Alien: Covenant (Ridley Scott)

[megladon8]

Please tell me I’m not alone in thinking Fassbender’s accent as Walter is super weird.

[megladon8]

I have so many mixed feelings about this. I think if I were to try to write it out it would be a jumbled mess of half baked ideas and dangling threads (kind of like Prometheus and Alien Covenant). So I’ll just share some bullet points:
-holy crap Michael Fassbender’s American accent is weird
-Michael Fassbender(s) is the best part of the movie
-like Prometheus, it has some great heady ideas, but focuses on the wrong stuff
-why was it continually brought up that Billy Crudup’s character was religious? It’s mentioned like half a dozen times, but it affects nothing. No other characters, nothing in the story, and thematically has no effect on the movie’s religion vs science themes. Why was it important?
-watching the deleted scenes on YouTube is INCREDIBLY frustrating, as they make the movie much better and more coherent. They show what happened to Shaw, they answer the question of why David was able to make eggs without a Queen, they explain in a single concise sentence exactly what the black goo is...why was this stuff cut??
-one of the greatest weaknesses of Prometheus was it’s characters acting so stupidly. In Covenant they are even more stupid, but I hesitate to even call them characters in this film as we know and learn nothing about them. One of them wears a cowboy hat, one of them loves his wife’s tits, and two of them were maybe gay. That’s about the extent of any characterization we get.
-the initial alien attack is awesome
-the android fight is awesome
-strong visuals all around, at least in design (there’s some questionable CGI)
-the film promised to answer questions from Prometheus, but while it answers some, it raises two more for every one it sheds light on
-like, how was there a xenomorph in the mural in Prometheus? Are we still missing information, or is the timeline totally screwed?

In the end I think I would rate this almost identically to Prometheus. Both have some fascinating stuff at their core, but have no idea how to explore the themes they bring up, and both focus on the least interesting elements of their stories.

[Dukefrukem]

I can answer the religion question and the mural question.

Religion Question: They establish at the beginning of the film, he has a chip on his shoulder to make the right decisions as captain, because his crew/company question him based on his faith. In the end, his faith was the result of his demise. Fitting but not very original. There's even a line that David feeds him about "the devil's workshop" because he knows he will relate. That's how he's able to lure him into the cellar.

Mural Question: I think most people forget the black goo is what mutates the DNA of the any creature it comes in contact with. The xenomorph in the mural is a warning but depending on what type of host the blackgood infects, will alter the look of the Xenomorph. The only reason we are familiar with THIS type of Xtrenmorph, is we have almost always seen it come out of a human after being infected by a face hugger. We see it come out of a Dog once And an Engineer once. And when it did, the xenomorph was altered slightly. We have also seen the effects of the engineered black goo in liquid form (zombie humanoid) and spore form. I think its fucking fantastic how such a powerful weapon can infect hosts in so many different ways.

[Skitch]

I still love that poster so much.

[megladon8]

Thanks for the insights Duke, and for reminding me of that handy chart.

Again, there’s more there to like than dislike.

[Ivan Drago]

Looking back on this now, I liked it okay even though it quite possibly has the single worst line in a movie this year.

"You hold the flute.....I'll do the fingering."