{"id":1230,"date":"2024-07-22T17:33:42","date_gmt":"2024-07-22T17:33:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=1230"},"modified":"2024-10-14T14:10:28","modified_gmt":"2024-10-14T18:10:28","slug":"alien-covenant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/07\/22\/alien-covenant\/","title":{"rendered":"Alien: Covenant"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Alien: Covenant<\/strong>\u00a0 (2017)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 20th<\/sup> Century Fox\/Sci-Fi-Horror\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 123 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (sci-fi violence, bloody images, language, some sexuality and nudity)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Ridley Scott\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: John Logan and Dante Harper\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Jed Kurzel\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Dariusz Wolski\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: May 19, 2017 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demian Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Amy Seimetz, Jussie Smollett, Callie Hernandez, Nathaniel Dean, Alexander England, Benjamin Rigby, Tess Haubrich, Uli Latukefu.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $74.3M (US)\/$240.9M (World)<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: **<\/p>\n

\u00a0Five summers earlier (i.e. summer of \u201912), the big question weighing on the minds of sci-fi movie geeks everywhere was whether or not Ridley Scott\u2019s Prometheus was a prequel to Alien, something that had been speculated about even before it went into production. As you know, the answer turned out to be yes. It marked a return to form for the director of Alien and Blade Runner after a thirty-year absence from the sci-fi genre.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The next chapter Alien: Covenant<\/strong> is a sequel to Prometheus and the second in a proposed trilogy of prequels to Alien. I won\u2019t come out and say it, but I think once you read the plot description, you\u2019ll know which of the Alien movies it\u2019s planting seeds for. \u2018Nuff said on that.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0Ten years after the events of Prometheus, the space vessel Covenant is bound for a distant planet with 2000 colonists and 1000 embryos on board. It\u2019ll take seven years to reach its destination so everybody is in stasis, everybody except for the android Walter (Fassbender, the X-Men movies), an upgraded version of his \u201cbrother\u201d David from the previous movie, who tends to the day-to-day stuff on the ship. He\u2019s forced to waken the crew from hypersleep when a neutrino blast hits the ship. The only one not to survive the process is the captain (an uncredited James Franco) who burns up in his pod leaving the second-in-command Oram (Crudup, Almost Famous) in charge.<\/p>\n

\u00a0While the crew works to repair the damage, the pilot Tennessee (McBride, Pineapple Express) intercepts a transmission from a nearby planet that appears to be inhabitable. Oram decides, against the objections of terraforming expert Daniels (Waterston, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them), to send down an expedition team to locate the source of the mysterious transmission. It leads them to the crashed remains of the ship piloted by David and Dr. Elizabeth Shaw at the end of the previous movie. She died in the crash according to David (Fassbender) who\u2019s still fully functional. I won\u2019t say exactly what he\u2019s been up to for the past ten years. I will it isn\u2019t long before the crew runs into trouble with certain nasty alien lifeforms.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Alien: Covenant<\/strong> is my least favorite entry in the series. It\u2019s a kind way of saying I didn\u2019t like it. It\u2019s lame. I don\u2019t know what\u2019s worse, the bad CGI effects or the weak attempt by female lead Katherine Waterston (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them) to step into Sigourney Weaver\u2019s shoes. She\u2019s no Ripley, believe it! This is indicative of a bigger problem, the film\u2019s biggest. There are no memorable characters. None, not one, of the characters in this sixth installment of the series stand out like Kane (John Hurt), Ash (Ian Holm), Hudson (Bill Paxton), Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein), Bishop (Lance Henriksen), Dillon (Charles S. Dutton), Vriess (Dominique Pinon), Elgyn (Michael Wincott) and Gediman (Brad Dourif). Daniels is, at best, a pale imitation of Ripley. Oram is said to be a \u201cman of faith\u201d but nothing is done with it. Tennessee\u2019s most defining trait is his cowboy hat. I really couldn\u2019t tell you anything about the others off the top of my head.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The effects in Alien: Covenant<\/strong> are anything but special. They were handled by a VFX company (Moving Picture Company) as opposed to actual FX artists like Carlo Rambaldi and Stan Winston. That would explain the impersonal nature of the digitally-rendered creature effects. Scott made a fatal error in deciding to forgo the original designs of conceptual artist H.R. Giger and give the alien creatures a more organic feel. This is tantamount to doing touch-ups on the Mona Lisa.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Alien: Covenant<\/strong> has pacing issues, especially in the middle section when it stops dead in its tracks with a too-long scene between Fassbender and Fassbender as they ponder life and play music on a recorder. It\u2019s eventually revealed one of the synthetic lifeforms has intentions that aren\u2019t altruistic. Who didn\u2019t see this coming? The same can be said of the final big plot twist. I spotted it immediately. The way it\u2019s set up leaves no doubt as to the outcome. As for Fassbender, he does a fine job in both roles. He\u2019s a good actor.<\/p>\n

\u00a0While not as thematically heavy as its immediate predecessor, Alien: Covenant <\/strong>does offer up a handful of effective moments like a shower scene where two victims-to-be are too busy getting busy to notice the alien tentacle at their feet. It\u2019s right out of an 80s slasher flick. The production design, the ship\u2019s interior in particular, is pretty good. I never said Alien: Covenant<\/strong> is without its good points. It has some, but not nearly enough to make this entry worth the effort.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alien: Covenant\u00a0 (2017)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 20th Century Fox\/Sci-Fi-Horror\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 123 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (sci-fi violence, bloody images, language, some sexuality and nudity)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Ridley Scott\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: John Logan and Dante Harper\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Jed Kurzel\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Dariusz Wolski\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: May 19, 2017 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demian Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Amy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1545,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-horror","category-sci-fi-fantasy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Alien-Covenant-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1230"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1868,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1230\/revisions\/1868"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}