"Alien: Awakening", "Covenant"'s shelved sequel, and what it would have been.
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Even though apparently Covenant was bad, (I honesty enjoyed Prometheus) its a shame the story will never get wrapped up.
We need our creepy alien "horror" franchise to end up with robots and super powered humans having a war instead.
Yeah, I liked Prometheus, but this shit is getting stupid
Give Alien a streamlined sequel in line with the original, lower budget, with a directing/writing combo that excels at the format.
Give Alien a streamlined sequel in line with the original, lower budget, with a directing/writing combo that excels at the format.
Like Jurassic world, I don't think Aliens is the sort of franchise that really benefits from being a franchise. And in particular, the direction Ridley Scott decided to take the franchise is just fucking weird. And even ignoring either of those, Prometheus and Alien Covenant are some of the dumbest movies to come out in recent memory.
So yeah, good riddance.
So yeah, good riddance.
Whenever people say movies can't retroactively harm those in the past this is the movie series I use to show they can.
Prometheus and the stupid fucking "Engineers" ruined the mystery of that Space Jockey. Also no, the space jockey was NOT a bloody suit, it was a fossilized skeleton of a weird ass alien species, it was also about 15 ft tall and a lot bulkier then the Engineers we got in Prometheus, "human" looking giant Aliens are one of the most boring and laziest designs for making an Alien imo.
Then Alien Covenant had to go and ruin the origins of the Alien (the version of it we know), which should have NEVER BEEN revealed.
It's like he doesn't grasp that some things are better left unknown, it's the idea of them that makes them scary and that sense of the Xenomorph having been a perfectly evolved species for survival. Seeing this huge ass looking Space Jockey and wondering where it came from, how old it is, and realizing that it too succumbed to the Xenomorph and just how old and long the Xenomorph had survived is what made it horrifying.
Having the Xenomorph be David's "design" and him doing what he did to Shaw made ZERO DAMN SENSE. Like seriously, wtf? The only good thing Prometheus did was have an ending that set up something that could have been great, Shaw and David going to the Engineer world and interacting with them, they could have made something amazing out of that, totally go for a 2001 style space movie, something more along The Martian in tone with actual SMART choices and interesting questions that it could prose by Shaw and David meeting the Engineers and having humanity's first interaction with an intelligent non-hostile alien species. Instead they literally threw that whole thing out for one of the most GENERIC "twists" and one of the worst things they could do to the Alien franchise.
They should have just made Prometheus/Covenant it's own separate thing not tied into the Alien series.
Prometheus and the stupid fucking "Engineers" ruined the mystery of that Space Jockey. Also no, the space jockey was NOT a bloody suit, it was a fossilized skeleton of a weird ass alien species, it was also about 15 ft tall and a lot bulkier then the Engineers we got in Prometheus, "human" looking giant Aliens are one of the most boring and laziest designs for making an Alien imo.
Then Alien Covenant had to go and ruin the origins of the Alien (the version of it we know), which should have NEVER BEEN revealed.
It's like he doesn't grasp that some things are better left unknown, it's the idea of them that makes them scary and that sense of the Xenomorph having been a perfectly evolved species for survival. Seeing this huge ass looking Space Jockey and wondering where it came from, how old it is, and realizing that it too succumbed to the Xenomorph and just how old and long the Xenomorph had survived is what made it horrifying.
Having the Xenomorph be David's "design" and him doing what he did to Shaw made ZERO DAMN SENSE. Like seriously, wtf? The only good thing Prometheus did was have an ending that set up something that could have been great, Shaw and David going to the Engineer world and interacting with them, they could have made something amazing out of that, totally go for a 2001 style space movie, something more along The Martian in tone with actual SMART choices and interesting questions that it could prose by Shaw and David meeting the Engineers and having humanity's first interaction with an intelligent non-hostile alien species. Instead they literally threw that whole thing out for one of the most GENERIC "twists" and one of the worst things they could do to the Alien franchise.
They should have just made Prometheus/Covenant it's own separate thing not tied into the Alien series.
Alright maybe that last part about them fighting on the planet is dumb but I want the rest of it
Fassbender as David was amazing. But, I don't think we need another sequel to make those connections. That one sentence is enough.
Ugh, good thing they put a stop to Ridley Scott's madness. After Alien Covenant, this movie would have bombed even harder. Canceling it was the smart decision.
Legit couldn't believe what I was seeing when David uttered the now famous "you blow, I'll do the fingering" and of course the other tons of dumb shit in that movie. Had a strong feeling Covenant would bomb when I walked out the theater.
Legit couldn't believe what I was seeing when David uttered the now famous "you blow, I'll do the fingering" and of course the other tons of dumb shit in that movie. Had a strong feeling Covenant would bomb when I walked out the theater.
Covenant was one of the most awful things I've watched in a long time. Really glad this didn't happen.
Covenant was a whole different thing from Prometheus, which I also enjoyed well enough. It was start to finish "fuck this movie" bad.
We thought we wanted to know the journey of how we got to Alien but it turns out even though the multi way transportation offered a very nice view (I like the cinematography of the two movies), we traveled with a bunch of weird people that soured the journey. And at the end of the second exchange the third leg is cancelled and you discovered that teleportation has already been invented and you traveled through two bad movies for nothing.
Covenant was a direct sequel to Prometheus, and they were both godawful.
All of this shit that came after Prometheus is so wretched that it's goimg to make me like Prometheus. I mean damn, at least it had something to
OP
OP
Presumably.
Prometheus made $403 million off of a $120 million dollar budget, which is pretty alright for an R-rated sci-fi film.
"Alien: Covenant" had a budget of about $100 million, and made only $70 million domestically and $170 million globally. While not bad, those are not good numbers since they imply a third entry would do so bad that it wouldn't even make back its budget, including global territories. Basically, that downward trend combined with a bigger budget means a definite no-go. So, yes, it is dead for the foreseeable future.
It's all...so....awful.
Ridley Scott's some kind of savant who doesn't understand his own work. Like he has an incredible eye, he understands mood, tone, pacing...but you better hope he's paired with a screenwriter who knows what they're doing because Ridley Scott sure doesn't grasp what he's filming. He's like the best example against the single-auteur theory in that his work so clearly demonstrates how film is a collaborate process where multiple artists contribute to the final piece, not just the director (see: Scott's take on BR that led to the Final Cut).
Here's some of what Dan O'Bannon, Alien's screenwriter, had to say in various interviews over the years:
And regarding the Space Jockeys....
Like, no shit. That's the point. Watching the first movie, I assumed the Space Jockeys were just some random other unfortunate race that fell victim to the Xenomorph. The alien was just what would result when the forces of evolution by natural selection acted upon life in space. Nature's scary enough on Earth, so what evolution would produce in space....
I know that Ridley Scott had in his mind for a long while that they were bioweapons, but I feel like that's so small. There's an existential fear in the unknown, and reducing the xenomorph to a manmade creation explains it away, it turns it into something that might as well be a killer robot.
It's funny. There was a period in the development of Alien that they considered making the xenomorph a creation of the Company!
If all we knew about alien was that it evolved somewhere else, the scariest question in my mind would be....what sort of ecosystem could this thing have come from? If this is what a parasite looks like, what else is from its world...? What could a predator of this thing possibly have been, or what else existed in this food chain...?
They had countless opportunities to use the question "What kind of horrible planet would produce a creature like Alien as just one of its species?" as a foundation for a movie.
Or just make one about some giant pale humans hunting Fassbender, I guess.
Ridley Scott's some kind of savant who doesn't understand his own work. Like he has an incredible eye, he understands mood, tone, pacing...but you better hope he's paired with a screenwriter who knows what they're doing because Ridley Scott sure doesn't grasp what he's filming. He's like the best example against the single-auteur theory in that his work so clearly demonstrates how film is a collaborate process where multiple artists contribute to the final piece, not just the director (see: Scott's take on BR that led to the Final Cut).
Here's some of what Dan O'Bannon, Alien's screenwriter, had to say in various interviews over the years:
And regarding the Space Jockeys....
Like, no shit. That's the point. Watching the first movie, I assumed the Space Jockeys were just some random other unfortunate race that fell victim to the Xenomorph. The alien was just what would result when the forces of evolution by natural selection acted upon life in space. Nature's scary enough on Earth, so what evolution would produce in space....
I know that Ridley Scott had in his mind for a long while that they were bioweapons, but I feel like that's so small. There's an existential fear in the unknown, and reducing the xenomorph to a manmade creation explains it away, it turns it into something that might as well be a killer robot.
It's funny. There was a period in the development of Alien that they considered making the xenomorph a creation of the Company!
But they knew this was a mistake, they knew that had to keep the alien an "Alien". And now, with the twist Ridley Scott made to the lore in Prometheus and Covenant....it isn't as alien, really. I mean, it's a creature from off-world, yes, but it has a very human origin. Go figure.
If all we knew about alien was that it evolved somewhere else, the scariest question in my mind would be....what sort of ecosystem could this thing have come from? If this is what a parasite looks like, what else is from its world...? What could a predator of this thing possibly have been, or what else existed in this food chain...?
They had countless opportunities to use the question "What kind of horrible planet would produce a creature like Alien as just one of its species?" as a foundation for a movie.
Or just make one about some giant pale humans hunting Fassbender, I guess.
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Tried too hard to make everything connected through plot instead of the theme of exploring our deep-rooted fears of that which is 'alien' to us.
How so? Genuinely curious, had no desire to see Covenant so my last Alien film was Prometheus.
Calling Prometheus "god awful" feels a bit much. It's quite a flawed movie but I wouldn't say it's terrible.
Convenant is clearly a worse movie.
Convenant is clearly a worse movie.
Blomkamp is perfectly fine as long as somebody else is handling the writing.
If this movie is not cancelled I wonder how they can top the stupidity and idiocy of the characters in both Promotheus and especially Covenant.
Despite them being allegedly highly intelligent folks, so many things happened in both those movies simply because they were acting like huge idiots.
Despite them being allegedly highly intelligent folks, so many things happened in both those movies simply because they were acting like huge idiots.
Humanity's brigthest minds are sent to a literal alien planet and suddenly they all get out of their suits to touch, breathe and snort everything on sight.
Five year olds at the park know better than doing that in front of their parents.
When I say "whole different thing" I mean, "some might say Prometheus is bad, but Covenant is on an entirely different level". I understand their narrative relationship.
I love the aesthetics of Prometheus and Covenant so much that I want this movie no matter how much it sucks.
Covenant was the last movie I remember seeing in the theater where I actually walked out of the room angry after finishing it. It's Idiot Plot all over the place. It's insulting.
Franchise will likely get a reboot after Disney officially owns Fox. Here's to hoping they bring it back to the roots.
The Alien Queen no longer exists
The Alien is now a Frankenstein monster created by David
You can't make a better Alien than Alien. I like that Ridley Scott took a different direction with those prequels and I would have watched this one.
Oh. Well I'm not into David creating the Xenomorphs but I am totally down with the queen not being the default for the Xenomorph life cycle. I always preferred much more out-there stuff that never made it into the original film.
I still remember seeing Covenant in an IMAX theater with my friend.
The entire theater was laughing, LAUGHING, during the backburster scene.
Then "I'll do the fingering" brought the house down again.
When Dr. Manhattan stuck his stupid face into the egg, someone said out loud "are you fucking serious?" and the whole theater laughed again.
The entire theater was laughing, LAUGHING, during the backburster scene.
Then "I'll do the fingering" brought the house down again.
When Dr. Manhattan stuck his stupid face into the egg, someone said out loud "are you fucking serious?" and the whole theater laughed again.
We don't really know, maybe the xenomorph species evolved all by itself after many various hosts. Like humans, engineers, animals, other alien life forms, etc.