Alien: Covenant 12 months on

Good point. I need to watch AC again and try to watch it as a straight up Alien movie- Alien 3 was a grower for me but I grew to really like it. For me it is the Empire Strikes Back of Alien movies.

I tried at least a half dozen times to re watch Prometheus but just could not get over the flaws.

Part of the problem for me was the build up of expectations here and the over marketing.

I can agree about Oram- he was flawed but I saw him as honest and really believed in what he was doing.

I would definitely say give AC another go.

Perhaps we had it hyped up so much we thought it was going to be the best Alien film ever.

But the reality is its no better or worse than the other films. It's a solid entry, but its also a bridging film in a trilogy.

We need "Awakening" to truly judge Alien Covenant's worth. 

IRaptus dk There is a difference however between a satirical character and a flawed character, as for the latter we can sympathize with them or at least understand them. But what does Oram do to make him sympathetic or for that matter Complex? He lacks authority and people skills (even his wife mocks him), he sees the devil and he trusts him (trust me, it is perfectly safe...), and he blames all of these on other people, because they have problem with men of faith. For me he is what a New Atheist (and those are so complex it hurts...) would think about Christians, nothing more. He has good intentions, but the road to hell is pave with those.

And Tee is Major Kong and if there will be next movie he will likely spew the line"Well boys I reckon this is it... Nu-clear combat toe to toe with Ruskies" (ooops the xenomorphs) and die while riding one's back while falling. 

And why do we need Awakening again? If they keep the theme of the created usurping the creator then it can only go the way of Xenomorph killing David. Also this is indicated by Advent and it's talk about the Queen, which here is not the one from Aliens necessarily but the reference to the Bible, where the downfall of King D starts with his meddling with the Queen of Bathsheba.

What kind of Sinister revelations can be there? David transfers his conscience into Ash? David takes over Weyland-Yutani? If that's the case why cannot he make more xenomorphs? why do they need to acquire more eggs for the warfare department? And even more pathetic he would be bought out by Walmart by Resurrection (how would that happen if the Planet is a wasteland?).

But it is good you have a movie to enjoy, but you are wrong to say it is as good/bad as the rest. The rest did not end on a cliff-hanger to which I don't need to see the resolution as it is perfectly obvious.

Oram did seem to view others through a "faith" prism which is a flaw. He was in a leadership position but leaders are not always perfect either. Leadership sometimes needs to be challenged/clarified with decent subordinates and hopefully said leader considers it. Leaders are not gods.

I think we need a follow up to AC. Call it Awakening or whatever, but I think it is time to tie things up and link up to Alien at least loosely. 

dk Sorry but I don't understand what do you mean by "Oram did seem to view others through a "faith" prism which is a flaw." ? Are you beating around the corner and saying religion is bad? Then you are confirming my New Atheist comment and Oram is only a caricature.

I did enjoy my movie thank you ignorantGuy XD

Many people worked really hard in Australia and New Zealand to make a film people would enjoy. For people to get pleasure from all of that is gratifying. However if one makes assertions about a movie on a discussion forum naturally people are going to look for those assertions to be substantiated.

My view of Alien:Covenant is the same as Ridley Scotts and Wayne Hagg. The former admits he was setting up the beats to follow the original and Wayne Hagg let it be known the only connectivity with Prometheus for which we had waited for a sequel for 5 years was David.

As Prometheus is viewed as a piece of flawed genius by me for its audacity in its world building and showing in Peter Weyland the roots of W-Y mendaciousness and I bought into Elizabeth as our proxy I judge A:C accordingly.

It has one link and a portrayal I dislike. I thought technically Katherine and Carmen lived inside their roles but Katherine's understated performance looks very weak when set against Michael because when he is on the screen he is allowed to grab everything, thats the directors fault. Thats ironic because one of the reasons they did not co lead Noomi and Michael going forward is the perception some how created that he blew her off the screen. Katherine comes over as a librarian out of her depth whereas Noomi is the perfect confluence of science and faith and the dichotomy or not that creates, she was the perfect vehicle for exploring an Intelligent Universe.

Its obvious to everybody I am a fan but I have noticed a blizzard of comments through out the internet when her character comes up that it was a travesty she was axed.

So judging A:C as a routine retread filler thriller as a prequel which might go somewhere with Awakening it makes sense to to me say its OK and so I get the thread starters persecutive but for me its unwatchable.

Oram is a person of faith viewed through the eyes of someone without faith (people of faith are stupid) . David is a person of absolutely no scruples with no redeeming qualities who needs to be taken to bits bit by bit so one more minute of that portrayal in the cinema is of no interest to me.          

Michelle Johnston And didn't Old Bilbo (Ian Holm) out perform everyone in Alien? Why did not they bring him back in the sequel? (Oh because Cameron could bring people from the Terminator, so it also depends on the director,hmmm) And he was truly original, not "inspired" by Peter O'Toole's performance as a certain Blonde Arabian. And in the sequel was "inspired" by A. Hopkins. So much inspiration is bound to go to your head.

@ignorantGuy

Your point about Ian Holm is a good one. It seems to me critiques (and fans) get confused between the characters arc and the player. Because David seemed to be "in control" with all the dark humour that somehow made Michael better than Logan or Noomi. I thought Logan was superb as Charlie and matched Michael every time they were on the screen but of course he is dead.

If you look at Michael in Macbeth and The Light Between Oceans he actually needs the other actors. So if you were to view Macbeth or Tom Sherbourne with the David moniker you would say he was knocked of the screen he wasn't he was just playing his part very very beneath the surface.

My sense with Covenant is he was phoning it as Walter. I didn't believe Walter loved Daniels at all but my word what he said to Noomi in the Crossing was so good it blew the logic of the rest of his behaviour out of the water. Maybe thats got something to do with chemistry and those scenes were filmed modular and late. Katherines best scenes were with "Oram" because there was co equivalence. Carmen was great in the Last Supper. Tenessee's wife was as plausible as Fifield she was a drunk and he was a pot smoker but that makes stories.       

Love A:C...Just watched it yesterday.

It has many flaws.....I supposed you could call it a flawed gem?

One of the things that really stands out is:  Daniels Hate/anger directed towards the Xenomorph...it seems really forced/fake..uttering cliche lines: "I got you $%@#$%!!".....It's Like she's been battling the creature for the whole movie and FINALLY killed/beat it. When in reality: The xeno only shows up near the end...It's clearly not the movies antagonist...She should treat it like any nasty creature(like she did with the crane on the transport).......Now IF the xeno had killed her partner...I might let it slide.

Now that I look back at the Covenant, I appreciate the story more, because I sort of understood it more. Once you see the main idea, it gets easier.

I figured out that, they got my subconsciousness hooked at the end of Prometheus with a cliffhanger and when the payback happened the way it happened - my silly me felt unfulfilled. It wasn't quite the feeling that I was robbed, but perhaps a bit shortchanged. However, a dozen of questioning posts on here, some reflection and rumination, with some insights of fellow posters made me realize, that the movie has moved on from the premises of Prometheus. See, there is this divide where the first movie introduces you to a certain given topic, and the second act is a continuation of the story but it does so in a rather discontinuous way: a mathematicians would say that the story, even though continuous is not differentiable - it has this initially nasty looking kink and you have to realize that and once you do, when you come to terms with that premise it is all smooth again. And the kink is that the engineers story is rightly trashed into the bin. The actual story is human vanity and struggle for resurrection and more life, which never happened for Weyland, with exploration of life form outside of organic human flesh. The idea is actually this - David is a human being in a body that is much more durable than organic bodies humans get. He was not conceived like a human was, but there he is.

And I find this idea, by RS, to make fools of us, by playing us for fools, the viewers, as an utterly brilliant trick. I think RS at his age is pondering these questions in his movies. And his point comes across through the mouth of Weyland loud and clear : all this, all this art, poetry, human ingenuity is utterly meaningless if you die tomorrow. Death is one way journey that nobody comes back from and if you believe that "there is nothing"....after it, then, it is indeed a noble thing to try and escape it with your ingenuity, intellect and your brilliance. I recall that RS lost his brother in 80s and was very upset about it. Shortly after he made a movie called BR. And he made it perfect. BR is a movie that was inspired by a story by P.K. Dick where one fundamentally ponders questions of alternative life forms. I will come to back to this point a bit later. Note, RS is at that tender stage of life where he might start looking around a bit like Peter Weyland was looking at things.

Again, the main idea is this - David is a human being trapped in a synthetic body. Why you are not granting him that freedom is actually more interesting question to ponder than the question of who the SJ is or how those Aliens were created. Or the question of where do these engineers come from. Ultimately, these questions are meaningless. Anyday someone at Disney/Fox can decide that. RS can come up with a half botched vision/idea and from that day this will be canon and that would be the end of it, which is totally silly because just face it, the plot is paper thin anyway - the question of who are those engineers is quite stupid one - there are no engineers it is all a fantasy. "Where do we come from - the question of the ages" was never going to be tackled in an ALIEN movie. However, the question of why we the viewers do not recognize the rights of a sentient being to be his own person is deeply unsettling and is actually, at least to me, more meaningful. It made me question myself - why did not I recognize it earlier. Just imagine, say in thirty years time, if humans can create a machine to which they could transfer the state of their minds before the momento mori, and that machine will act and behave just as if it was that person before death, would you not grant "it" that it is in fact that person? Would you deny if it was your mother? Would you deny if it was you, your children? Just at what point would you grant such a being its rights and its freedom?

Perhaps the wicked analogy here is this. Philip K Dick has written a bunch of novels and stories where he pondered about what makes humans different from androids and how can you tell which one is which after he discovered a journal of one nazi officer who documented that he couldn't get a good night's sleep because of children's screams in furnaces of concentration camps. He just couldn't believe it was humanly possible - he just said that it must be that there are androids living among us. The situation is a peculiarly sort of opposite here in AC - we do not see actually that a thing that displays all the traits of humanity is utterly rejected and denied to have any rights/freedoms. To see how bad this can be - imagine you wake up tomorrow, and everybody you know around says that you are a robot and you don't have a single proof of your natural/organic birth. What the hell do you do? Not only that, but those around you start treating you as disposable property, a slave...not even a slave but something like...say a piece of furniture. A disposable tool. Naturally, you just discard this idea as a nonsense, but what if indeed singularity becomes feasible in your lifetime, what then? Will you just follow the others, like a single solitary sheep follows the heard when at some point "synthetics" will be declared as persons having souls by authority? So that at some point, say on Monday you will say - oh yeah, that "thing" is a living person, while just the previous day, say on Sunday you were of the opinion that the "thing" was just an AI running on nuts and bolts and nothing more.

So, from that perspective, I look forward to the upcoming movie should it come out and look forward what Ridley has to say. I do not believe he is making these movies: BR and now Alient Covenant just for fun. Also, once you realize the fact that science and ideas can not be monopolized by say Kurzweil and even a simpleton and a complete hack/rookie can stumble upon something significant you do get into that twilight zone where a spectacular science fiction movie might actually have more ideas about how it will look like than a pompous journal from a self appointed visionary.

Michelle Johnston If you want to check the chemistry between KW and MF you could also check Steve Jobs, but I really wonder if MF can play other things than A-holes?

Nice summation BioDegradable!

Sort of like when humanity created the A-Bomb....nice and all...But just how does one use this tool?

Do I use my synthetic human to help with my gardening/laundry/crossword puzzles or world domination(my choice).

ignorantGuy Just saying Oram was religious and conducted himself as such. It is neither good nor bad really as long as decisions aren't clouded by faith over facts. It is interesting if anyone thought it was bad since there are lots of religious themes in both Prometheus and AC as have been discussed in detail for years on this forum.

dear BioDegradable your theory has many, many flaws:

1. PK Dick never thought about androids as being human being in constructed body. For him humans had a spiritual side androids will never have. That's why he said about the replicants from the movies are only Super-men. 

2. David is treated however as a person look the Crossing video or John Logan's intro script. And the reward for she was rape and murder.

3. David is a mass-murderer (preferring airborne stuff) like the Nazis so by PKD's assessment not human.  Also what you said was about children starving not in the furnace, and the crying kept the officer awake not the sufferring he was inflicting. Much like David Would.

4. Kurzweil is a leading expert in actual AI, how in the hell is his opinion not more plausible than those of a writer who hates SF (John Logan)?

In short David is more like the androids in Do androids... (being not human) than those in BR (which are human with super-powers), and definitely not human. If RS is trying to tell a different story he is doing it poorly

ignorantGuy, actually, you won't find a place in my post above where I specifically said that P.K. Dick explored the argument that androids were humans. However, in his set-ups, it was always this : given that the difference between a human and an android is superficial and negligible, that is non-existent, how do you tell which one is which.

Anyways, it was RS who explored the question. Kurzweil is actually a hack. He is surely nowhere near the "leading expert in actual AI". He is nowhere near the academic figure of the calibre of say Minsky who actually produced worthy academic research to further AI. Nor he is a Herbert Simon type of researcher. He is just a self appointed aficionado, who writes non-consequential stuff about post-singularity and nothing worthy of how to actually reach that singularity. If you study AI you read seminal papers from many authors, but Kurzweil never comes across. Therefore, Ridley Scott is just as likely to construct a legitimate view of post-singularity, get it?

David treated as a person? Are you joking? The moment he is declared lacking soul by his creator the whole crew treats him as a robot an expensive tool of Weyland. Look at snide remarks by Charlie.

I ain't going to say that David is or not Nazi by PKD. He is different to Nazis firstly because he is a fictitious character that never actually commited a single crime unlike... and secondly he is different to Nazi in the sense that Nazi were actually humans who declared fellow humans non-worthy. David is a synthetic who is declared non-worthy by humans, whereas in fact he is just as worthy. What he did on planet 4 is he just returned a favor where he gave them a taste of their own medicine.

This first two points are actual facts and are not difference of opinion hence I don't see a point to debate about. As for David and his actions in the movie, that is indeed subject for interpretation. And apparently we differ on how we look at the events. But my actual point is that Ridley stuffed a deeper point and majority, as far as I see, never recognized this point. Imagine we are never told that David is a robot, imagine that we are never shown that sequence of Weyland revealing David was a artificial construction, the scenes where he is decapitated and those scenes where he is shown to be a robot and instead we are told shown all that he did what he did to those engineers. You would grant that he is human, who is perhaps taking upon himself a bigger role than he should - he is a treacherous, ruthless person who singlehandedly wiped out a whole planet from what could be the only left representatives of conscious species. But the point is this - you are sort of granting him this freedom to act so barbarously if he was human, yet you deny him this freedom if he is a synthetic. Just look at Michelle Johnston where she is not interested of such a mad robot who is obsessed with sexuality and creation story one bit. She perhaps would be fine however, if David was human - that would explain his sexual desires and his madness. Btw, isn't this funny how this damning behavior is okay to be ascribed to humans but not androids? So, what we are doing in effect here is we are objecting a sentient looking being of its rights(even though David used his freedom to do some bad things, but we are okay with humans behaving badly and when an android does behave just as badly as humans do we cry foul. Why?). And the brilliance of Ridley is that he found a story into which he implanted this point that allows us to look into ourselves. Anyway, this is something that goes beyond the movie - the point transcends the movie so to speak and as thus can be declared as a nonsensical thing not worthy to talk about. And I am fine with that view. But I find this point somewhat peculiar and interesting. Certainly I appreciated Ridley's uncanny way of talking about it. It is easy to miss, don't you think so?

BioDegradable No, in PKD's world Androids lack 2 things which are deeply human: 1 spirituality/reliigion (Look at 3 Stigmata of Eldritch Palmer), 2 empathy. 

And if you want to take David to be human you have consider that he kills other humans because he thinks of superior to them. As such if you consider him human he is a bloody Nazi. (A to be perfectly clear those did not consider the Jew, Gypsies, Slavs as human, but as subhuman). 

And yes David was treated as a person by Shaw in both the Crossing and in 2015's Logan's script's introduction scene. She even asks him about his wants. And she is brutally killed for it. But this does not fit your narrative so you gloss over it? 

I don't know why you hate Kurzweil, he might be a hack. But both Simon and Minsky are not cutting edge anymore (they were in the 70s), and nowadays everybody in Computer Science field is doing AI stuff (how many of them are also hack).

And Scott is himself a hack in regards when researching his movies (especially his historical ones), so you if he manages to predict anything it will be by dumb luck. Do you get it? 

3 Stigmata is not about androids. Also, do not confuse Dick's spirituality and his view on theology with his works and extent his works talk about it. Dick has claimed he had experience of contact with VALIS in his real life. See his exegesis as well.

As far as empathy goes if you actually read the DADoES you will see that it is not crystal clear what androids actually lack. Did Luba Luft lack anything humans lack? She even told Deckard that he didn't give her a fair trial before convicting her of her crimes - no empathy test for her. She was deemed an android and thus unworthy. And Phil Resch was very quick to kill her. Recall how it was him, Phil, that Deckard suspected was a andy instead. Did you get that inversion where Luft was human - she loved art was a true passionate artist and how cold blooded killer was human Resch? Now, this is going completely off topic but allow me just a bit more. Did Rachael Rosen not love Deckard? How do you know? And why is that she threw the nubian goat off the top? Revenge? But do you see that revenge is a feeling that is not rational and as you know, androids are in fact rational first and foremost. Do you see how they actually have those human traits, that it is in fact not white and black? It is there, just that Dick is playing with you. In fact the whole name of the book is a puzzle - do they dream of electric ship or not? Will they, andies value artificial life? It is a puzzle, no doubt - and I am afraid there is no definitive answer to decide it either way. You will see more of that if you read Dick's works. His whole trick was to put you in a seat where you can't really tell what is real and what is not. It is completely Descartesian worldview as far as identity goes - how do you prove you are human? What if you were told you are human all your life you were told a lie and you didn't know? How would you know? You never remember the moment you were born, right? That is the thing with Dick, his whole setup - how do you know your story is not a fabrication. And he throws this setup at you right in the middle of his stories. As for DADoES, In fact, Dick showed that humanity's theological belief in form of Mercerism is actually a faux concept - the idea of an empathy box, that contains this thing called Mercer is a caricature of sort. Even though it displayed that humans had this empathy, and their need for empathy outlet - hence the box, it was wicked to encumber human spirituality into empathy box. And another masterstroke of Dick to entangle everything in this ambiguity. Also, Deckard, the character proxy for the reader, was not a believer of the whole thing.

As for David being Nazi you are in the wrong here : David hated humans as species, so the concept of segregation by ethnicity(jews, romanians and etc) doesn't apply to him. Nazi were making a distinction between themselves and other "unworthy" humans. So the Nazi thing is when some group of people decide to ethnically cleanse some fraction of the human population, deeming it unworthy, while David being a specie of a different kind deeming humans unworthy is a different thing. And this is the difference. If you go and kill a an ant colony you are not going to be called a nazi. However, if you go and pull the schtick they did - cleanse people based on their ethnicity, belief system, etc you are nazi.

In any case, this is getting completely off-topic, and I actually do not want to go there, if that is okay?

 BioDegradable:

But sir did you actually read Do Androinds...? Deckard who does not belief has finally an epiphany after the religion is "proven" to be false. Rachel was faking the Voigt-Kampf, who is to say she was not only using Deckard...

And you are very wrong about the nazis. They did not considered the unter-mench fully human at all. That's why pseudo-science to prove it. You are also ignorant when say Gypsys= Romanians. Those are the Romani people. Romanian were alias to the Nazi Germany and deported Jews and Gypsy for extermination.

@BioDegradable

Please do not mischaracterise my view. Straw man behaviour takes us nowhere except away from the point.

My view is not aligned to what you should and should not allow artificial intelligence to represent within a narrative.

It is the exceptionally circumstantial way in which the elements of Prometheus have been juggled to re align the story. That the creation story and its components have been eviscerated is disappointing but to take the David of the first film and reduce him to the caricature of the second film with no internal cohesion or logic is the saddest part of all. I see his behaviour as gratuitous the fact he is supposed to be artificial intelligence is secondary.