Comments (Page 647)

Space JOC: LOL! I am not a film maker but I have ideas about what could have improved it. You don't need to be a film maker to come up with ideas.

I love the attention to detail Ridley has.  And by the way, he wasn't just handed no name actors and told to make do.  People that act in his movies have said being on his sets make them feel like they are in the actual movie.  They don't have to act with as much green screen.  I love that you can pick through the movies and find tiny little details that would have been overlooked or just ignored in other movies.  Sure they all go unnoticed, but that's part of what makes Ridley Scott great.  Stanley Kubrick was very particular about the way he placed things in movies as well, and a lot of that went unnoticed for a long time.

With that much attention to detail, he is surely not just goofing things like size of an alien race, or eye color, etc.  These were all deliberate, and I think it's sad that so many people are quick to throw out that "It's just another plot hole or inconsistency that Fox and RS have overlooked trying fix things they didn't fix in the last movie..."  That's probably the laziest answer I've seen on this forum for everything people dislike about the movies.  If it hasn't been explained in the movie or in a viral video, then there is probably a reason for it.  Scott has already put the argument about Walter or David at the end to rest.  He admitted he cheated about 20 minutes out of the movie where David would have made the swap, but people bitched so much that it would have been impossible, or that it's just what Scott decided to have happen to fill in a gap.

You can never have too much detail in a movie.  If you think you can, then you might just be watching movies to watch movies.

I actually like Resurrection as a popcorn flick. I can agree on Prometheus , but Prometheus might seem better if Awakening shifts the focus in that direction and answers some of those questions.

Ali81:

I see what you mean but they could at least have given us some answers in a less ambiguous way in Prometheus. For example, if a movie raises 8 questions then I would like them to answer at least three of them in a somewhat coherent way in the movie, in that way they have five left that they can answer in a later movie or two but these answers got to be satisfying. Unfortunately it seems that Lindelof as a writer is better at asking questions rather than answering them, this is just my impression. When you don't get satisfying answer and at the same time have very thin characters you get a disappointment.

Fassbender was good in Prometheus but they made him a bit too evil in AC even though he was OK.

"where Prometheus and to a greater extent covenant come short is any really relevant dialogue and character building."

Exactly, this is my main problem with both Prometheus and Alien Covenant. It was like they didn’t learn enough from Prometheus but at least they felt more like real people in AC.

The thing is they got to have the Engineers making sense. Unfortunately they were not made very well in Prometheus but they could have been. Hopefully they will be better written in the next sequel if we will get one.

You should make the next one I think so because you know better than Scott Ridley. You're the man to sort it

The black goo did not replace the possibility of egg morphing or a queen.  I think with the comment made in Advent, there will definitely be a queen. That is way to good of an easter egg to throw in for fun. He's looking for his queen, which would have been an immortal Shaw (I'm curious if by immortal he meant to live forever, or just through whatever offspring is grown from Shaw).  I doubt the queen is going to have any resemblance to Cameron's queen.  I think it is going to be a more human-related, mutation between Daniels and the xenomorph features.  The queen will probably still be used asa device to create eggs quicker.

Alien:Covenant Bluray is No.1 Best Seller in Movie & TV section on Amazon.

This will most likely all be spelled out in the Origins novel.  The whole unfolding of events at the beginning of A:C is odd. The burst (Doubtful it was David, but could have been planned somehow), Captains pod burning, Oram instantly becoming a hostile leader (he wasn't Captain material), it all seems like it was set up to happen. And I don't mean for the purpose of all moving the movie along.

if u had heard him correctly, while lying on his back talking to walter while reaching for the knife, his voice is distorted. it is damaged and sounds similar to when he was speaking to weyland when his head had been ripped off. so how did he fix it? remember he has 20 mins as RS says. 20 mins to change clothes, gain access to walter for the relevant codes, chop his arm off, fix his voice and still catch up to the crew.

I accept RS says its david, im not disputing that fact. but its just hard to logically get to grips with how he manages it all.

I don't think the human characters were ever meant to be these deep, memorable characters that stick around through multiple sequels.  They are meant to drive the one movie, then die unfortunately.  I'm OK with that, I'm not looking for human characters I can fall in love with and be sad when they die.  I want the expanse, the story, all of the details that go into that.  With all of the aspects of these movies, the human characters aren't really that important.  The human characters can really only be around to die at this point.  With the extremely advanced Engineers, a malfunctioning advanced AI robot (who is obsessing over creating the perfect organism), and the perfect organism in al of it's variations so far, humans really have no hope to compete with any of this in space, and even though people like happy endings, it's not what we have come to expect from an Alien movie.

I get the connection of sex=life and the xeno= death but it wasn't a good scene

gavin. I believe the terminator sex scene was most definitely a necessity as kyle was john's father and he dies in the film. so he kinda had to bang sarah

'Fix'? He can speak just about any language you care to mention, and most likely in any and all dialects if he is so minded.

that's the part iv been saying for a while thoughts, Prometheus was only the first instalment which seems to be overlooked by so many when they bash Prometheus. any half decent director, writer or studio would never give out the answers in the first movie. Prometheus was used to raise the questions and maybe tease some answers but was never going to answer anything fully.

I love Prometheus and think it opened so many doors for the rest of the prequel series. Fassbender is awesome and the only consistent positive in the 2 movies. where Prometheus and to a greater extent covenant come short is any really relevant dialogue and character building. but my biggest gripe is the lack of screen time for the engineers. ok I guess they don't want to show them to soon or too much straight away but their really the only original thing in the franchise now. ok we have different types of xeno and while really really cool (I love the protomorph and neomorph) once wev seen them that's it. the engineers offer hours upon hours of story telling and have yet to be utilised.

Didn't David mention that the Engineers didn't create binary code, or technology?  I took this to mean their technology isn't like ours at all. It seems very biological. Even on Earth today we are finding that nature tends to come up with very efficient and effective ways of doing things. Maybe the Engineers started off with a different type of technology and developed everything around organics.

This scene was not good, think about it. You have a place where monsters are running around and you go to the shower to have sex? Who would have sex at that point? I would think about staying alive and kill the bastard, but that is me. My impression is that they added that scene just to have some nudity in it.

Maybe they were stressed so they got there to get rid of some tension but still it just doesn’t make sense in the context of the situation. Their deaths could have been written in a lot better way. Another problem is that we don’t know too much about them as characters which adds to the problem so their deaths don’t mean that much.

Unfortunately it seems more like something out of Scream than an Alien movie.

To sum it up of what I would have done if I would have written the script:

1. Let the audience know more about them as characters
2. Make them die in a situation that makes more sense

District 9 / Elysium / Chappie.

Lord, no more, please. They're all the same movie!

If Scott’s vision means focusing on the androids at the expense of human characters then I prefer Cameron. Both Alien Covenant and Prometheus are below the standard that I would like to see and both have Scott as a director. Maybe Cameron should direct the next one because it could not be much worse than it is now (which is not to say that both Prometheus and AC are complete pieces of crap).

Xeno movies can work if they have well done human characters. Prometheus was not very well because of lack of well done human characters and it also should have been closer to Alien. The lack of Xenos wasn’t the main problem, far from it but it should have added things to make more sense.

I am not sure about the point of this thread but I put it like this: I am not complaining if I am satisfied with a book, movie, whatever. When there is something that I dislike then I think that it is alright to point that out but criticism can be given in different ways. Actually my criticism comes from caring enough about the movie and not that I don’t care. If someone is fine with what ever they give us then sure be quiet but I am not picking a movie just because it has Alien in the title. Disagreeing with something or not is alright, it depends on how you say it.

First I would like to say that having Prometheus as a favorite movie is alright, we all like different genres and movies.

There was probably the case that many had very different opinions so maybe many disliked the Shaw character so they decided to write her off. I did not have a problem with that since I very much disliked Shaw but I can understand that people might have liked her or think that it is a bad continuity thing.

Unfortunately it seems like Fox thought that the lack of Xenos was what people were complaining about. Yes I had a problem that there were not too many of these but it was far from the worst thing about Prometheus. My main problem with Prometheus was the lack of good characters but I think that Fox is mostly to blame.

A lot about the Engineers didn’t make sense in Prometheus at first but I understood more about them after repeated viewings. They could have been made more lethal and their motifs about killing humanity could have been explained better in Prometheus but maybe they can be explained better in the next movie. I would rather see the connection between the Engineers and the Xeno rather than a movie about a crazy android but they got to make the Engineers make sense and to get better human characters compared to AC and Prometheus. Hopefully they won’t make David as the creator of the Xenos, that would suck.

Hopefully they will explain in the movie that David found some black goo that the Engineers had left and that he fond some sort of way that the Engineers did their Xenos and so he repeated that. David would not be the creator of the original Xeno.

I like that they killed Shaw, she was annoying to say the least. My main complain about Prometheus is the lack of good characters but they could also have had better Xeno connections.

The Engineers on LV-233 wore burlap like capes/robes as well.  I think that is just the fashion of the Engineers in general. Not all forms of life in the universe feel the need to wear stupid conversation t-shirts or 8 piece suits.  The more efficient they are, the less they care about fashion I'm sure.

Ali 81: Maybe they manufactured their own toilet paper? One color per day of the week. Maybe they were playing pranks on each-other (like constant April-fools)?

I have to agree. theres keeping a story going when u can justify it then theres just throttling the life out of something good just to make an extra dollar and spoiling everything. I love the terminator, T2 and salvation. the rest can rot and if their gna make another then id suggest bringing back mr bale as John Connor.

true the romans had more fun, but remember, the engineers chose to wipe us out and let these guys live. but for me, id rather go out having fun. would be interesting to see what these engineers did for fun

Please no, just stop it. I haven't heard anything about an eventual Terminator 6 but I really hope that won't be the case. To me the only Terminator movies that count are 1 and 2.

Chris: You mean 70 / 30, right? 80 + 30 = 110

The poll is slightly biased considering the population over there are heavily supportive of Blomkamp and his Alien 5. If I were to place the same poll here we'd likely have 80% for Covenant 2 and 30% for Alien 5. Different communities draw different tangents of the fan base so I wouldn't assume the poll is representing the entire Alien fandom. I'm all for more Alien films but couldn't care less if Alien 5 ever gets made. I want the Prometheus angle explored more.

My favorite is probably Clemens from Alien 3. He is sort of quiet but still goes his own way look at his conversation with Andrews "I am the doctor you are the jailer". 

After Clemens my favorite is Vasquez. I like her attitude for example when she pulls out some shells after being forced to give them to someone in Aliens (Apone?). She has some "don't take any shit" kind of attitude. Who can forget “Let’s rock!!!”?

The only movie where I have had Ripley as number one is in Alien, I don't know why.

is there going to be another instalment?

iraptu, it is an interesting and chilling theory. does anyone know if dark horse are going to be coming out with anything post covenant that could show this? they have done awesome work writing and illustrating the alien universe in the past and have done some brilliant things with theories that haven't been shown on screen and id like to see something like this.

though im going to stick with my original theory, simply from a weaponised perspective that it may not be required for the neomorph to reproduce but I like all the ideas

Alien Covenant 2 seems more interesting than Alien 5 even though AC was flawed. Ripley was over after Alien 3 so let it be. Having a fan base that is divided is not a problem for me, what would be strange is if all would prefer the same movies of a franchise that has been around for almost 40 years.

Ridley and Fox, well maybe but they got to stop this focus on AI because it reduces the human characters to some background kind of thing. I am not interested in an Alien 5 movie at all.

“If the Beast is cooked, then Ripley is charcoal...”

LOL! F-ing right about that, no doubt.

I agree that the Vickers character didn't add much to the story and Theron may well look back at this part and think maybe someone else less well known should have taken it. she didn't give anything by way of influencing the mission as no one listened to her really. that's why I believe her part was merely just to show what a cold hearted bastard weyland really was and if it came to it, hed sacrifice her in a nanosecond. given more screen time I think someone as talented as Theron wouldv done the character justice but her time was limited

Big Dave:

The thing is that we hadn’t had an Alien movie since 1997 (I don’t count the AVP’s) until we got Prometheus and maybe that is why many people went and saw it. It was a disappointing movie that people have different opinions about. Prometheus is a reason why AC was worse than it could have been even though it was not the only reason. To me they created a problem when they did Prometheus because it was different in a bad way but some people liked it so there are different fractions of the franchise as far as fans are concerned.

Unfortunately we have now had three disappointing Alien movies in a row so they got to make the next one a lot better. AC is a bit disappointing but still OK. Prometheus is a disappointment but AC is better than Prometheus IMO.

You say that the alien movies belong in different genres I agree. I don’t see Alien Aliens, and Prometheus as being in the same genre even though in itself isn’t a big problem because it would be bad if they were all the same.

I sort of dislike AVP and AR so. A lot should have been re-written in Prometheus but now the damage is done. They should have explained the Engineer and SJ connection better and tied it closer to the Xenos in Prometheus.

“so yeah another direction, that displeased some Fans, and some fans again displeased the Prometheus connections and would rather Prometheus and David had not been involved at all.... and also while they was given Xenomorphs it was not enough Xenomorphs.”

This is me to a degree. David could have been in it but should have been given a smaller role but he shouldn’t be the creator of the Xeno, that would be so bad. If that would be the case after the prequels are done then they should scrap them all and start the prequels over again. Blame Fox for this really. Having David re-create them wouldn’t be a problem for me and would be a lot better way of writing it (I think that ADF explained it in this way). Just because someone as a AI fetish doesn’t mean that David should be the creator of them.

Maybe I have said this before but having Xenos is not enough because we need well done characters also that we can sort of see ourselves in. Like: Oh shit, I could have been in that situation and how they react is interesting.

“do we go for a more ALIEN Flick or a ALIENS... Action or Horror... Queen or No Queen etc”

Mainly horror but more action is what I would like to see. Egg-morphing and no queen. More Alien and Aliens, less Prometheus but above all: Better characters. I believe that well written characters can save a movie even if the story isn’t that great but if a movie has bad characters it doesn’t matter if it has good visuals, whatever.

The SJ should be older than just ten years. To me it should be ancient because that would add to the mystery that I like.

“If they Re-booted the Prequels... then RS would not have this as it would be like him having to Admit his Idea was a complete FLOP!”

Well he hasn’t done that well this far. I wouldn’t be disappointed if he would admit that a lot of the ideas for the prequels and how they were done on film was bad.

moon girl. I don't believe its just a case of not wanting to believe but more a case of theres nothing logical about it. its similar to the david walter swap. ok if RS says that's how it is then fine, but its still hard to fathom. in the novel, david confirms that after the goo is released, all ships r locked down so what did he use? hes alone so how could he have designed the delivery system, built it, launched it AND mined the material on his own? the citadel also doesn't look as technologically advanced as the ships the engineers use so I doubt they had any weapons as they would have relied on the engineers and the scorpion ship for this. I can get that maybe someone from within the company gave the codes to david to access the covenant if he got onboard but the events that lead to the ship changing course r really far fetched and rely too much on everything going 100% according to plan.

Ali81:

Maybe that was the case but I still think that they didn't do a very good job with the Vickers character. Charlize Theron might be able to do well done roles it is just that Vickers wasn't that well written.

when he downloaded data from walter im sure he was only looking for specific files such as schematics of the covenant, inventory and the codes. the cottage by the lake would not have been of any importance to him at the time

You don't need to be sarcastic to show dislike for a movie. I am fine that some people don't like the movie but it depends how people express it. People can describe their dislikes like "I don't like it because XYZ" but it annoys me if when they are like "this is so bad LOL! " or "I hate it bla bla bla". There are more intelligent ways to express a dislike for something, that is just how I look at it.

I think the Vickers plot was to show in more depth the kind of man weyland was. he cast his daughter aside and created the son he always wanted. he was probably not around while she was growing up and so she has become a cold woman, hates him for not being a dad but really pissed hed rather have a synthetic son than a true daughter

Hate is a strong word, I don’t hate any movie even though I can have a heavy dislike for some. I look at it as some disappointment compared to what it could have been. Prometheus could have been a lot better if they would have kept a lot of the cut scenes in the movie.

Some scenes that should have been left in are Xeno Fifield, when they find a small worm, (Fifield and Milburn before they get stupid and try to cuddle a space cobra). Yes it would still have been bad but at least it would have been given an explanation. They should have left in some parts of the Weyland speech so we would get a better understanding of what he was trying to achieve. The translation of the David Engineer discussion would have been left in, that would have made more sense. I am not sure why they cut those scenes, maybe it was for some pacing shit.

Fassbender/David was interesting but most of the characters were badly developed which a lot of times made me think "that was stupid" or "meh". Janek was another character that I found interesting. It was good that they had David and Janek in it, otherwise it would have been trash. Those two characters saved the movie for me at least.

The movie is good looking, Scott is a good visualist but he shouldn’t write the story otherwise we get a focus on David, which is bad. Human characters should be the most important thing, not androids.

I agree with you about the abortion scene, that was nasty.

As far as technology, I think that it kind of depends what kind of mission it is. Sometimes you need more advanced technology compared to other times. Maybe it depends on how advanced the aim of the mission is. I didn't find any reason to complain about that at all. To me that is more like nit-picking.

Unfortunately there are more things that I dislike about it or that I stay neutral about rather than things that make me go "um that was good" or "Yes! Great!". I give Prometheus a 2 out of 5, I don't like it but I don't dislike it a lot either. At least it is better than AVP and AR.

Vickers being Weyland's daughter wasn't an issue for me, I just didn’t care about that part. To me she was a corporate bitch with daddy issues. At least she was not dumb as Shaw.

I never "disliked" Prometheus. I knew what was coming and what it was supposed to be. I DID want to see more connections to the "Alien" Universe, but other than not feeling satisfied in that regard, the movie has become much better with time, much like a fine wine, and is an excellent piece of cinema, alone AND as part of the "Alien" Universe.