Alien Covenant Review

Hey you, welcome back to the channel. And guys, today we're going to do Alien Covenant, uh, a review on the movie. And it's been out over 3 months now, and it's taken me a long time to do this review. And the reason being is because I was very, uh, uh, honestly, I don't know, I didn't know if I really wanted to see this movie or not. And I'm an Aliens fan, you know, I love the franchise, but I think I'm more of a purist in the idea of what Aliens is supposed to be about. I like the first Alien. I loved Aliens. I even like Alien vs. Predator. But there were a lot of Alien movies throughout this franchise with Ripley to the fact— to the point she was cloned. And it was just a lot. It was just a lot of weird weird things going on when a lot of directors took over the Alien franchise. So I think Ridley Scott, you know, looking at this disaster that they caused over the years with the Alien franchise, I think Ridley Scott decided to step in and say, hey, let me, you know, come back and, you know, correct some of these mistakes. And so, you know, everybody was excited You know, everybody loves Ridley Scott. I love Ridley Scott. Uh, you know, he did Blade Runner, which I talk about, you know, a lot of people believe to be one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time. I think it was like number 2 on my list, but over the years it's fallen. And, uh, you know, I think Ridley Scott will always have a special place with me, but I think as I've grown and I've become uh, dare say it, more of a sophisticated movie watcher, you know. I've, I found a lot of shortcomings with Ridley Scott, uh, especially during these last two films. And yeah, but looking back, but it also got me to look back on some of his other films I thought were masterpieces, and, and that I found that where they were good films, they maybe weren't masterpieces, that they maybe didn't have the depth of, you know, of a movie that I was looking for and who are in the kind of movies I thought he could, you know, he could be part of and produce and direct. And that's not to say Ridley Scott's a bad movie director. He's still way better than a great majority. But just, you know, you evolve, you grow up, and there's some things I've just found that kind of bother me about some of his productions. And whereas Ridley Scott does create a great world, uh, great cinematography, uh, he just has a great vision with how to do these movies. It's something about his movies now, and even, and like I said, as I look back on some others that lack a kind of substance, uh, to them that I think should be there as it's set up to be, uh, on a certain level, and I don't think it achieves that. You know, like even watching this movie Alien Covenant, although It did kind of combine and bring us back to a lot of common themes in the Alien franchises we know, the ones we grew to love, a lot of us. It still kind of did this horror/thriller/jumpscare type thing that, with all the dumb nuances and all of the You know, the crazy things that happen in these horror movies where people separate from the group at the exact right opportune time so they could be taken out one by one. You know, all the scary horror movie film clichés, you know, were part of this film. And that kind of bothers me because I look at Ridley Scott again as a master, you know, of movies. He did Gladiator, which I thought was awesome. But you know, as I look back on a lot of these films, although they were good, he's great at world building, some of his movies kind of— I don't know if it's the actors too and how they're directed, but when it comes to the, to the actual story itself and the actors, it's just something not gelling with me on some of Ridley Scott's movies. And again, he's a great director, but I really had him high up there. You know, I had him up there, we were talking like Francis Ford Coppola level for science fiction films. But I don't know, I've seen a lot of other science fiction films and people in the industry do a lot better job than Ridley Scott now. So I don't know, I don't think I worship him as much like I did in these last two films. I think they've pretty much consolidated for me that Alien Covenant and Prometheus, they just for me didn't achieve what I thought Ridley Scott coming back was going to achieve. Uh, you know, they were mediocre films at best. They tried to be deep, and I don't think they achieved that either. I think they just— it's, it's become this, uh, situation where it's just a lot of more questions than answers, and it, it, it starts to just get a little bit ridiculous. And so this film tried to, I think, please a little bit of everybody, and I think In doing that, it kind of, you know, missed, you know, missed the, uh, what it was, you know, trying to be exactly. But it is a spoiler review, guys, so we're going to get a lot of— I'm just going to, you know, go right into, you know, the things that happen. And if you haven't seen the film yet, uh, if you're an Alien fan and you haven't seen this film yet, uh, uh, you know, I'm, I'm guessing that you probably aren't an Aliens fan because, uh, I think you would have seen it by now. And, uh, you know, if you're not into aliens, it probably won't matter anyway. Uh, so— oh, excuse me. So, um, geez, I had to sneeze and couldn't sneeze. But, um, so we meet this android, synthetic being, synthetic life form that's been prominent through the Alien franchise that looks like David the android from the Prometheus movies with Shaw. But it's not David, it's another version named Walter. It's an updated version. And he's on this trip with this, you know, with the Weyland Corporation where they're trying to colonize. And they have about 2,000 passengers, I believe about 15 crew members, including embryos, you know. So when they get there, they can, you know, grow these embryos, they become human beings. And that's a better way to transport human beings is you don't have to feed them. You don't have to put them in a type of stasis or sleep or cryonics or whatever they use to keep themselves from aging so that they can make it to their destinations. And so they get this distress beacon from a planet that seems to be a dream planet like they're trying to find and colonize. But the only difference is because they're awakened early through a— some type of, uh, shockwave through space, maybe a cosmic shockwave, something maybe from an exploding star, or whatever the idea was, it wakes them out of stasis too early. It kills the captain who's played by James Franco, who we got to see in the Alien prologue. And that was kind of interesting because now I see the importance of that prologue because we got no James Franco at all in this movie except videotapes of him dying. But I thought, I think it would have been weird to see James Franco as the captain. It's just something didn't seem, seemed a bit strange about him being captain, you know, of this vessel. I don't know. But anyway, they get a distress beacon from a planet that, you know, as we got to see, that they find to be almost like a paradise. It looks like a paradise. It can support life, and they still have several years, probably 7 or 8 years to go before they can make it to the planet they mapped out to colonize. And our due to the fear and shock of what has happened while in stasis with shockwaves through space, people dying in their chambers. They're not too enthused to go back to sleep. So with that opportunity presenting themselves, they can go check on this distress beacon. At the same time, they can colonize this planet that's habitable, that looks great. They get there, it looks wonderful. It looks like a paradise. And they're already, you know, putting together how they're going to live, what they're going to do, how they're going to colonize this place. Unfortunately, they get to learn that there is some type of alien life there that doesn't like them much, that is not hospitable. They're getting ill because of spores that are floating around in the atmosphere. You know, these And you know, we get to learn, you know, that the android David, you know, as we tried to piece together what happened from Prometheus, which I think was many of our goals, that, you know, David basically was responsible for— he did make it to the Engineers' planet, but he releases the sporadic goo on them and it wipes them out and kills them. And that's another huge problem I had with this movie that He gets to the Engineer planet. Nothing is explored about who the Engineers are, what their purpose is. And I would have been okay with them doing this in this Alien franchise had they not set the movie up so much to deal with Engineers. If it would have kind of been this thing where you kind of hear about the Engineers and you hear they might be over here, they might be over there, and maybe at the conclusion you finally get to see the Engineers and what they were all about, I could have went for that. But That's not what they did in Prometheus. They make the Engineers a huge part of the story, and they put us on this idea we're going to learn about what the true purpose of the Engineers are, maybe at least give us a little better idea of what the Engineers are, you know, as the movie seems to be implying from the very beginning. But they quickly jump off of that and have the Engineers wiped out, and their whole story pretty much ends there, and we're back to the aliens, you know, and it's just this really big mystery about the aliens. And then they kind of do this, uh, we kind of get this kind of parallel and comparison from Engineers creating humans to humans creating synthetic life, and each form of life destroying and outdoing the other. The, uh, humans vicariously through the synthetic beings they created, the Engineers through destroying their creation after they, you know, various things like that. So it's a lot of messages, you know, put out in these, you know, in this movie, but they all just seem like incoherent that don't fit anywhere, that don't really go any place. And, uh, I, I didn't like that. It was, to me, it just felt like a jumbled up movie that kind of tried to kind of change up midstream and kind of do fan service to people who were upset about the Prometheus movie, uh, and kind of lead the Prometheus movie going down its own course. And I didn't much care about that. Now, some people kind of felt it was kind of all tied back together as we got to kind of— they kind of just— we got to see David, you know, the android, being made responsible for, you know, basically everything that's happened throughout the Alien franchise, you know, his involvement, his You know, basically his, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, you know, his teetering with the, uh, uh, uh, the process of, uh, the evolution, if you will, of the xenomorphs, uh, you know, created the aliens as we know it. And so I'm not sure exactly what the message were they were going for. Perhaps the message could have been, uh, you know, that, uh, this artificial life can be the end of us, and that they're, you know, in conclusion, responsible for everything that's happened. So in a way, they're really, it's serving kind of two stories. They're the fall of human civilization. They're the creation of these perfect alien killers. Are they the next step in evolution maybe? The next perfect being, as David kind of described them, or wanted them to be, you know, as he, he's kind of seeking his perfection. What's kind of weird about, uh, David's idea of perfection— if he's the machine that's figured out that he's better than all the humans, uh, I'm a bit in, uh— this is another jumbled part of the movie that I didn't get. Usually if you have artificial intelligence that is going for the idea of I'm better than every human, and humans should be therefore eradicated to create a much more perfect being, then why would you thrive to be more human? Because we get David, he's trying to experience emotions, he's under some guise that he's in love. So as he now became— become this conscious being, and if he's become this conscious being, then why does he still hold to value all of the flaws in humanity, unless he's trying to say then love is not a type of humanity— I mean, it's not a flaw in humanity, but, uh, the passions that drive humans, that could be argued as well. So I don't know what they were going for in that as well. But anyway, we get David, who's kind of this conscious human synthetic being now, and he's going back and forth with uh, an upgraded synthetic being, you know, made to be able to deal with, uh, flaws that David, uh, had that maybe perhaps caused him to go off course, if, if that's, you know, how you're going to explain it. But, you know, basically, uh, you know, we get that, uh, you know, David in a sense is kind of superior to this other synthetic being in that he's still able to outsmart him and kind of, you know, create this, um, a situation where he's now disguised himself as Walter, gets back on the ship. And then of course, you know, we get, uh, you know, to basically find out that David is actually Walter and that his plan of spreading these xenomorphs all through the galaxy is back in full force. And he's responsible again for all of what has happened throughout the Alien franchise. This plague that's spread across the universe that isn't a plague for David but is a perfect human best, you know, specimen to, you know, the perfect killer, the perfect whatever. Uh, you know, I would have— I think I would have liked to wrap this up and make this more of a story about mankind dealing with the— with their past, dealing with the future of what they thought would be a perfect world or perfect universe. And maybe them trying to destroy the Xenomorphs, you know, I'm sure, you know, obviously they would have seen the Xenomorphs as an unnatural creation, as something they needed to fight and to try to destroy, keep it from spreading through the galaxy. I would have maybe liked to have seen something different, you know, or at the very least understood it better their position about everything, you know. And there, and what we got from Prometheus, we really don't know exactly. We know that Engineers didn't like humans, but I would like to better understand why they felt that human beings need to be destroyed, why they felt that they were so imperfect. And is it that they felt that the human beings were somehow going to create a situation like we got with the Xenomorphs by creating indirectly, or whether it be directly or indirectly, creating these Xenomorphs and creating this scourge across the galaxy. So anyway, guys, you know, I think that's it for me, guys, for the Alien franchise. Was it an entertaining movie? Sure, it It was better than Prometheus for me in that it did pay homage to a lot of the original Alien franchise so that we would be able to at least have our bearings about us, to have a coherent story told in a proper progression so that we, you know, don't get sidetracked and like we did. And, you know, because I think if the idea was to kind of surprise us we go this way, we go that way, and this is how we end up with the Alien franchise. I think it kind of failed at that. I think they would have done a much better job just staying direct on course with a very linear progression of how the Engineers were involved, how the humans got involved, how the aliens got involved, and maybe a speeded-up evolution of how the aliens become the Xenomorphs. I don't think it was quite necessary to do it this way. Another thing that really bothers me, that really bothers me about the Alien franchise is we got a very good tie-in, I feel, from the Predator series with the Alien series. And for those of you who watch Alien vs. Predator, you will know that in the movie there's a flashback sequence of early history where we get to understand that these Predator-like creatures were who, uh, were responsible for spreading these Xenomorph embryos and using human beings as hosts so that they can use these, uh, planets as a type of war planet, a type of war games planet where they try to prove their superior worth and, and warrior-like skills on these planets to survive by killing these xenomorphs, only to become, uh, you know, only for them to become this epidemic, you know, if you will, to become this, uh, uh, you know, spread all across the planet to the point that they couldn't even handle them and they had to nuke the entire planet. So if anybody who's familiar with the Alien vs. Predator franchise understood that. Now, although I don't believe Ridley Scott was— in fact, I know he, I know he wasn't involved in that series, at least I'm pretty sure, or that movie. That was the movie I thought should have remained in the whole series, whereas it looks like to me, in a way, they tried to erase that one out. And I feel like they took one of the best ones out. And I like that explanation as to what the Xenomorphs— now, I wouldn't have minded the the Engineers getting involved in some kind of way, being involved with the Predator creatures. And I can't remember what they were called, but, uh, I think that would have made a much more better story. I like that story better. I was able to deal with that story a lot better. Didn't like what direction they went off in this. But anyway, that, that was the explanation to that. And so, uh, you know, this is what we get, which I just think is a kind of messed-up pieced-together movie. And although entertaining, a popcorn movie, a Friday night movie that I can go and enjoy for a few hours and go home and forget about it, doesn't really contribute to the great Alien legacy that I know of, like what I consider to be Alien 1, Aliens, and Alien vs. Predator. I wanted something part of that legacy, and I would have— we all, as far as I'm concerned, we already got the prequel to it because we got it with Alien vs. Predator. Somebody talked to somebody, they thought maybe that was ridiculous or wasn't so good. I thought that movie did pretty well. I don't remember anybody really complaining about that movie. I remember people complaining about the Aliens movies they did after that with Adrian, uh, what is his name, Brody. Adrian Brody. Uh, I remember complaining about that one where humans are just kind of abducted, dropped off on these planets, different planets, and being hunted by the Predator creatures. Uh, I recall that being not a well-accepted one. But as far as, um, uh, uh, the Alien vs Predator, I, I, when I saw, I thought everybody thought it was a pretty decent movie. I like how they had the pyramids involved. I like how it happened in Antarctica. I really liked all that stuff, but maybe everybody didn't. But anyway, guys, that's my review, uh, of the Alien series. I know some people like this movie. Again, uh, if it wasn't part of the Alien series, if it was just a space alien movie, standalone movie of some type, I probably would have liked it. But I think that they have continued to ruin this franchise, and even though I was entertained by some familiarity with the Alien franchise, uh, I don't think it holds up in the Alien series, uh, any better than just being a tiny bit better than Prometheus. And really, for me, not having a really good tie-in with the rest of the really great Alien movies. Anyway, guys, that's my review. Uh, let me know what you thought about Alien Covenant, if you felt as I felt about, or if you just thought it was not that great a movie, or if you thought it was a great movie. Be sure to like or dislike, uh, likes and dislikes. I like them both because both of them, uh, helps promote the channel and push them to the forefront. Uh, if you're on Steemit, don't forget to upvote this. And until next time, guys, you know it, take care.