Alien Covenant Thoughts

As Always Spoilers are listed in this post.  Read on at your own risk.

• Name changing

This will have nothing to do with the movie’s story but it’s name.  Alien: Covenant.  This was supposed to be Prometheus 2.  I guess because of backlash on the prior film Prometheus.  I heard a lot that Prometheus didn’t feel like an Alien series film.  Causing the film’s name change from Prometheus 2 to Alien: Covenant.  What bothers me is that I heard the there is a chance that Prometheus is going to be called Alien: Prometheus in the future.  Why, so it can connect with the Alien movieline.  I’m fine with that but if that is done, then I want the 1979 Alien movie to be changed as well to Alien: Nostromo since we are subtitling the movies after ships to link all of the movies together.  Does that sound stupid, then that’s my point of the title change.

• They are back to the original Alien formula

I mean this as Alien: Covenant went from a new type of story that Prometheus tried to do, back to the “Truckers in Space” type of story arc that Alien had done.  The Covenant is taking 2,000 colonists and 1,100 embryos to a new planet with a crew of 15 people running the ship to colonize a planet.  The crew is in hyper sleep with something goes wrong and they are suddenly awakened.  The crew receives a mysterious signal from a nearby planet.  They decide to go investigate the planet, but the female protagonist Dany Branson (Katherine Waterson) protests.  (Side note her character gave off such a Ripley vibe with her look and I’m not sure still how I feel about that).  They get to the planet.  Something goes wrong and the crew are attacked by an alien Neomorph.  The crew gets picked off one by one.  Finds help with the Synth David (Michael Fassbender).  There is a sinister plan behind the Neomorphs and David’s intention with them.  The whole story felt like the original Alien.  However, going back to the original formula is fine with me.  It was done well.

• Pointless side characters

While we had Dany, we also got Tennessee (Danny McBride), David and Walter The Synths (Michael Fassbender), Captain Oram (Billy Crudup), and that is all the characters that I remember from the film.  There were others in the crew.  They felt like Alien Fodder and throwaways.  I don’t even remember them too much and could understand their purpose nor did I care to know.  I did like the cameos of Guy Pearce as Peter Weyland and Noomi Raplace as Elizabeth Shaw.  Two characters from Prometheus who seem to came back to wrap up their plots.

• The Aliens look

It wasn’t bad as the visual of the Alien’s bursting out of the bodies were great and gory.  The designs of the Neomorphs were good.  I don’t know, my the nostalgia in me, but I thought the Alien’s were too motion captured and CGI.  I think, that I wished in a way, that the Aliens were puppets again.

• The horror scenes

Some where done well, others could come off laughable.  At one point of the movie, a security team member Ledward (Benjamin Rigby) gets infected with an Alien Spore that births a Neomorph.  He is brought back to the Med bay and what ensues should be horror but came off as silly.  Ferris (Amy Seimetz) tries to quarantining and trapping Katherine and Ledward (Carmen Ejogo) who brought him back to the ship and gets Maul to Death by a Neomorph that bursts out of Ledward’s back.  Ferris comes back with a weapon, and slips on blood and proceeds to seemingly comedically run away from the Alien, and blindly shooting at the Neomorph trying to attack and kill it.  The scene ends with her shooting and blowing up the ship when she hits gas canisters.  When I saw all of that, it just came off as silly and pointless instead of fearful.  However, the crew that is trapped on the planet after the ship is destroyed had a good scene with horror.  They were being attacked by the Neomorphs in fields at night.  It was a good scene.

• The end

I did like how the film ended.  It had a good twist to keep the story going.  As it did still have many plot holes for me, everything in the story seem to help tie Prometheus and Alien together.  I’m hoping this gets a sequel as I would like to see at least one more movie to finish this story arc.

Thanks for reading.