Review: ALIEN COVENANT

All Is Well In Alien World. But You’ve Seen It All Before

2.5 stars

Mini Review:

Ridley Scott makes a paint by numbers Alien movie. What could have been great, just turns into let’s predict who gets killed next game. Yes Fassbender is there, Prometheus is there, the Aliens tearing apart human bodies from the inside is there, there is lots of blood too. But after having watched so many sequels, you find yourself hankering for something a little different.

Main Review:

As the Eagles sang: Same dances in same old shoes/Some habits that you just can’t lose/There’s no telling what a man might use/After the thrill is gone…

There is Covenant the transporter ship that’s taking people in deep sleep across space to a planet they can colonise. There is Walter the Synth who takes care of all the people and embryos until a Passengers (Jennifer Lawrence/Chris Pratt) style space accident wakes up the crew…

As the song says, ‘Same ole dancing in same old shoes’ we watch as the crew take stupider and stupider emotional decisions.

Look at the lyrics of the song again: ‘What can you do when your dream comes true/And it’s not quite like you planned?’

Of course the travelers choose to land on a totally unchecked, unknown planet and they are so sloppy, even I wouldn’t allow such jokers to take care of my body in stasis during interplanetary travel.

Even Star Trek chaps knew when you landed on alien planets, you wore protective gear, and you always set your phasers on ‘Stun’. These guys just walk out of the lander craft as though they were going to take a walk in a park in New Zealand. They smoke, they take pee breaks, and they stomp through the flora as if they ruled alien territory. And the audience just groans when one from the landing party simply breaks off a fat wheat pod and eats it. Why would you eat untested stuff on an alien planet? The girl who breaks off from the party to ‘Test the water and the soil’ should have said a ‘No! Don’t eat that!’

When you see such rampant stupidity, you begin to support the aliens that just want them as meat. They are so stupid, they deserve to die.

How they die becomes apparent soon enough, but not before you have praised Ridley Scott’s vision of the doomed world. You meet…

The dialog is interesting enough and you nod your head in approval and you smile. You are also stumped at the setting but then you see the predictability of it all.

The visitors die one by one and you almost yell out in happiness when you meet your old friend the facehugger.

The movie grows on you because Fassbender and Fassbender are cooler characters than anyone in the landing party (you know they are fodder for the Alien. What I enjoyed was the connect to Prometheus.

You watch the final act play out knowing the twist in the tale before the characters in the film do. It’s exhausting to watch the finale, because you know they have to keep the tale going a mile before the Captain’s log is recorded again. You wonder what they’re planning with Spock and Kirk and Dr. McCoy and Uhura are up to… Or where Luke and Leia and Darth Vader are…

The thrill is gone.