Alien: Covenant/Alien Series thoughts.

  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
An IRL buddy of mine is very proud that he got his first film credit in Badlands for character/creature design after a long career in vidya and a few years of uncredited freelance work in film industry. I hate to tell him he is part of the problem, but the guys in his social circle don't care about breaking lore or generating endless slop. They just want the creative director to pick their badass monster design over all the other guys' monster designs to end up in the final render of the movie.

His whole VFX artist social circle is weird about Alien. I think most are definitely just surface-level, pop-culture osmosis "fans", but possibly 1 or 2 others are deeper into the lore, like with the RPG books and the old Colonial Marines Technical Manual. The scary thing is that I think the former were more heavily involved in official Alien IP projects than the latter.

Anyway, those are the young people working on the vidya and movies of the IP, for better or worse.
 
Adamska said:
So they are doubling down on the idea that there isn't FTL because these fucking tards think these ships are generation types and have ignored the dozens of sources and things from the movies themselves that show they HAVE IT. Nice; that makes nothing they make canon then.
Click to expand...
It's really hard to credit it, but it's become clear that these writers like Noah Hawley et al. genuinely do not know what FTL means and think of it as being hyperspace from Star Wars. They think Alien doesn't have FTL because they've never seen Ripley push a stick forward and stars turn into lines around her.

We really are talking that level of ignorance, hard though it is to believe.
 
I'm likely preaching to the choir when I say I hate what they've done to the Predator since the third movie*

I hate that the fourth movie made them into generic aliens bent on conquering Earth (with the power of autism).

I hate that Prey used the line from the original, along with the flintlock from Predator 2, as memberberries and retconned Billy as being a descendant of the tribe from Prey.

I hate that the Killer of Killers show made them into sore losers who now abduct survivors of their past hunts, thus destroying the respect that was shown in the Predator 2 ending.

I hate that the director of Prey got so much praises, including from the likes of the Critical Drinker, that he continued to be involved with the IP to make Killer of Killers and Badlands. Now you got the shills saying Badlands is the way to go with the franchise and the original is just a "macho B-movie that belongs in the past."

Predators is mid, perfectly third behind the first two. It had good concepts that could have been fleshed out more (harden soldiers and killers working together on a gaming preserve planet, rival Predator clans). But the script, casting choices (a waste of Danny Trejo and Laurence Fishburne), and memberberries are its major flaws. Still, there are moments in it that are pure cinema like the duel involving the yakuza character.

 
Last edited:
I know franchises becoming shit over time is natural, but seeing Alien and Predator franchises go down in still-burning flames still brings me a bit of pain.
Alien Earth getting another season confirmed right after Badlands and the original movies tossed away on being 'macho' action films for traumadumping ones to take their place is the cherry on top of the shit sundae.
 
74164978231 said:
Who watches this shit.
Click to expand...
Screenshot 2025-11-12 013648.png
They call them "Disney Adults." I call them other things...
 
TheHarbinger said:
Alien Earth is getting a second season officially.
Click to expand...
"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life."

LightDragonman1 said:
Would you say that people disliking Badlands like Critical Drinker simply don’t understand the film, like this guy claims?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fjdFFtAN5JA
Click to expand...
I would not. I think we understand it just fine - we just don't like it.

In general, I find the position of "you don't like it because you don't understand it" and those who espouse it, to be insufferably smug, both.
 
Overly Serious said:
n general, I find the position of "you don't like it because you don't understand it" and those who espouse it, to be insufferably smug, both.
Click to expand...
Personally, I think he's just obfuscating that he doesn't have any actual argument to defend this piece of shit other than "But it was fun bro". He's aware that just going it was fun is not really an argument you can make that's reasonable. He also knows that the grifter gang have on more than one occasion made fun of people who use this argument, usually because it's completely reductive and can be applied to any particularly garbage media.

For example, I could wholeheartedly state that playing a round of FATAL, or Bad Rats, or watching Twilight while drunk with friends means that these are all actually good because I had fun bro. So honestly I just think they're mentally retarded enough to like garbage like Godzilla versus Kong, and are dishonest enough to try to hide that with faux intellectualism.

This film isn't hard to fucking understand. It's a low IQ slop film that relies on PG-13 antics to draw more butts to seats, staple two IPs together to get the cattle to honk and butcher their wallets for toilet fent, and it humanizes the Yautja in a way that is completely uninteresting, stupid, and it's more of a case study in the father issues of the director than anything else.

Again, I think it's horrifically and idiotically stupid to suck it up and take the crap the entertainment industry shits out by lowering my standards.
 
Overly Serious said:
So how is the film actually doing? Do we know? Because Alien: Earth was dreadful and that's renewed. These things only die if they don't make money.
Click to expand...
It's made 82 million so far (and was made for 105 mil), and the cattle are abusing as many excuses as possible to force this IP merge and lie about this as a success as hard as they fucking can so that the investors don't skin Bob Iger alive. Some fun n'wah babble from these fucks include adding two days to it's first day in the weekend to artificially add 5 million to its number (it made 10 million in actuality if you ignore Thursday and Friday), refusing to adjust for inflation so it can beat AvP in numbers (barely; it did this by 2.5 million).

They're also massaging the ratings so it's the best scored piece of shit in the franchise, because listening to the Predator speaking in full sentences and crashing out about muh daddy to the robot is apparantly kino.

They're going to commit to the shitslop approach, because you have fent cattle who intentionally dropped their standards to levels where them not spitting on you while making shit you second screen while watching tiktok is considered gud. The same cunts who look at cgi that looks worse than shit used in T2, gurgle "BUT IT FUN THO" even though they forgot and/or were bored for 90% of the film.

Alien Earf is doing a shade better than Star Wars is in numbers that Disney likely lied about on D-. It allegedly got nearly 10 million views, but that was massaged by being on three separate items (Hulu and Fox) to bulk up its shitty fucking numbers, but they're also bribing critics into pretending its good. I'm also assuming that they'd have made this another season regardless because to not do so is losing face. That and they likely have a contract to ensure Noah can grift as much money as possible for the worst band since James Rolfe's own pathetic midlife crisis attempt.

I'm calling bullshit on the numbers tbh, but RatCo is desperately forcing one of the last franchises they haven't raped yet down our throats, using all their considerable effort to lie to us to do so.
 
Last edited:
I've only ever been interested in Alien/Predator as concepts/mythology and never really enjoyed any of the movies. I saw Badlands yesterday and it's probably the first Predator film I've seen since AVP, which I barely even remember.

I liked it for what it was, a goofy action adventure movie. I think the glaze on it is absolutely fucking unreal (I see people saying Elle Fanning deserves an Oscar), but it was at least a consistently entertaining popcorn flick. Thia gets a bit grating at times, and dumb shit like her high-fiving her own legs was cringy as fuck, but if you just wanna watch a predator slice shit up for 2/3rds of the run time, it's worth seeing.

My biggest complaint is that:
Dek never really gets a decent kill the entire fucking movie.He slices and smashes a bunch of nameless, faceless synths, he kills some stupid fucking tentacle elephant and some stupid fucking tentacle bug. All the kill shots on everything else are delivered by others. Tessa kills the Kalisk. Bud kills his dad. The Kalisk wrecks Tessa's loader. Thia kills the pterodactyl thing, etc. He delivers some really solid action choreography, but realistically he's either jobbing, or getting kill stolen.

I tried watching Alien Earth and got bored. Tried watching Killer of Killers, got bored. I haven't been able to sit through Marvel slop since the first Iron Man. I liked this, but like I said I'm not big on the movies to begin with.
 
I found it weird that fans of Badlands ignore the og movies because it shows "an actual friendship without fanservice"(????) while ignoring AvP with Scar and Lex. No humanizing the Predator with dumb translated language, Lex can understand her partner just fine with gestures and actions with context clues. They were even each other halves- him being the brawn for fighting monsters, and her being the brain on smartly knowing how to get around the location.
 
Aib Ld said:
I found it weird that fans of Badlands ignore the og movies because it shows "an actual friendship without fanservice"(????) while ignoring AvP with Scar and Lex.
Click to expand...
The fans of the series are like Star Wars fans. They only like the new stuff and once something is a decade old they automatically hate it. In a decade they'll be ripping on the terrible acting and writing of Alien Earth and Predator Badlands and praising AvP:7 as the real future of both franchises. When Prometheus and Covenant came out they were praising them to death. Prey and Killer of Killers are the strongest entries into the franchise yet and so on.
Aib Ld said:
No humanizing the Predator with dumb translated language, Lex can understand her partner just fine with gestures and actions with context clues. They were even each other halves- him being the brawn for fighting monsters, and her being the brain on smartly knowing how to get around the location.
Click to expand...
The Predator imitates English in the first movie and repeats words back to Dutch. The Predators in Predators record people speaking and play them back like a duck call for hunting. It's not exactly a hard science fiction series. It's always been campy and idiotic. Ridley Scott wanted the xenomorph in Alien to speak English and talk through the communications equipment using Ripley's voice. The goofy alien in Resurrection speaks out loud. The Predators in The Predator are searching the galaxies for autism. Ridley Scott wanted the Engineers to be Jesus.

They've always tried to make these movies as dumb as possible for audiences. Without studio interference you get mediocre movies. Now with Disney at the helm you get studio executives making nonstop slop. There's no one like Giger or Lovecraft controlling the franchise. It's just a bunch of Disney executives and directors for hire.
 
Scar and Lex were so kino. Why did Scar have to die. If he survived, Requiem wouldn't have had to happen either.
 
Aib Ld said:
I found it weird that fans of Badlands ignore the og movies because it shows "an actual friendship without fanservice"(????) while ignoring AvP with Scar and Lex. No humanizing the Predator with dumb translated language, Lex can understand her partner just fine with gestures and actions with context clues. They were even each other halves- him being the brawn for fighting monsters, and her being the brain on smartly knowing how to get around the location.
Click to expand...

Arbiter said:
Scar and Lex were so kino. Why did Scar have to die. If he survived, Requiem wouldn't have had to happen either.
Click to expand...

I wish they'd left in this deleted scene from AvP. Scar pierces the xenomorph's nerves in such a way as to make it stick out its tongue at Lex, for a prank. (Shame it's so dark, you can barely see what's happening).



It's great chemistry between the two and adds to the predators' personality, imo. They have a rather brutal sense of humour and that's great. They're savages, but smart and technologically advanced ones.

Badlands going back on their language being clicks and swapping it to human but funny, is a big black mark against the movie for me.
 
I'm just glad that its metrics fucking plummeted after the first week despite pumping so much money into bribes to the journoscum to fake its score being higher than the original. It had one good week and then died; meaning it was a disappointment despite their efforts to lie about it being the most financially successful Pred movie.

It was more disrespectful to the IP than 2018's Predator film in some ways how it handled the IP. How in the fuck.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom