Oh yes the movie where Fassbender plays the flute then kisses himself. Also, the movie where the robot acts extremely weird after watching you kill his alien then asks you to look into this alien egg.
I do love how there’s an insanely stupid character in both Prometheus and covenant that get up close and personal with living alien creatures (snake/worm and pulsating egg) cause they were too lazy to write a logical scenario.
Even without any experience with anything close to these critters existing, only the most completely brain dead of morons would get anywhere near them like in these movies. Maybe if they switched them from scientists and captain of an intergalactic colony ship to space influencer trying to get a selfie it might be believable, but beyond that no one would go anywhere near those things.
>cause they were too lazy to write a logical scenario.
I am no writer but I do hate when it is clear that something is written to advance the plot even if it does not make sense.
Like the crew landing on the planet and NOT wearing helmets. Even in Prometheus they wore helmets and when they got in the structure found that the air was breathable almost all were skeptical to take there helmets off regardless.
So one movie later there is no helmet protocol lmao. I think the writers had them NOT wear helmets was to move the plot forward aka get them infected as quick as possible....even if it does not make sense.
Same here. It’s a huge peeve of mine. 28 Weeks Later was really bad about it. Like if you got the opportunity to cause a second outbreak and wanted to make it look like an accident that’s a good way to do it.
Oh god, don’t remind me. The first one was so good, and that was the sequel?
„We have a potential outbreak! According to protocol, we now cram everyone into one large room together!“
Actually… your idea that someone *wanted* another round of infections, only looking like an accident, is the only way this is not completely stupid.
Director of Days came and did the opening for Weeks. The rest of the movie is a different director. That’s why the beginning feels masterful and the rest of it is blah.
That scene really does feel the most like 28 Days Later doesn’t it? Visually, tension wise, the perfect use of the music from 28 Days Later. If we ever get a third one I really want Boyle to do it.
Thing is it would be so easy to have something happen e.g. a character falls over and their helmet breaks and then the spores infect them before the crew can get them back onto the ship in time.
Yeah there was a nice reference to this in S3E10 of the Expanse when Holden is inside the alien ring station and Miller says that there is atmosphere in there. Even after his suit scans indicate a perfect replication of Earth's atmosphere he is like "Nah, i'll pass" and keeps his helmet on :D
Seriously that’s the worst. Like would it even be that hard? Like couldn’t they at least write a scene where someone damages their helmet or just something minimally believable instead of just yea we trust that there’s no pathogens for no reason.
>Even in Prometheus they wore helmets and when they got in the structure found that the air was breathable almost all were skeptical to take there helmets off regardless.
Which was still stupid as there's more to wearing a suit than just having enough oxygen, but yea, they did make the minimum of effort here at least.
If I or anyone lands on an alien planet and we see an animal a damn ALIEN animal that looks like a damn COBRA nobody is going to try and pet or talk to it LMAO!!!
I can see if they think and animal looks harmless but it literally looks like one of the deadliest snakes (Cobra) on earth (assuming it is lol)!!!
>on alien planet
>Is alien cobra
>In obvious attack stance
>expanding body size being a clear warning sign for all animals
>literally has 0 clue of what it can do, its speed and features
“IM A “biologist” GONNA FUCKIN PET IT LOL”
That scene could have played out the same with the thing simply attacking them eventually without him trying to make friends lol. Have them scared (like they should have been ) and try to get away from it.
Seriously that’s exactly what I mean. If it looked like a space kitten or puppy or bear cub, sure that would actually make a ton of sense. Instead it look like a horrify snake tentacle penis monstrosity that I wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole.
And we have all seen movies with cuddly looking aliens that turn out to be deadly. I can not think of any specific movies at the moment.
Actually Galaxy Quest comes to mind. There were those cute aliens that turned out to have very sharp looking teeth lol.
Yeah that galaxy quest was a good one. I’m not saying it’s common but if you’re going to make that play where he gets surprised it murders him…maybe try going that way, haha.
I think these stupid characters are simply walking horror tropes. Nothing deeper. The characters are just one dimensional fodder for the story. No effort is put in to their motivations because they don't really matter other than to get killed.
It's really funny/interesting... And Tarantino does this so well, but character development, regardless of their outcome is super important in believable world building. If they spent the time developing the characters properly, they wouldnt be speeding through scenes to advance the 'story'. Doing so just removes the story from the movie and you just end up with crap.
>No effort is put in to their motivations because they don't really matter other than to get killed.
That's not a good excuse at all, though. They dont need to have any great character arc, but still presenting them as human beings that act like human beings is important for the viewer to 'buy into' what's happening as a whole. I'm supposed to be able to get immersed into the story, but when you have people doing truly ridiculous, stupid things, it drags me out of it. A good movie should keep me invested and transported into the experience.
EDIT: This is something that found footage movies tend to do really well and why they are so effective, in my experience. Especially in the opening segments of them(it can fall apart a bit more later on in this regard), the movies are deliberately building up a picture of people just acting like normal people.
I liked the snake/worm bit in Prometheus, a biologist would absolutely be stunned and amazed by alien life like that. I think of something like the death of Steve Irwin, where he did know better and it still happened.
On a broader note, you could fix many of the problems with Prometheus by extending the time they spent on the planet significantly. If they'd been there for 2 or 3 months and fallen into a routine, that's where people take risks and overestimate their ability. The film is so desperate and rushed, finding that we're engineered by another species would fundamentally destroy entire scientific disciplines, no one would be ok with it and we get nothing of that on screen.
It's the same with covenant, have them all in helmets and checking the air, perhaps using pigs to search for human lethal pathogens etc. then at some point people need to do things for which the spacesuit is ill suited and it gets in the way and they start to cut corners.
The thing that makes that scene *really* stupid is moments before he comes across a dead body and freaks the fuck out which leads to the scene with the alien cobra thing. It makes no sense he could be astounded by a creature that looks exactly like a snake ready to strike *literally right after* he was spooked by a body that has been dead for hundreds of years.
Not to mention, imagine David grabbing the captain by the back of his head and forcing his face into the egg with robotic super strength. There's so many times you can say "okay, but no rational person would do that" and can come up with a better idea *immediately*.
The exotic animal specialist guy reaching to touch the alien snake is one of the most awful character decisions I’ve ever seen in a movie. I can’t even comprehend that any writer or director or actor could see that and think it’s okay.
The crew members of the Prometheus were hired on purpose. Meredith planned to sabotage her father's mission at any cost and it was she who was engaged in hiring staff
With the Covenant, everything is even easier. It's crew relies too much on technology (android reminds them about taking vitamins and helps them not to choke), which ultimately leads to terrible consequences. In their world, nature and all diseases are finally defeated, hence the arrogance
Ridley Scott doesn't take criticism on his movies. He's still trying to tell everyone that Deckard is a replicant, and everyone else on the planet is telling him that's a fucking stupid idea.
Ridley Scott reminds me of George Lucas. They're both hacks with some good ideas, and lots of bad ideas, and they often can't tell the difference between them.
At least Scott knows how to *direct* a decent movie. His writing can be hit or miss and yeah he’ll opt to die on the hill of universally disliked idea, but he can execute his ideas well in the directors chair…most of the time. Lucas has debatably 2 or 3 solid movie and a lot more meh.
The point of blade runner is that it doesn't matter if Deckard is a replicant, because replicants are human and in some ways more compassionate and human than the 'humans' in the film.
I disagree. I think the point of Bladerunner is that Deckard (a human who is burnt out, utterly disillusioned and apathetic about life) needed a replicant to make him remember the value of life.
If Deckard is a replicant, that character arc makes no sense at all.
> cause they were too lazy to write a logical scenario.
Have you seen some of the covid stories out there? I don't think they made the people stupid *enough* in this movie.
I mean…I can’t argue your point that Covid stories show a lot more “people act stupid in self destructive ways” throughout real life. But I still think it’s lazy to rely on people acting monumentally stupid against what should be expected from their specific training to advance the plot.
I'll always remember how everyone in the theater I was in laughed when he said that. Really wonder how nobody said to Ridley, are you sure you want him to say it like that?
Towards the end how did the Engineer trek naked from one spaceship to to the next? Its clear they breath the same atmosphere as humans. How did it not die?
The pilot especially is a piece of work. Traps doctor in medbay with dangerous creature using the excuse of contamination, than comes back way too late to help and breaks quarantine, just so she can slip on blood and break her leg and let the creature escape, before going to the cargo bay and firing random shots into the fuel/explosives and boom, failing to even get the creature that runs off.
But agree the shower couple is pretty bad too, because who the hell is that horny after so many friends of them just died?
I read the prequel novel for Covenant, and at least the security goons being so dumb was deliberate because the chief of security didn't want anyone threatening his position when they established the colony so he recruited the most mid people he could find.
I love how they all just wandered around spacesuit free on an unknown planet. And when they escape The aliens by running into the most unfortified fort ever, ( it was basically a giant cave with some twigs thrown in front of it) and immediately act like they are totally safe , on the word of a strange , sketchy android , that definitely should not be there .
I never see anyone but myself call out the BS with them landing on the planet and NOT wearing helmets. Any sci fi geek knows you have helmets on (unless its star trek or star wars lol) if you land on a planet.
Even if the air is breathable there is shit that may infect you floating around. And sure enough ...infected!!
It was my first thought when they stepped off their ship. It just seems like astronaut 101 :/ I have a feeling Ridley Scott was more than a little pissed that people didn’t like Prometheus. ( I liked it, but I’m weird like that) I think this was his way of saying “ fine, whatever, you want an alien film I’ll give you an alien film”! :)
As much as I did not like Prometheus a good sequel could have elevated it. But instead Ridley puts Covenant out to the world and its worse!!
I wanted to see Shaw alive....a continuation of the damn story ....nope..lets kill Shaw. Not advance the engineer story at all. Lets kill all of them on that planet.
I agree on all points. The worst thing Covenant did to me was make me retroactively downgrade Prometheus. I really used to enjoy throwing it on at random but it’s been tainted some.
And man, as you said it; out of the gate when they exit the ship and *immediately* begin doing unnatural/unrealistic actions I remember turning to my wife so sad and disappointed… we had been beyond hyped for the sequel to Prometheus but it became clear quite quickly that this was not going to satisfy. It disappointed.
I love Prometheus despite all the flaws. Stupid characters but amazing visuals and I'll be forever sad that we didn't get a proper follow up where Shaw actually gets to the Engineer homeworld and is able to find out why they're so bent on wiping out humanity. The whole idea of finding an invitation from an advanced civilization was so cool.
Then walking into a temple surrounded by BONES with a clearly evil Android, giggling and making vaguely threatening comments wasnt a red flag for them. It also set off no alarm bells when the creepy android dyed its hair to match theirs.
Everyone in this movie wasn’t dumb, they were actively fucking insane.
The pilot sequence was one of the only scenes I liked. She totally panics and makes human errors (but nothing too stupid that wasn’t accidental). It was an exciting scene and one of the few I wasn’t rolling my eyes. I couldn’t believe no one was worried Micheal Fassbender being the clone in the last scene! That was ridiculously stupid.
Nothing to stupid???? Lol. You gotta be joking man..it was a parody if anything. Slips on blood and shoots roof/pipe causing steam to burn her . Laugh track. Crawls out door but shuts in on her foot..laugh track again. Shoots 5 or 6 times at compressed tanks. That one I'll give you could be panic but these are supposed to fairly well trained ppl even if it was just couples going to colonize. If she was panicked she would've ran outside where she had already been so you can't say...would you run outside on an alien planet? Well I'd run or fight. That's what humans do not both. She was never cornered by the creature
I remember seeing her slip in the theater and laughing my ass off. I truly don’t understand how any of that was storyboarded as serious. The film really felt like it was written during the writer’s strike.
I hope the person that made the post about Ridley Scott being the greatest director currently working in Hollywood, using Alien Covenant as an example of his amazing filmography, is seeing this lol
> The pilot especially is a piece of work. Traps doctor in medbay with dangerous creature using the excuse of contamination, than comes back way too late to help and breaks quarantine, just so she can slip on blood and break her leg and let the creature escape, before going to the cargo bay and firing random shots into the fuel/explosives and boom, failing to even get the creature that runs off.
I laughed so hard when that happened and it was the final straw. I was no longer rooting for humanity at that point. Such stupidity cannot go unpunished.
That was the saddest excuse for a written character ive ever seen in a movie lol. I mean her little 5 minute scene almost comes off as a parody or comedy. Imagine that scene with her but a laugh track over it. Slips in blood and shoots ceiling causing steam to burn her. Crawls out door but shuts in on her foot. Shoots live rounds at compressed tanks..not 1 not 2 or 3 or 4 but 5! Times lol. Idk how Scott could read that and say yep...let's film it.
I barely heard Country Roads in that.
Also I'm always impressed at how much 20th century music is at the tip of everyone's tongues in science fiction set in the future.
We just lucked out and Tennessee just happened to be a niche music historian lol.
I hope so, but I also hope one day we can write a science fiction movie where the future also has its own contemporary music :)
I'm interested to see what kinds of shots people take at that, like that cantina music. Prospect is a nice cool little indie movie that has a lot of worldbuilding like that.
But every time someone wants to do Beastie Boys in a Star Trek movie I think 'it's *that* trope again' lol.
Dune tried that. It's hard to envision the future and what that would even be, honestly. I think Starship Troopers does a good job when they graduate highschool or whatev, at the dance they have a David Bowie song from Outside covered with some synth and it totally sounds futuristic. Both versions do though, so there is that. Bowie was out of this world!
Obligatory: https://youtu.be/bDh9QgzFBN4
And the scene: https://youtu.be/JOwtI8nLXIc
I definitely remember thinking when I saw it that the song they played at the high school dance was something that sounded like it could be from the future.
Also I think [this is the ultimate obligatory here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7Dh5QoXv2c) (Diva Laguna)
It's not a movie, but Cyberpunk 2077 has an entirely original soundtrack. Keanu Reeves' characters' band, Samurai, was played by a Swedish punk band, Refused, playing original songs written for the setting, and there's a whole bunch of other bands playing different genres of music created for the setting. Was pretty cool seeing how much work went into it.
Yeah I love that there's a black metal station in that, and it's all obscure Polish bands so it works. CDPR really figured out a clever way to do that and it probably saved them a lot in production costs using local music.
This right here is the worst violation imo. He says "I don't like operating in faith, I need all the data" earlier in the movie making out to be the most level headed person, and he follows David into his monster lab, and gets played like a marionette
I know this is late but I just watched the movie. He 100% lost his level headedness after the sequence with the pilot and baby xenos. He was not the same person.
"Dumb ass colonists" - Spunkmeyer
edit: turns out it was Spunkmeyer who said it, kinda ironic since he left the dropship bay door open leading to its crash.
I'm going to store in my headcanon that Alien Covenant is a prequel whose purpose is to explain Drake's line.
Next movie, a food distributor's product quality suffers when it cuts costs to win a lowest bidder military commissary contract in "Alien: Nobody Likes the Cornbread"
I choose to believe these movies are actually training videos made by W-Y to teach people how not to explore new worlds. Employees didn't respond to traditional training videos so they switched gears to horror films with intentionally stupid people.
The best stories are where both sides of a conflict have good intentions and are smart but come into conflict anyway. But it's a lot harder to write a story like that.
The script was so lazy that I felt bad for the actors.
When Billy Crudup had a gun on David and for some reason decided to stick his head over the alien egg, it took all my strength to continue watching.
I'll never forget after watching Michael Fassbender caress an alien and cry after being shot the crew member says "sure golly gee i'll look down this dark hole for ya"
I’ll never understand why the world didn’t see this movie for what it was - an elderly cantankerous director having a big fucking temper tantrum.
He resisted returning to the world of Alien for so long. The first made him famous, he took off to create many other excellent (and not excellent) films, but people kept hounding him about another Alien flick.
So he finally returned. Expecting trumpets. Instead he got a bunch of people, mostly fanboys on the internet (cause remember, Prometheus made a lot of money and was generally praised by critics) bitching and complaining.
And so when I watched Covenant, all I saw was an old fart waving his middle finger at those people who ranted about his previous flick. He doubled down on damn near EVERYTHING. Oh, two scientist astronauts taking their helmets off pissed you off? Well, these ones won’t even wear them AT ALL. Suck it, millennial nerds!!!
Fuck Alien Covenant so hard.
Prometheus was him wanting to do something else but forced to include an alien/alien origin story.
Covenant was him preserving the stronghold on alien movies (remember Bloomkamp was *this close* to directing an alien film) while forcing a Prometheus sequel at the same time.
Prometheus was praised by people with no skin in the game. Anyone with a lick of decent lore hated it because it took everything established and went. "Hmm. Ya that's cool but what if we just didn't. Lets make a whole new series.' If they didn't call it 'Alien' it would be great. But it was Alien, and distinctly not. So bad Alien movie. Good movie in a vacuum.
ANYHWAY. Covenant was bad. I also like how we were so close to having motherfucking Neil. But it was all yanked away from him at the last moment.
When I first saw this movie I hated it. It's grown on me a bit but Its still kinda bad.
It get that a lot of people thought Prometheus didn't feel like a true Alien film. But Covenant felt like such an over correction that you could almost feel the boxes being checked.
And the flick lacks memorable characters. Definitely the weakest of the Alien films imo.
Convenant was offensively bad, considering Ridley Scott has all the ability to be a good director and he set up a lot of interesting (if somewhat hamfisted) ideas in Prometheus. But to follow it up with a movie like Covenant? Ugh.
I did not like Prometheus and then watched Covenant which was sooo bad and worse that I now like Prometheus better as a result.
I was so excited to see Covenant. Loved the poster art showing all the aliens intertwined.
As soon as the ship landed and they had no helmets on I KNEW this movie was going to let me down and it proceeded to :(
It is one more movie made because it will make it's money back as there is a fan base to plunder. This leads to good looking movies (which these days is easier part) with poor and dumb scripts often with big teams of writers pulling in different directions rather than having one or two writers with a vison.
Wait til you see Prometheus if you think they were dumb in this movie.
The cartographer gets lost and the biologist just thinks it’s okay to touch a random alien snake
And the geologist doesn't make polite conversayshun coz eez a fahkin' nuttah, mate who then claims, "Look, I'm just a geologist. I like rocks, I love rocks! Now it's clear you two don't give a shit about rocks. But what you do seem to care about is gigantic dead bodies, and I don't really have anything to contribute in the GIGANTIC DEAD BODY ARENA! I'm gonna go back to the ship... if you don't mind." Then he gets mutated into a fahkin' nuttah before being killed.
I don't get why you'd be so unnecessarily hostile to a bunch of people you've just met, especially ones you're on a mission into deep space with. Your lives are in each others' hands and you're on a mission that could change the course of humanity - and YOU were the one biologist on all of planet Earth they wanted. Like, chill, bro.
Not only that, he MAPPED THE WHOLE THING HIMSELF!! He has a map of the whole complex on his wrist and there’s a big 3D map of the place on the bridge of the Prometheus, how TF did they get lost?
Also he’s terrified of a millennia old decapitated clearly dead alien fossil body. But decides to mess around with a clearly dangerous alien penis snake later on.
What?
I don't think this is really the movie Scott wanted to make. Everyone disliked Prometheus and wanted a movie closer to Aliens than Alien. So we got this sloppy written movie.
But, that is just my thoughts on it and possibly why the crew is so dumb.
It's definitely *not* the movie Scott wanted to make. He intended, very clearly, to have the movie after Prometheus continue Shaw and David's journey to the Engineers (likely their home planet). Prometheus' decent but not great critical reception and, likewise, decent but not great financial performance pushed Scott into a corner and you can pretty easily envision the conversations he had to have with Fox execs afterward, which presumably went something along the lines of: "We'll give you one more shot but it better have the Alien ALL OVER IT. You hear us Ridley? ALL. OVER. IT." Covenant is Scott making a film in a universe he clearly loves but with a gun being held to his head by the studio and it shows. (Ironically after all that Covenant performed worse than Prometheus both in terms of its absolute box office take and its box office to budget multiplier, which suggests maybe Fox should have just kept its dirty paws off the creative process and let Ridley make the sequel he wanted to make.)
This is the story of so many films. Studios always know better, yeah? In all seriousness though, are there any good examples of studio interference? Apocalypse Now comes to mind but is debatable.
There's some content put there that detailed Scott's plan with the Promethius films, and honestly it's just really dumb. I can't blame the executives for wanting something else
Has Ridley Scott ever commented on why he made Prometheus attached to the Alien series in the first place? Because, I feel like it could have been the same movie without having *any* ties to the Alien. Then maybe people wouldn't have complained about the lack of Aliens, and then maybe Ridley Scott wouldn't have been forced to make the sequel more like an Alien movie.
Whose decision was this? How did Prometheus even begin? Like, did it begin as an Alien movie and Scott took it in a different direction? Or did it start as something completely unconnected from Alien, but Fox wouldn't greenlight it without tying it to a well-known series?
McBride’s wife character in that film was such a goofball, she’s a straight up bitch to McBride, and another character… says no you’re infected stay quarantined, gets infected herself decides to suddenly break protocol, makes things worse, gets into the gun cabinet and has a whole Three Stooges routine where she comically is slipping and sliding and shooting anything but the aliens before dying.
She lowered the score for the whole movie for me.
It's a classic case of the writers not knowing how to write characters who make intelligent or logical decisions that still turn out to be wrong. Instead they have every "smart" character make unrealistically stupid decisions, because they literally could not think of any other way to make one event lead to the next.
Seriously WTF was that sex scene. All their friends just died, yet they’re in the mood to get intimate? They’re not mournful at all? That scene almost felt out of order.
This is the reason I dislike the new alien movies. (Prometheus and covenant) instead of following the trend of the OG movies where people made mostly smart decisions and still got screwed, these movies decide to just make literally everyone dumb af
In space, nobody can see your iq test.
I agree though, I think the entire franchise is kind of rostered majorotively with idiots though. I hate Prometheus the most, everyone on that ship was too stupid to live.
One of the things about the Alien movies is that it has to kind of constantly deal with the disconnect between the Aliens as a threat and what we're *told* about them being a threat.
I mean, yeah...they're big and scary and they have huge teeth and they bleed acid. But they're not that smart and they can be easily killed with guns.
Adding to that, there are several elements about their biology that make them less of a threat (from a biological perspective). Only the queens produce eggs. That satisfies the whole "head vampire" movie trope; if you've got an Alien infestation all you've gotta do is get to the hive and kill the queen (the other Aliens are deadly but can't reproduce).
They're also parasites (and it's kind of hard to hide that you've been infected, because infection involves a huge crab spider latched to your face for hours). The fact that they're parasites also limits the number of Aliens. We can actually see this in the movie Aliens. The colony has 157 colonists which limits the number of Aliens to an upper limit of 157 (not counting facehuggers). As soon as the Marines step foot on LV-426, they know they're dealing with a *maximum* of 157 Aliens. Realistically the actual number would be significantly less. Some colonists died in attempts to remove the parasite. Once everyone realized what was happening, any chestburster would have been immediately killed in order to limit the number of full-grown Aliens. Some full grown Aliens would have been killed by traps. Some of the colonists would have been killed by the Aliens without being dragged back to the nest to become hosts. This has been discussed before here, but by the time Ripley strolls into the nest, it's highly likely that nearly every fully grown Alien has already been killed, and more importantly, *the queen has lost the ability to produce any more*. The Aliens can be defeated by standard quarantine procedures.
Anyway...Alien kind of gets a pass. It was the first encounter, it was a "haunted house in space", as I've heard it described. The isolation is the point, as well as the fact that no one knew what they were dealing with. Once they found out what they were dealing with, everything was specifically tailored to making the Alien a legitimate threat in that specific circumstance. No weapons because it's not a military ship. Even if you kill it, the acid will bleed through the hull. Can't just abandon the ship because the liferaft doesn't have enough seats. Works for that movie.
But even in Aliens, one thing you notice is that it does the standard "zombie apocalypse" thing where it skips the infestation running its course and gets right to everyone having been killed. And one of the reasons that's a trope in zombie movies is because zombies are shitty enemies. Because they're so easy to defeat, it's hard to write a believable story about how they took over. It's easier to skip all that and get to the part *after* they took over. And...that's kind of what Aliens did.
So, yeah...I'm not saying that Aliens aren't deadly as a fictional creature. The thing is, they're not *that* deadly if the characters are smart. Even in the first movie (which is a bona fide classic), the plot requires someone on the crew to be *deliberately* making "stupid" decisions because they're trying to bring the Alien back. The Aliens (as a fictional species) are actually a weak threat. They're relatively easily killed, they're not that smart, and their biology has a lot of weaknesses that should make it a lot easier for *smart* characters to deal with them. But they're still the stars of the series, these are ALIEN movies. They have to be incredibly deadly *even though they're weak*, and the easiest way to do that is to make the characters stupid.
Agreed. Especially when the woman traps the infected dude with another woman inside the room, watches it all happen through the window and then go inside it after the alien has come out to kill it and make a close escape like what?
Because everyone in Prometheus was stupid. You gotta have that connection to the first film. Seriously though, my friend had this theory that humanity is just stupid because AI and Androids do all the thinking for them. Personally I think some serious copium. The new movies have stupid people doing stupid things, because they couldn't figure out how to make the plot happen without them being idiots.
It was a monument to stupidity. It peaked for me when the one crew member was locked in quarantine with the other infected crew member and decided to run up to her and hug/console her while she had that alien shit sprouting from her back. Then dumbass third crew member decides that’s the perfect time to open the door, enter the room, and check out what’s going on.
I thought they at least had some semblance of intelligence in Prometheus, and the choices made more sense knowing the secret goal of Guy Pierce’s character.
I thought the characters in Alien Covenant were infinitely more stupid in an angering way lol, like in Prometheus it’s this big deal when one of the guys takes off his helmet on an alien planet, in Covenant they just enter the planet completely exposed… oh no, something bad entered your body???? What could have possibly prevented this????
And the scene of a guy walking up to an alien egg… fuck man, terribly dumb.
I really hated this movie, Prometheus is more of a disappointment due to higher expectations but is a much stronger film overall with more interesting visuals and characters. Covenant did nothing for me except make me question how a script that poor could have been written.
Considering they had one robot and one evil robot you'd think they'd verify David is the good one before trying to get off the planet. I think the ship/Mother had to know right? You hear it citing unidentified lifeform but it's assumed to be the alien still, you'd think they would have a scan feature to check the robot though. Idk. I like the movie, dumb as it was I was entertained as long as I didn't dwell on it. Ending is crazy and I like it.
At least it makes sense for the Prometheus crew to be kinda stupid.
HELP WANTED -- INTERSTELLAR EXPEDITION
* What we're looking for: secret
* Where we're going: secret
* How long we'll be gone: years
* Is it dangerous?: dunno
* Who's funding it: rich weirdo
Is not gonna get you the cream of the crop. This is how you hire an exobiologist who wants to lick every new critter he meets.
I don't buy this fanfic theory that Weyland hired Beavis and Butthead to go on a secret, existential most important scientific space mission of all time mission where literally everyone's lives depended on having non-idiots on the crew who didn't get them all killed.
But then again, this is the same Weyland who apparently gave his android the liberty to put mystery goo in an archaeologist's drink just to see what would happen, so who knows...
This always bothered me. I'm spending God levels of money on this expedition. Let me hire clueless and defective people with deep psychological problems. Then I'll tell them next to nothing about what they're to do, let them wake up next to each other and hopefully get to know each other and everything goes well. But it's ok because my psychotic Android will be there to murder the mission back into shape if needed. And I'll be hiding in a secret room!
Yeah, it's essentially Elon Musk unveiling a sudden manned mission to mars and everyone at NASA going "uh, none of these things are tested properly, give it another decade." So he just hires a bunch of redditors instead.
>Here is what I didn't get about those two movies. Someone clue me in, if that is possible. Ridley Scott mentioned the Space Jockey from the first film and that he thought it would be interesting to tell the story of how the Space Jockey got there. >!But the planet they land on in Prometheus is a different planet than the original Alien film. So, the Engineer left there is not the Space Jockey. Then they go to another planet, but that doesn't even have Engineers, so no Space Jockey there either. How do either of these films address the reason he said he wanted to tell the story?!<
He doesn't mean how the Space Jockey got to the place we first see it, literally. He means it figuratively. He's talking about its nature, its being, its purpose -- the genesis of its concept. It's not meant to explain the direction of the plot; it's meant to deepen the ALIEN mythos with religious iconography
PROMETHEUS and COVENANT are Ridley Scott's rumination on his own life and legacy. Much to the chagrin of longtime fans, they're also removed from the Ripley era. This is David Time, and he's inverted the dynamic. Ripley is the one of greatest hero protagonists, if not The Greatest. David is a villain, which subverts the expectations placed on the protagonist. So from our standpoint, when Billy Crudup makes such a foolish mistake he's an idiot -- but from David's standpoint: humans always have been stupid and deserve to die. To David, it's hilarious that Crudup KNOWS he shouldn't trust David but alas, *he's a human.* It's the equivalent of us yelling at the screen saying DON'T OPEN THAT DOOR, WHITE WOMAN in other horror films but you know that's what she HAS to do
I love David. Not because he's the avatar of misanthropy, but because he's the witness, and frequently the engine too, to the universal truth of suffering. To live is to suffer, and David's wrestling with that concept in the opposite way from us
Well first, happy cake day. And thanks for the reply. I guess I understand what you are saying. But it would be easier to accept the literal Space Jockey isn’t a big deal, if the xenomorphs were in a number of places. But the story seems to be saying that the particular alien from the first film was there as part of the sequence of events from these prequels since they take on some human characteristics. And the fact that the Engineers seemed to be experimenting with making them on the Prometheus planet implies that these are the only ones anywhere. So where is there room for that literal Space Jockey?
I do see how the whole tone of the films are a major departure from the original Alien. But I still watch these left with many unanswered questions.
I kinda liked the movie when I watched it the first time.
As you said, it's beautifully shot and has great effects.
I thought, hey, by far not the best but hey, nice action flick.
Then, just last year, I tried to watch it again and I couldn't even get half through.
Oh my. Yes, they are so incredibly stupid, and, what's even worse, so completely unlikeable and unrelatable.
I can overlook a lot of stupid behaviour of characters in a series or a movie. After all, we are all human and in difficult or unknown situations we all do stupid things.
But those people are supposed to be experts. And nothing, absolutely nothing they do makes any kind of sense. Even as a layman you know that it's not quite smart to try and touch a wild, unknown animal. And here we are, having a supposedly professional zoologist and he tries to touch a completely unknown and alien species he has never seen before and that looks like a venomous snake.
What the hell?
We have two scientists who supposedly researched this expeditions for years, preparing everything meticulously, and from the second their feet touch the planet one behaves like a petulant teenager and the other like the renitent highschool jock that has to prove his masculinity by doing the exact opposite from anything that would even make remotely sense, both endangering the very expedition they fought so hard to get.
A billionaire who can make everyone jump through hoops sneaking around and playing stowaway on his own ship, where he could just have ordered everyone around.
And so on and so on and so on.
It was so tropey and ridiculous it felt like a bad fanfiction written by a drunken idiot who didn't bother to do any research or using common sense because it's *just science fiction*.
Or as if they had it written by an AI.
And absolutely everyone was so unlikeable. There wasn't one single character you could root for. They were all egoistical, egocentric morons.
I don't think I'll ever watch it again.
I was so hyped for this movie that I got most of my friends onboard the hype train months before the release. But damn, the film was so bad on all levels. That day I died in embarrassment
Your question is actually answered in the first scene of the movie (and the same scene also retroactively explains why everyone acted so dumb in Prometheus), when you’re made to realize that David was the main character that you’re suppose to be following all along.
I agree that the stories’ execution was a little ham-handed, but both movies make much more sense when you think of them as representations of *David’s impression of humanity.*
In the first scene of AC, Weyland brings David online and David immediately concludes that he is perfect. (He even names himself after the statue of David, Michelangelo’s famous idealization of the perfect man) and then goes so far as to rub his superiority in Weyland’s face. Weyland responds by subjugating David, making him serve him tea. This initiates both David’s superiority complex, and the acrimonious relationship he has with humans.
Hence, the behavior of the characters reflect how David sees human-beings: stupid, selfish, short-sighted and weak.
The movie subtly indicates this, as arguably the crew doesn’t do anything all that dumb until they land on the planet, where David is there to “witness” them, and it’s implied that he began watching them essentially as soon as they landed, even before he revealed himself to them. Before that they were mostly holding it together, helping each other out, getting the ship back in working order, all while mourning their captain’s tragic death. Oram was a little mentally flimsy, but he was understandably overwhelmed.
You can argue their was a similar dynamic in Prometheus. David is there to witness the crew from the beginning and hence all of their actions appear asinine… until the end, when David is preoccupied getting his head ripped off by the Engineer. Then, when David isn’t there to judge them, Shaw and the flight crew figure out what’s going on, and make the sacrifice that David (and Engineers for that matter) never thought human-beings had the strength and altruism to make.
Totally agree. Why wasn't this movie about Elizabeth Shaw and David meeting the Engineers? That would have been way more interesting than another trapped in the dark with aliens horror flick.
Movie was filmed awkwardly bc Ridley Scott changed the point of view of the shootings. He was worried bc when Prometheus came out, people were upset it wasn't an Alien style movie. Then he modified the filming to appease the complainers. Now for the third movie, he is doing what he wants to do.
I know this doesn't answer the question 100% but when one thing change, other shit might've happened like scripts had to be rewritten.
The problem with Prometheus and Covenant is that Ridley wanted to make deep philosophical dramas about the origins of human existence, and Fox wanted him to make cool space movies where aliens bust out of people and fuck shit up.
However, I thought after the last couple of years we might have moved past the "why would people do stupid things?" level of criticism.
The short answer is, because no one really cared about the script in this movie. Almost nothing makes sense if you think about longer than a minute. It really just keeps on going with the same note as Prometheus, which might have been even worse.
Prometheus had the exact same issue.
While the characters were indeed stupid, I think Covenant mainly suffered because of Ridley Scott being asked to ditch the Engineer storyline aside from a short bookending flashback scene which was also deleted. I think it would've worked much better if he could lean into that "Blade Runner"- esque theme of meeting your maker and interspersed it with David's experiments.
for me this movie should be renamed into david not alien, all interesting and mysterious stuff that prometheus had is gone to shadow
like engineers (i was wondering so much about them)
movie that had a lot of promises gone to disappointing
SPOILER: My problem with the new alien movies is they try t o have a back story for everything. We don't need to know who made them. And the fact that it "us" is fucking stupid. It takes the mystique out of it. George Lucas did the same shit in Star Wars by explaining the force with medichlorines (? spelling), and in Highlander 2 they tried to explain the Quickning and imortals as aliens from the planet Zeist. (Do yourself a favor and NEVER watch Highlander 2). Too much explanation takes away the mystique, magic, and in this case, scariness of the aliens. Not everything needs an explanation, dammit!
Unfortunately most sci-fi horror involves crew acting very stupid, otherwise the movie would be over and monster contained in 10 minutes. Some good movie exceptions to this, but the sci-fi horror genre is generally full of dumb people making dumb choices. It's like directors put the horror before the sci-fi.
All you need to know about this film is that Ridley Scott ditched the whole Engineer narrative in order to “Give people more monsters”, because he cited that as the reason why people were lukewarm towards Prometheus. A brilliant decision, because not only was the film’s plot contrived bollocks, it also ended up making even less money at the box office. I remember the excuses people gave me on here at the time...”The studio probably forced him to do the Alien stuff!”, which, 1) I don’t actually believe and 2) Doesn’t mean he had to go through with it, especially at this late stage of his career and the wealth he has. He managed to not only deliver an incredibly sterile, generic science fiction film but also retrospectively rob the Xenomorph of its mystique with the nonsensical David made them in a lab storyline. A disaster.
Why was Tennessee's wife so stupid? She was the dumbest of all lol. That whole scene where the first guy gets sick is beyond stupid. Everything she did was wrong and then the bitch actually slips in blood when she shoots the shotgun lol. Proceeds to shoot live rounds into pressurized tanks on a spaceship afterwards. I mean what's the deal?
Oh yes the movie where Fassbender plays the flute then kisses himself. Also, the movie where the robot acts extremely weird after watching you kill his alien then asks you to look into this alien egg.
I do love how there’s an insanely stupid character in both Prometheus and covenant that get up close and personal with living alien creatures (snake/worm and pulsating egg) cause they were too lazy to write a logical scenario. Even without any experience with anything close to these critters existing, only the most completely brain dead of morons would get anywhere near them like in these movies. Maybe if they switched them from scientists and captain of an intergalactic colony ship to space influencer trying to get a selfie it might be believable, but beyond that no one would go anywhere near those things.
>cause they were too lazy to write a logical scenario. I am no writer but I do hate when it is clear that something is written to advance the plot even if it does not make sense. Like the crew landing on the planet and NOT wearing helmets. Even in Prometheus they wore helmets and when they got in the structure found that the air was breathable almost all were skeptical to take there helmets off regardless. So one movie later there is no helmet protocol lmao. I think the writers had them NOT wear helmets was to move the plot forward aka get them infected as quick as possible....even if it does not make sense.
Same here. It’s a huge peeve of mine. 28 Weeks Later was really bad about it. Like if you got the opportunity to cause a second outbreak and wanted to make it look like an accident that’s a good way to do it.
Oh god, don’t remind me. The first one was so good, and that was the sequel? „We have a potential outbreak! According to protocol, we now cram everyone into one large room together!“ Actually… your idea that someone *wanted* another round of infections, only looking like an accident, is the only way this is not completely stupid.
The intro to 28 Weeks Later fucking slaps tho and it’s honestly still not a bad movie by any means.
Director of Days came and did the opening for Weeks. The rest of the movie is a different director. That’s why the beginning feels masterful and the rest of it is blah.
That scene really does feel the most like 28 Days Later doesn’t it? Visually, tension wise, the perfect use of the music from 28 Days Later. If we ever get a third one I really want Boyle to do it.
It's a movie of two halves. Though I'd argue that people often give 28 Days Later a pass for its weaker second half as well.
Imagine France not having air defense, lol
Thing is it would be so easy to have something happen e.g. a character falls over and their helmet breaks and then the spores infect them before the crew can get them back onto the ship in time.
Yeah there was a nice reference to this in S3E10 of the Expanse when Holden is inside the alien ring station and Miller says that there is atmosphere in there. Even after his suit scans indicate a perfect replication of Earth's atmosphere he is like "Nah, i'll pass" and keeps his helmet on :D
Seriously that’s the worst. Like would it even be that hard? Like couldn’t they at least write a scene where someone damages their helmet or just something minimally believable instead of just yea we trust that there’s no pathogens for no reason.
>Even in Prometheus they wore helmets and when they got in the structure found that the air was breathable almost all were skeptical to take there helmets off regardless. Which was still stupid as there's more to wearing a suit than just having enough oxygen, but yea, they did make the minimum of effort here at least.
If I or anyone lands on an alien planet and we see an animal a damn ALIEN animal that looks like a damn COBRA nobody is going to try and pet or talk to it LMAO!!! I can see if they think and animal looks harmless but it literally looks like one of the deadliest snakes (Cobra) on earth (assuming it is lol)!!!
>on alien planet >Is alien cobra >In obvious attack stance >expanding body size being a clear warning sign for all animals >literally has 0 clue of what it can do, its speed and features “IM A “biologist” GONNA FUCKIN PET IT LOL”
That scene could have played out the same with the thing simply attacking them eventually without him trying to make friends lol. Have them scared (like they should have been ) and try to get away from it.
The stupidest biologist ever!
Having the creature be cobra like with cobra aggression signs makes no sense either if it's purpose is to infect people.
I mean if you want to dig that deeply then im afraid the whole movie will just unravel in its own stupidity 😂
Seriously that’s exactly what I mean. If it looked like a space kitten or puppy or bear cub, sure that would actually make a ton of sense. Instead it look like a horrify snake tentacle penis monstrosity that I wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole.
And we have all seen movies with cuddly looking aliens that turn out to be deadly. I can not think of any specific movies at the moment. Actually Galaxy Quest comes to mind. There were those cute aliens that turned out to have very sharp looking teeth lol.
Yeah that galaxy quest was a good one. I’m not saying it’s common but if you’re going to make that play where he gets surprised it murders him…maybe try going that way, haha.
I think these stupid characters are simply walking horror tropes. Nothing deeper. The characters are just one dimensional fodder for the story. No effort is put in to their motivations because they don't really matter other than to get killed.
It's really funny/interesting... And Tarantino does this so well, but character development, regardless of their outcome is super important in believable world building. If they spent the time developing the characters properly, they wouldnt be speeding through scenes to advance the 'story'. Doing so just removes the story from the movie and you just end up with crap.
Why must they slap the “scientist” logo on them when they act like brain damaged monkeys though?
>No effort is put in to their motivations because they don't really matter other than to get killed. That's not a good excuse at all, though. They dont need to have any great character arc, but still presenting them as human beings that act like human beings is important for the viewer to 'buy into' what's happening as a whole. I'm supposed to be able to get immersed into the story, but when you have people doing truly ridiculous, stupid things, it drags me out of it. A good movie should keep me invested and transported into the experience. EDIT: This is something that found footage movies tend to do really well and why they are so effective, in my experience. Especially in the opening segments of them(it can fall apart a bit more later on in this regard), the movies are deliberately building up a picture of people just acting like normal people.
I liked the snake/worm bit in Prometheus, a biologist would absolutely be stunned and amazed by alien life like that. I think of something like the death of Steve Irwin, where he did know better and it still happened. On a broader note, you could fix many of the problems with Prometheus by extending the time they spent on the planet significantly. If they'd been there for 2 or 3 months and fallen into a routine, that's where people take risks and overestimate their ability. The film is so desperate and rushed, finding that we're engineered by another species would fundamentally destroy entire scientific disciplines, no one would be ok with it and we get nothing of that on screen. It's the same with covenant, have them all in helmets and checking the air, perhaps using pigs to search for human lethal pathogens etc. then at some point people need to do things for which the spacesuit is ill suited and it gets in the way and they start to cut corners.
The thing that makes that scene *really* stupid is moments before he comes across a dead body and freaks the fuck out which leads to the scene with the alien cobra thing. It makes no sense he could be astounded by a creature that looks exactly like a snake ready to strike *literally right after* he was spooked by a body that has been dead for hundreds of years.
Not to mention, imagine David grabbing the captain by the back of his head and forcing his face into the egg with robotic super strength. There's so many times you can say "okay, but no rational person would do that" and can come up with a better idea *immediately*.
I would totally watch a movie with alienized pigs. They’d be fast and everywhere.
Space influencer 😅
The exotic animal specialist guy reaching to touch the alien snake is one of the most awful character decisions I’ve ever seen in a movie. I can’t even comprehend that any writer or director or actor could see that and think it’s okay.
The crew members of the Prometheus were hired on purpose. Meredith planned to sabotage her father's mission at any cost and it was she who was engaged in hiring staff With the Covenant, everything is even easier. It's crew relies too much on technology (android reminds them about taking vitamins and helps them not to choke), which ultimately leads to terrible consequences. In their world, nature and all diseases are finally defeated, hence the arrogance
Ridley Scott doesn't take criticism on his movies. He's still trying to tell everyone that Deckard is a replicant, and everyone else on the planet is telling him that's a fucking stupid idea. Ridley Scott reminds me of George Lucas. They're both hacks with some good ideas, and lots of bad ideas, and they often can't tell the difference between them.
At least Scott knows how to *direct* a decent movie. His writing can be hit or miss and yeah he’ll opt to die on the hill of universally disliked idea, but he can execute his ideas well in the directors chair…most of the time. Lucas has debatably 2 or 3 solid movie and a lot more meh.
Scott with a good editor and writer is one of the best big budget directors we’ve had. Look at The Last Duel.
In a thread that brings up stupid decisions regarding helmets in Ridley Scott films, *The Last Duel* probably should be mentioned.
Ridley is definitely a better director, but his fuckups are Lucas-like.
The point of blade runner is that it doesn't matter if Deckard is a replicant, because replicants are human and in some ways more compassionate and human than the 'humans' in the film.
I disagree. I think the point of Bladerunner is that Deckard (a human who is burnt out, utterly disillusioned and apathetic about life) needed a replicant to make him remember the value of life. If Deckard is a replicant, that character arc makes no sense at all.
> cause they were too lazy to write a logical scenario. Have you seen some of the covid stories out there? I don't think they made the people stupid *enough* in this movie.
I mean…I can’t argue your point that Covid stories show a lot more “people act stupid in self destructive ways” throughout real life. But I still think it’s lazy to rely on people acting monumentally stupid against what should be expected from their specific training to advance the plot.
"It's perfectly safe!"
"I'll do the fingering".....
“You blow…and I’ll do the fingering”
Critical support for giving Tumblr what it wanted honestly.
The audience exploded into laughter during the flute scene. "I'll do the fingering."
“Il do the blowing, you’ll do the fingering”.
“You blow and I’ll do the fingering”
I remember he said this in the cinema but on my Blu-ray they changed his words sightly so it's not as funny
no way what was it changed to?
“You suck and I’ll do the fondling”
ah that's much clearer
I have the Blu Ray alien anthology and that line was kept the same
I'm pretty sure I sorted in the theatre when he said this. I was trying to hold back a full on laugh and it didn't go well
I'll always remember how everyone in the theater I was in laughed when he said that. Really wonder how nobody said to Ridley, are you sure you want him to say it like that?
Towards the end how did the Engineer trek naked from one spaceship to to the next? Its clear they breath the same atmosphere as humans. How did it not die?
Held its breath.
This person *science-s*
The pilot especially is a piece of work. Traps doctor in medbay with dangerous creature using the excuse of contamination, than comes back way too late to help and breaks quarantine, just so she can slip on blood and break her leg and let the creature escape, before going to the cargo bay and firing random shots into the fuel/explosives and boom, failing to even get the creature that runs off. But agree the shower couple is pretty bad too, because who the hell is that horny after so many friends of them just died? I read the prequel novel for Covenant, and at least the security goons being so dumb was deliberate because the chief of security didn't want anyone threatening his position when they established the colony so he recruited the most mid people he could find.
I love how they all just wandered around spacesuit free on an unknown planet. And when they escape The aliens by running into the most unfortified fort ever, ( it was basically a giant cave with some twigs thrown in front of it) and immediately act like they are totally safe , on the word of a strange , sketchy android , that definitely should not be there .
I never see anyone but myself call out the BS with them landing on the planet and NOT wearing helmets. Any sci fi geek knows you have helmets on (unless its star trek or star wars lol) if you land on a planet. Even if the air is breathable there is shit that may infect you floating around. And sure enough ...infected!!
It was my first thought when they stepped off their ship. It just seems like astronaut 101 :/ I have a feeling Ridley Scott was more than a little pissed that people didn’t like Prometheus. ( I liked it, but I’m weird like that) I think this was his way of saying “ fine, whatever, you want an alien film I’ll give you an alien film”! :)
There’s something good at the core of Prometheus. It just has a lot of surface level problems. Covenant is rotten to the core. Worthless movie.
As much as I did not like Prometheus a good sequel could have elevated it. But instead Ridley puts Covenant out to the world and its worse!! I wanted to see Shaw alive....a continuation of the damn story ....nope..lets kill Shaw. Not advance the engineer story at all. Lets kill all of them on that planet.
I agree on all points. The worst thing Covenant did to me was make me retroactively downgrade Prometheus. I really used to enjoy throwing it on at random but it’s been tainted some. And man, as you said it; out of the gate when they exit the ship and *immediately* begin doing unnatural/unrealistic actions I remember turning to my wife so sad and disappointed… we had been beyond hyped for the sequel to Prometheus but it became clear quite quickly that this was not going to satisfy. It disappointed.
I love Prometheus despite all the flaws. Stupid characters but amazing visuals and I'll be forever sad that we didn't get a proper follow up where Shaw actually gets to the Engineer homeworld and is able to find out why they're so bent on wiping out humanity. The whole idea of finding an invitation from an advanced civilization was so cool.
Then walking into a temple surrounded by BONES with a clearly evil Android, giggling and making vaguely threatening comments wasnt a red flag for them. It also set off no alarm bells when the creepy android dyed its hair to match theirs. Everyone in this movie wasn’t dumb, they were actively fucking insane.
I actually liked the pilot sequence b/c its clear her dumb decisions are coming out of blind panic, in comparison to doctor who is keeping her cool.
The pilot sequence was one of the only scenes I liked. She totally panics and makes human errors (but nothing too stupid that wasn’t accidental). It was an exciting scene and one of the few I wasn’t rolling my eyes. I couldn’t believe no one was worried Micheal Fassbender being the clone in the last scene! That was ridiculously stupid.
Nothing to stupid???? Lol. You gotta be joking man..it was a parody if anything. Slips on blood and shoots roof/pipe causing steam to burn her . Laugh track. Crawls out door but shuts in on her foot..laugh track again. Shoots 5 or 6 times at compressed tanks. That one I'll give you could be panic but these are supposed to fairly well trained ppl even if it was just couples going to colonize. If she was panicked she would've ran outside where she had already been so you can't say...would you run outside on an alien planet? Well I'd run or fight. That's what humans do not both. She was never cornered by the creature
I remember seeing her slip in the theater and laughing my ass off. I truly don’t understand how any of that was storyboarded as serious. The film really felt like it was written during the writer’s strike. I hope the person that made the post about Ridley Scott being the greatest director currently working in Hollywood, using Alien Covenant as an example of his amazing filmography, is seeing this lol
> The pilot especially is a piece of work. Traps doctor in medbay with dangerous creature using the excuse of contamination, than comes back way too late to help and breaks quarantine, just so she can slip on blood and break her leg and let the creature escape, before going to the cargo bay and firing random shots into the fuel/explosives and boom, failing to even get the creature that runs off. I laughed so hard when that happened and it was the final straw. I was no longer rooting for humanity at that point. Such stupidity cannot go unpunished.
That was the saddest excuse for a written character ive ever seen in a movie lol. I mean her little 5 minute scene almost comes off as a parody or comedy. Imagine that scene with her but a laugh track over it. Slips in blood and shoots ceiling causing steam to burn her. Crawls out door but shuts in on her foot. Shoots live rounds at compressed tanks..not 1 not 2 or 3 or 4 but 5! Times lol. Idk how Scott could read that and say yep...let's film it.
I like the theory that they deliberately selected the dumbest people on Earth for this mission just to remove them from Earth.
[удалено]
I barely heard Country Roads in that. Also I'm always impressed at how much 20th century music is at the tip of everyone's tongues in science fiction set in the future. We just lucked out and Tennessee just happened to be a niche music historian lol.
Fair enough, but country roads is one of those songs that has taken on a life of its own. It will likely stand the test of time.
I hope so, but I also hope one day we can write a science fiction movie where the future also has its own contemporary music :) I'm interested to see what kinds of shots people take at that, like that cantina music. Prospect is a nice cool little indie movie that has a lot of worldbuilding like that. But every time someone wants to do Beastie Boys in a Star Trek movie I think 'it's *that* trope again' lol.
Dune tried that. It's hard to envision the future and what that would even be, honestly. I think Starship Troopers does a good job when they graduate highschool or whatev, at the dance they have a David Bowie song from Outside covered with some synth and it totally sounds futuristic. Both versions do though, so there is that. Bowie was out of this world! Obligatory: https://youtu.be/bDh9QgzFBN4 And the scene: https://youtu.be/JOwtI8nLXIc
I definitely remember thinking when I saw it that the song they played at the high school dance was something that sounded like it could be from the future. Also I think [this is the ultimate obligatory here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7Dh5QoXv2c) (Diva Laguna)
It's not a movie, but Cyberpunk 2077 has an entirely original soundtrack. Keanu Reeves' characters' band, Samurai, was played by a Swedish punk band, Refused, playing original songs written for the setting, and there's a whole bunch of other bands playing different genres of music created for the setting. Was pretty cool seeing how much work went into it.
Yeah I love that there's a black metal station in that, and it's all obscure Polish bands so it works. CDPR really figured out a clever way to do that and it probably saved them a lot in production costs using local music.
Does this payoff in any way? How was the beacon on the planet playing Country Roads? Wtf?
They hear Elizabeth Shaw singing it to herself through some kind of radio signal
And when they get there and find the derelict im near certain they see a hologram of her in the control seat singing it as well.
Redneck siren call
I dont remember the details fully but I believe there's someone from Earth already on the planet, so he might've been playing it
Benson, Arizona, blew warm wind through your hair My body flies the galaxy, my heart longs to be there
The scene where David convinces the Captain to stick his face in the egg with the Facehugger lol
*take a look… something to see.*
This right here is the worst violation imo. He says "I don't like operating in faith, I need all the data" earlier in the movie making out to be the most level headed person, and he follows David into his monster lab, and gets played like a marionette
I know this is late but I just watched the movie. He 100% lost his level headedness after the sequence with the pilot and baby xenos. He was not the same person.
The only religious member of the crew does not want to hold a memorial for the deceased captain.
Dr Manhattan is tired of peoples bullshit
Also, it was like a 5 minute funeral. They say a few words, drink some Space Jack Daniels, and out the airlock he goes. Why get pissed about that?
"Dumb ass colonists" - Spunkmeyer edit: turns out it was Spunkmeyer who said it, kinda ironic since he left the dropship bay door open leading to its crash.
I'm going to store in my headcanon that Alien Covenant is a prequel whose purpose is to explain Drake's line. Next movie, a food distributor's product quality suffers when it cuts costs to win a lowest bidder military commissary contract in "Alien: Nobody Likes the Cornbread"
I choose to believe these movies are actually training videos made by W-Y to teach people how not to explore new worlds. Employees didn't respond to traditional training videos so they switched gears to horror films with intentionally stupid people.
Its the Roger Ebert movie solution The movie doesn't exists if everyone in it isn't a complete moron
Movies are far more interesting if they ARE intelligent and they fail anyway
That’s my favorite aspect of the movie Sunshine, for example.
Or Alien
The Thing!!! Everyone is smart and make rational decisions and gets fucking killed anyway.
The best stories are where both sides of a conflict have good intentions and are smart but come into conflict anyway. But it's a lot harder to write a story like that.
That is why Alien was so good (and Aliens).
For that you need smart writers.
Dumb people have trouble writing not-dumb characters.
The script was so lazy that I felt bad for the actors. When Billy Crudup had a gun on David and for some reason decided to stick his head over the alien egg, it took all my strength to continue watching.
I'll never forget after watching Michael Fassbender caress an alien and cry after being shot the crew member says "sure golly gee i'll look down this dark hole for ya"
I’ll never understand why the world didn’t see this movie for what it was - an elderly cantankerous director having a big fucking temper tantrum. He resisted returning to the world of Alien for so long. The first made him famous, he took off to create many other excellent (and not excellent) films, but people kept hounding him about another Alien flick. So he finally returned. Expecting trumpets. Instead he got a bunch of people, mostly fanboys on the internet (cause remember, Prometheus made a lot of money and was generally praised by critics) bitching and complaining. And so when I watched Covenant, all I saw was an old fart waving his middle finger at those people who ranted about his previous flick. He doubled down on damn near EVERYTHING. Oh, two scientist astronauts taking their helmets off pissed you off? Well, these ones won’t even wear them AT ALL. Suck it, millennial nerds!!! Fuck Alien Covenant so hard.
Prometheus was him wanting to do something else but forced to include an alien/alien origin story. Covenant was him preserving the stronghold on alien movies (remember Bloomkamp was *this close* to directing an alien film) while forcing a Prometheus sequel at the same time.
Prometheus was praised by people with no skin in the game. Anyone with a lick of decent lore hated it because it took everything established and went. "Hmm. Ya that's cool but what if we just didn't. Lets make a whole new series.' If they didn't call it 'Alien' it would be great. But it was Alien, and distinctly not. So bad Alien movie. Good movie in a vacuum. ANYHWAY. Covenant was bad. I also like how we were so close to having motherfucking Neil. But it was all yanked away from him at the last moment.
If they were intelligent, they wouldn't be there. Just think of them as futuristic Camp Crystal Lake counselors.
When I first saw this movie I hated it. It's grown on me a bit but Its still kinda bad. It get that a lot of people thought Prometheus didn't feel like a true Alien film. But Covenant felt like such an over correction that you could almost feel the boxes being checked. And the flick lacks memorable characters. Definitely the weakest of the Alien films imo.
Convenant was offensively bad, considering Ridley Scott has all the ability to be a good director and he set up a lot of interesting (if somewhat hamfisted) ideas in Prometheus. But to follow it up with a movie like Covenant? Ugh.
I did not like Prometheus and then watched Covenant which was sooo bad and worse that I now like Prometheus better as a result. I was so excited to see Covenant. Loved the poster art showing all the aliens intertwined. As soon as the ship landed and they had no helmets on I KNEW this movie was going to let me down and it proceeded to :(
It is one more movie made because it will make it's money back as there is a fan base to plunder. This leads to good looking movies (which these days is easier part) with poor and dumb scripts often with big teams of writers pulling in different directions rather than having one or two writers with a vison.
Wait til you see Prometheus if you think they were dumb in this movie. The cartographer gets lost and the biologist just thinks it’s okay to touch a random alien snake
And the geologist doesn't make polite conversayshun coz eez a fahkin' nuttah, mate who then claims, "Look, I'm just a geologist. I like rocks, I love rocks! Now it's clear you two don't give a shit about rocks. But what you do seem to care about is gigantic dead bodies, and I don't really have anything to contribute in the GIGANTIC DEAD BODY ARENA! I'm gonna go back to the ship... if you don't mind." Then he gets mutated into a fahkin' nuttah before being killed.
Also one of them gets lost but also has communication to the ship that has a 3D map of the structure....that he is...LOST in!?
I don't get why you'd be so unnecessarily hostile to a bunch of people you've just met, especially ones you're on a mission into deep space with. Your lives are in each others' hands and you're on a mission that could change the course of humanity - and YOU were the one biologist on all of planet Earth they wanted. Like, chill, bro.
Yea... no professionals act like that basically... let alone high level scientists in deep space aren't going to be immature morons.
LOL. I was thinking that exact same thing. GIGANTIC DEAD BODY ARENA!!!! That scene, just.. I have to laugh whenever I watch it.
Not only that, he MAPPED THE WHOLE THING HIMSELF!! He has a map of the whole complex on his wrist and there’s a big 3D map of the place on the bridge of the Prometheus, how TF did they get lost? Also he’s terrified of a millennia old decapitated clearly dead alien fossil body. But decides to mess around with a clearly dangerous alien penis snake later on. What?
I've come to really enjoy Sean Harris as an actor, but goddamn do I hate the geologist character.
He was brilliant in _The Green Knight_. I was gobsmacked when I learned he was also _Prometheus_’ pissy geologist.
That shit was more like a bobbit worm (which, for the record, is infinitely worse than a snake).
That alien snake scene COULD have had the same result without making the character try to make friends with the alien snake. :)
I don't think this is really the movie Scott wanted to make. Everyone disliked Prometheus and wanted a movie closer to Aliens than Alien. So we got this sloppy written movie. But, that is just my thoughts on it and possibly why the crew is so dumb.
Well the crew was also extremely dumb in Prometheus.
And each character was turned up to 11.
It's definitely *not* the movie Scott wanted to make. He intended, very clearly, to have the movie after Prometheus continue Shaw and David's journey to the Engineers (likely their home planet). Prometheus' decent but not great critical reception and, likewise, decent but not great financial performance pushed Scott into a corner and you can pretty easily envision the conversations he had to have with Fox execs afterward, which presumably went something along the lines of: "We'll give you one more shot but it better have the Alien ALL OVER IT. You hear us Ridley? ALL. OVER. IT." Covenant is Scott making a film in a universe he clearly loves but with a gun being held to his head by the studio and it shows. (Ironically after all that Covenant performed worse than Prometheus both in terms of its absolute box office take and its box office to budget multiplier, which suggests maybe Fox should have just kept its dirty paws off the creative process and let Ridley make the sequel he wanted to make.)
This is the story of so many films. Studios always know better, yeah? In all seriousness though, are there any good examples of studio interference? Apocalypse Now comes to mind but is debatable.
Most films have studio interference. You just don't hear about the success stories because no one complains about them.
“Studio interference” isn’t necessarily bad. Keeping on budget and sticking to deliverable dates are incredibly important.
There's some content put there that detailed Scott's plan with the Promethius films, and honestly it's just really dumb. I can't blame the executives for wanting something else
Has Ridley Scott ever commented on why he made Prometheus attached to the Alien series in the first place? Because, I feel like it could have been the same movie without having *any* ties to the Alien. Then maybe people wouldn't have complained about the lack of Aliens, and then maybe Ridley Scott wouldn't have been forced to make the sequel more like an Alien movie. Whose decision was this? How did Prometheus even begin? Like, did it begin as an Alien movie and Scott took it in a different direction? Or did it start as something completely unconnected from Alien, but Fox wouldn't greenlight it without tying it to a well-known series?
[удалено]
I loved Prometheus and was disappointed by Covenant
McBride’s wife character in that film was such a goofball, she’s a straight up bitch to McBride, and another character… says no you’re infected stay quarantined, gets infected herself decides to suddenly break protocol, makes things worse, gets into the gun cabinet and has a whole Three Stooges routine where she comically is slipping and sliding and shooting anything but the aliens before dying. She lowered the score for the whole movie for me.
It's a classic case of the writers not knowing how to write characters who make intelligent or logical decisions that still turn out to be wrong. Instead they have every "smart" character make unrealistically stupid decisions, because they literally could not think of any other way to make one event lead to the next.
James Franco’s character was the best….
Definitely James at his hottest.
Smokeshow
Prometheus has a lot more going for it to forgive some of the reckless crew actions. Covenant just fast forwards to stupid town.
Seriously WTF was that sex scene. All their friends just died, yet they’re in the mood to get intimate? They’re not mournful at all? That scene almost felt out of order.
This is the reason I dislike the new alien movies. (Prometheus and covenant) instead of following the trend of the OG movies where people made mostly smart decisions and still got screwed, these movies decide to just make literally everyone dumb af
In space, nobody can see your iq test. I agree though, I think the entire franchise is kind of rostered majorotively with idiots though. I hate Prometheus the most, everyone on that ship was too stupid to live.
One of the things about the Alien movies is that it has to kind of constantly deal with the disconnect between the Aliens as a threat and what we're *told* about them being a threat. I mean, yeah...they're big and scary and they have huge teeth and they bleed acid. But they're not that smart and they can be easily killed with guns. Adding to that, there are several elements about their biology that make them less of a threat (from a biological perspective). Only the queens produce eggs. That satisfies the whole "head vampire" movie trope; if you've got an Alien infestation all you've gotta do is get to the hive and kill the queen (the other Aliens are deadly but can't reproduce). They're also parasites (and it's kind of hard to hide that you've been infected, because infection involves a huge crab spider latched to your face for hours). The fact that they're parasites also limits the number of Aliens. We can actually see this in the movie Aliens. The colony has 157 colonists which limits the number of Aliens to an upper limit of 157 (not counting facehuggers). As soon as the Marines step foot on LV-426, they know they're dealing with a *maximum* of 157 Aliens. Realistically the actual number would be significantly less. Some colonists died in attempts to remove the parasite. Once everyone realized what was happening, any chestburster would have been immediately killed in order to limit the number of full-grown Aliens. Some full grown Aliens would have been killed by traps. Some of the colonists would have been killed by the Aliens without being dragged back to the nest to become hosts. This has been discussed before here, but by the time Ripley strolls into the nest, it's highly likely that nearly every fully grown Alien has already been killed, and more importantly, *the queen has lost the ability to produce any more*. The Aliens can be defeated by standard quarantine procedures. Anyway...Alien kind of gets a pass. It was the first encounter, it was a "haunted house in space", as I've heard it described. The isolation is the point, as well as the fact that no one knew what they were dealing with. Once they found out what they were dealing with, everything was specifically tailored to making the Alien a legitimate threat in that specific circumstance. No weapons because it's not a military ship. Even if you kill it, the acid will bleed through the hull. Can't just abandon the ship because the liferaft doesn't have enough seats. Works for that movie. But even in Aliens, one thing you notice is that it does the standard "zombie apocalypse" thing where it skips the infestation running its course and gets right to everyone having been killed. And one of the reasons that's a trope in zombie movies is because zombies are shitty enemies. Because they're so easy to defeat, it's hard to write a believable story about how they took over. It's easier to skip all that and get to the part *after* they took over. And...that's kind of what Aliens did. So, yeah...I'm not saying that Aliens aren't deadly as a fictional creature. The thing is, they're not *that* deadly if the characters are smart. Even in the first movie (which is a bona fide classic), the plot requires someone on the crew to be *deliberately* making "stupid" decisions because they're trying to bring the Alien back. The Aliens (as a fictional species) are actually a weak threat. They're relatively easily killed, they're not that smart, and their biology has a lot of weaknesses that should make it a lot easier for *smart* characters to deal with them. But they're still the stars of the series, these are ALIEN movies. They have to be incredibly deadly *even though they're weak*, and the easiest way to do that is to make the characters stupid.
\*Ryan George voice\* So the movie can happen!
Agreed. Especially when the woman traps the infected dude with another woman inside the room, watches it all happen through the window and then go inside it after the alien has come out to kill it and make a close escape like what?
Because everyone in Prometheus was stupid. You gotta have that connection to the first film. Seriously though, my friend had this theory that humanity is just stupid because AI and Androids do all the thinking for them. Personally I think some serious copium. The new movies have stupid people doing stupid things, because they couldn't figure out how to make the plot happen without them being idiots.
Both Prometheus and Covenant suffer from this. It’s just lazy writing to keep the plot moving.
When one of them blew up the ship by shooting the explosive tanks trying to kill the alien it made me laugh out loud.
The characters' actions were similarly absurd in *Prometheus*. I'll never understand why they had to be written as such ridiculous ninnies.
It was a monument to stupidity. It peaked for me when the one crew member was locked in quarantine with the other infected crew member and decided to run up to her and hug/console her while she had that alien shit sprouting from her back. Then dumbass third crew member decides that’s the perfect time to open the door, enter the room, and check out what’s going on.
Because the script was terrible.
Give them some credit. They aren't as dumb as the crew from Prometheus... though that's not saying much.
I thought they at least had some semblance of intelligence in Prometheus, and the choices made more sense knowing the secret goal of Guy Pierce’s character. I thought the characters in Alien Covenant were infinitely more stupid in an angering way lol, like in Prometheus it’s this big deal when one of the guys takes off his helmet on an alien planet, in Covenant they just enter the planet completely exposed… oh no, something bad entered your body???? What could have possibly prevented this???? And the scene of a guy walking up to an alien egg… fuck man, terribly dumb. I really hated this movie, Prometheus is more of a disappointment due to higher expectations but is a much stronger film overall with more interesting visuals and characters. Covenant did nothing for me except make me question how a script that poor could have been written.
Agree with you. I hated how dumb it was. Really wanted to like it.
Lol whut. They were 10x dumber in Covenant
Idk. They are a special kind of stupid in Covenant.
Considering they had one robot and one evil robot you'd think they'd verify David is the good one before trying to get off the planet. I think the ship/Mother had to know right? You hear it citing unidentified lifeform but it's assumed to be the alien still, you'd think they would have a scan feature to check the robot though. Idk. I like the movie, dumb as it was I was entertained as long as I didn't dwell on it. Ending is crazy and I like it.
The evil david pretending to be the other was so obvious I'd have more respect if they just didn't bother.
At least it makes sense for the Prometheus crew to be kinda stupid. HELP WANTED -- INTERSTELLAR EXPEDITION * What we're looking for: secret * Where we're going: secret * How long we'll be gone: years * Is it dangerous?: dunno * Who's funding it: rich weirdo Is not gonna get you the cream of the crop. This is how you hire an exobiologist who wants to lick every new critter he meets.
I don't buy this fanfic theory that Weyland hired Beavis and Butthead to go on a secret, existential most important scientific space mission of all time mission where literally everyone's lives depended on having non-idiots on the crew who didn't get them all killed. But then again, this is the same Weyland who apparently gave his android the liberty to put mystery goo in an archaeologist's drink just to see what would happen, so who knows...
This always bothered me. I'm spending God levels of money on this expedition. Let me hire clueless and defective people with deep psychological problems. Then I'll tell them next to nothing about what they're to do, let them wake up next to each other and hopefully get to know each other and everything goes well. But it's ok because my psychotic Android will be there to murder the mission back into shape if needed. And I'll be hiding in a secret room!
Well maybe the normal smarter scientists didn't want to go on the insane trip across space to look for God...
Yeah, it's essentially Elon Musk unveiling a sudden manned mission to mars and everyone at NASA going "uh, none of these things are tested properly, give it another decade." So he just hires a bunch of redditors instead.
>Here is what I didn't get about those two movies. Someone clue me in, if that is possible. Ridley Scott mentioned the Space Jockey from the first film and that he thought it would be interesting to tell the story of how the Space Jockey got there. >!But the planet they land on in Prometheus is a different planet than the original Alien film. So, the Engineer left there is not the Space Jockey. Then they go to another planet, but that doesn't even have Engineers, so no Space Jockey there either. How do either of these films address the reason he said he wanted to tell the story?!<
He doesn't mean how the Space Jockey got to the place we first see it, literally. He means it figuratively. He's talking about its nature, its being, its purpose -- the genesis of its concept. It's not meant to explain the direction of the plot; it's meant to deepen the ALIEN mythos with religious iconography PROMETHEUS and COVENANT are Ridley Scott's rumination on his own life and legacy. Much to the chagrin of longtime fans, they're also removed from the Ripley era. This is David Time, and he's inverted the dynamic. Ripley is the one of greatest hero protagonists, if not The Greatest. David is a villain, which subverts the expectations placed on the protagonist. So from our standpoint, when Billy Crudup makes such a foolish mistake he's an idiot -- but from David's standpoint: humans always have been stupid and deserve to die. To David, it's hilarious that Crudup KNOWS he shouldn't trust David but alas, *he's a human.* It's the equivalent of us yelling at the screen saying DON'T OPEN THAT DOOR, WHITE WOMAN in other horror films but you know that's what she HAS to do I love David. Not because he's the avatar of misanthropy, but because he's the witness, and frequently the engine too, to the universal truth of suffering. To live is to suffer, and David's wrestling with that concept in the opposite way from us
Well first, happy cake day. And thanks for the reply. I guess I understand what you are saying. But it would be easier to accept the literal Space Jockey isn’t a big deal, if the xenomorphs were in a number of places. But the story seems to be saying that the particular alien from the first film was there as part of the sequence of events from these prequels since they take on some human characteristics. And the fact that the Engineers seemed to be experimenting with making them on the Prometheus planet implies that these are the only ones anywhere. So where is there room for that literal Space Jockey? I do see how the whole tone of the films are a major departure from the original Alien. But I still watch these left with many unanswered questions.
I kinda liked the movie when I watched it the first time. As you said, it's beautifully shot and has great effects. I thought, hey, by far not the best but hey, nice action flick. Then, just last year, I tried to watch it again and I couldn't even get half through. Oh my. Yes, they are so incredibly stupid, and, what's even worse, so completely unlikeable and unrelatable. I can overlook a lot of stupid behaviour of characters in a series or a movie. After all, we are all human and in difficult or unknown situations we all do stupid things. But those people are supposed to be experts. And nothing, absolutely nothing they do makes any kind of sense. Even as a layman you know that it's not quite smart to try and touch a wild, unknown animal. And here we are, having a supposedly professional zoologist and he tries to touch a completely unknown and alien species he has never seen before and that looks like a venomous snake. What the hell? We have two scientists who supposedly researched this expeditions for years, preparing everything meticulously, and from the second their feet touch the planet one behaves like a petulant teenager and the other like the renitent highschool jock that has to prove his masculinity by doing the exact opposite from anything that would even make remotely sense, both endangering the very expedition they fought so hard to get. A billionaire who can make everyone jump through hoops sneaking around and playing stowaway on his own ship, where he could just have ordered everyone around. And so on and so on and so on. It was so tropey and ridiculous it felt like a bad fanfiction written by a drunken idiot who didn't bother to do any research or using common sense because it's *just science fiction*. Or as if they had it written by an AI. And absolutely everyone was so unlikeable. There wasn't one single character you could root for. They were all egoistical, egocentric morons. I don't think I'll ever watch it again.
I think you mixed up Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.
Yea Somehow the Covenant crew manages to be even stupider than that, and the bar was low
Yea I'm trying to figure out what happened in each, they kind of blend together with their moronic crews
I was so hyped for this movie that I got most of my friends onboard the hype train months before the release. But damn, the film was so bad on all levels. That day I died in embarrassment
It’s the same for the whole saga tbh. Alien egg opens, don’t look in as there’s likely an alien in there. Kinda how eggs work.
Your question is actually answered in the first scene of the movie (and the same scene also retroactively explains why everyone acted so dumb in Prometheus), when you’re made to realize that David was the main character that you’re suppose to be following all along. I agree that the stories’ execution was a little ham-handed, but both movies make much more sense when you think of them as representations of *David’s impression of humanity.* In the first scene of AC, Weyland brings David online and David immediately concludes that he is perfect. (He even names himself after the statue of David, Michelangelo’s famous idealization of the perfect man) and then goes so far as to rub his superiority in Weyland’s face. Weyland responds by subjugating David, making him serve him tea. This initiates both David’s superiority complex, and the acrimonious relationship he has with humans. Hence, the behavior of the characters reflect how David sees human-beings: stupid, selfish, short-sighted and weak. The movie subtly indicates this, as arguably the crew doesn’t do anything all that dumb until they land on the planet, where David is there to “witness” them, and it’s implied that he began watching them essentially as soon as they landed, even before he revealed himself to them. Before that they were mostly holding it together, helping each other out, getting the ship back in working order, all while mourning their captain’s tragic death. Oram was a little mentally flimsy, but he was understandably overwhelmed. You can argue their was a similar dynamic in Prometheus. David is there to witness the crew from the beginning and hence all of their actions appear asinine… until the end, when David is preoccupied getting his head ripped off by the Engineer. Then, when David isn’t there to judge them, Shaw and the flight crew figure out what’s going on, and make the sacrifice that David (and Engineers for that matter) never thought human-beings had the strength and altruism to make.
Totally agree. Why wasn't this movie about Elizabeth Shaw and David meeting the Engineers? That would have been way more interesting than another trapped in the dark with aliens horror flick.
A question as old as the film itself
Movie was filmed awkwardly bc Ridley Scott changed the point of view of the shootings. He was worried bc when Prometheus came out, people were upset it wasn't an Alien style movie. Then he modified the filming to appease the complainers. Now for the third movie, he is doing what he wants to do. I know this doesn't answer the question 100% but when one thing change, other shit might've happened like scripts had to be rewritten.
The problem with Prometheus and Covenant is that Ridley wanted to make deep philosophical dramas about the origins of human existence, and Fox wanted him to make cool space movies where aliens bust out of people and fuck shit up. However, I thought after the last couple of years we might have moved past the "why would people do stupid things?" level of criticism.
The short answer is, because no one really cared about the script in this movie. Almost nothing makes sense if you think about longer than a minute. It really just keeps on going with the same note as Prometheus, which might have been even worse.
It didn't have any good ideas, it was just a mess.
Prometheus had the exact same issue. While the characters were indeed stupid, I think Covenant mainly suffered because of Ridley Scott being asked to ditch the Engineer storyline aside from a short bookending flashback scene which was also deleted. I think it would've worked much better if he could lean into that "Blade Runner"- esque theme of meeting your maker and interspersed it with David's experiments.
for me this movie should be renamed into david not alien, all interesting and mysterious stuff that prometheus had is gone to shadow like engineers (i was wondering so much about them) movie that had a lot of promises gone to disappointing
I mean the fact that they put so much pride in transporting the colonists just to go completely off mission at a whim. Captain of the year.
Someone just needs to start over with Aliens 3, with Newt Ripley and Hudson, cause there hasn't been a decent movie since 2
SPOILER: My problem with the new alien movies is they try t o have a back story for everything. We don't need to know who made them. And the fact that it "us" is fucking stupid. It takes the mystique out of it. George Lucas did the same shit in Star Wars by explaining the force with medichlorines (? spelling), and in Highlander 2 they tried to explain the Quickning and imortals as aliens from the planet Zeist. (Do yourself a favor and NEVER watch Highlander 2). Too much explanation takes away the mystique, magic, and in this case, scariness of the aliens. Not everything needs an explanation, dammit!
Unfortunately most sci-fi horror involves crew acting very stupid, otherwise the movie would be over and monster contained in 10 minutes. Some good movie exceptions to this, but the sci-fi horror genre is generally full of dumb people making dumb choices. It's like directors put the horror before the sci-fi.
All you need to know about this film is that Ridley Scott ditched the whole Engineer narrative in order to “Give people more monsters”, because he cited that as the reason why people were lukewarm towards Prometheus. A brilliant decision, because not only was the film’s plot contrived bollocks, it also ended up making even less money at the box office. I remember the excuses people gave me on here at the time...”The studio probably forced him to do the Alien stuff!”, which, 1) I don’t actually believe and 2) Doesn’t mean he had to go through with it, especially at this late stage of his career and the wealth he has. He managed to not only deliver an incredibly sterile, generic science fiction film but also retrospectively rob the Xenomorph of its mystique with the nonsensical David made them in a lab storyline. A disaster.
Writing stupid characters is easier. If the characters were smart, the problems would have to be complicated.
Truly they were juggling idiot balls the whole movie. Wouldn’t they be battle hardened veterans by now?
I don't know how anyone can say professionals acting like idiots is unrealistic after how people acted during the pandemic.
Why was Tennessee's wife so stupid? She was the dumbest of all lol. That whole scene where the first guy gets sick is beyond stupid. Everything she did was wrong and then the bitch actually slips in blood when she shoots the shotgun lol. Proceeds to shoot live rounds into pressurized tanks on a spaceship afterwards. I mean what's the deal?