies being a space ship landing (or crashing) on Earth. They had to make absolutely sure that even the most incompetent morons in the audience understood that there would be aliens from outer space in the film. The studio side of films have always wanted audiences to be spoon fed everything so that they don't miss a single piece of the plot. Everything has to laid out clearly and characters must regularly dump exposition to the audience like a narrator.
It's gotten to the point where the studios are basically showing the monster, plot twists, or the endings of movies in the trailers now. You can watch the trailers for so many movies and you've seen every story beat and plot twist. If Alien was premiering today the trailers would show the fully grown xenomorph and probably have lines like "Ash is a goddamn robot" so that there is zero mystery.
DapperShark
kiwifarms.net
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- Jan 21, 2018
Speaking of Predator, they're doing an animated anthology set in different time periods.
I really don't like the artstyle and it's from the director of Prey so naturally it features a strong female Viking fighting the Predator. The Samurai one might be decent.