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 Lance845 wrote:
Covenant was good. Prometheus was the biggest pack of idiots doing idiot things for 2 hours i have ever seen.

Agreed - hopefully this will be better

I'm not really sure how Convenant was any better than Prometheus in the idiot department. Both films suffered serious SOD problems in how blindly silly many of the characters acted just to keep the plot rolling.

I like the theory that somehow they got confused when shooting Prometheus script. The geologist/spelunker gets lost in the cave? The Biologist just runs up to alien species and goes PSPSPSPSPS? Makes no sense unless you swap them. Still dumb but makes more sense.

Love the Alien series and will be going to see this, but feeling lost as to why they can't just continue the stories of David or Amanda.

Second name Hugenkis?

SamusDrake wrote:
Love the Alien series and will be going to see this, but feeling lost as to why they can't just continue the stories of David or Amanda.

For the same reason they don’t continue the story of Alien vs Predator.

 Lance845 wrote:
Covenant was good. Prometheus was the biggest pack of idiots doing idiot things for 2 hours i have ever seen.

Covenant has a supposedly experienced terraforming party wander on to an unsurveyed planet with all the precautions of teens backpacking through Thailand. There’s plenty of idiot to go around.


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SamusDrake wrote:
Love the Alien series and will be going to see this, but feeling lost as to why they can't just continue the stories of David or Amanda.

I love Michael Fassbender’s performances and I think David is an interesting character with an intriguing story to explore, but it’s not an Alien story. And it detracts from the original Alien stories; these are supposed to be ancient, unknowable horrors that expose the hubris of humanity (i.e. lots of people would happily crack open Pandora’s box if you told them there was something shiny at the bottom). Making them the product of a wonky android from a couple of decades ago just strips away that mystique for me.

I thought that the creatures David created were not "true" xenomorphs, but we're more like his "close enough" approximation of them.

Covenant is not an experienced terraforming team. It's a colony ship. Every person there was supposed to be a colonist.

Their captain/leader died when his cryo tube filled with fire leaving secondary members in command positions.

Their ship suffered other damage due to the solar flare that killed the captain that made completing their planned journey more perilous and a nearby planet showed all the signs of being a good habitable world for colonization.

The inexperienced leaders decided to take their chances on the less known planet then to take a risky trip that potentially none of them would even survive to see the new planet.

Covenant has way less stupid then you think.

Promethius has the geologist with a wrist mounted digital map of the entire complex get lost and the afore mentioned biologist sticking his finger in a space snakes mouth.

So Covenant isn’t stupid because it’s so contrived?

"Things happen because of other things" is pretty much how stories work.

 insaniak wrote:
"Things happen because of other things" is pretty much how stories work.

Sure, but “and then, and then” stories are generally not highly regarded compared to stories where character choices and interactions propel the plot. And a complicated set up like that to get ignorant characters to make (believably?) bad decisions is a clear case of “so the movie can happen” as Ryan George says.

But fine, Covenant is better than Prometheus. Congrats, Covenant.

It's called the set up.

Most stories have some kind of instigating incident that sets the rest of the story in motion.

In alien the commercial star ship nostromo picks up a signal of unknown origin causing the ship to go off course and wakes its crew early.

In aliens ripleys shuttle is picked up by a salavge crew after drifting through all the core systems and into the other side of deep space 80 years after the events of the first movie.

In lord of the flys a storm shipwrecks some boys on an island with the adult crew nowhere to be found. Stranding the children.

In covenant a solar flare damages the colony ship covenant killing some of its passengers including its captain, causing those who remain to take command and seek refuge on a nearby, seemingly habitable world.

I see. Your description earlier in the thread made it sound like a comedic pile-up of unfortunate mishaps.

So everyone aboard with experience exploring alien worlds killed by the solar flare, leaving only people who take poor precautions?

While it is true that the premises of Covenant seems legitimate, however sending down an expedition crew with very little biohazard suits/equipment id a bit reckless. Sure the planet has a breathable atmosphere, but that doesn't mean it is free from pathogens and the like, even with scans it would have been wiser to er on the side of caution.

This however would have made for a dull film... so sometimes stupid/silly things need to happen in order to propel the story along.

It's a colony ship. Not an exploratory/surveying ship. It's packed wall to wall with the supplys they need to get the colony they were supposed to start up off the ground.

It's not really equiped to do much besides basic surveying from orbit.

Now.. you can say that first guy who pulls off his helmet cause the air is breatheable is an idiot. And you would be correct. He was also the religous idiot who thought this planet was built for them and threw all caution to the wind.

Any time anyone points out the stupidity of the characters in Prometheus and Covenant, I have to wonder how many horror films they've seen. The entire genre is built on characters making dumb decisions.

It's an issue of set up.

Good horror movies establish solid and even reasoned rationales for why a character is making a blatantly bad decision.

The main character in Sinister is desperate to recapture his success as a true crime writer and willfully ignores the early warning signs that something supernatural is happening.

The leading girl in Thanksgiving wants to do the right thing and be responsible leading to her helping the villain without being critical of early signs of his odd behavior.

The characters in Alien, make a blatantly bad decision, are called out on it by Ripley, but then encouraged to make bad choices by a saboteur who wants to see them fail.

In Aliens the Colonial Marines are cocksure, operating on intel they clearly don't give full credence that wasn't enough to explain the gravity of what they were walking into and get wrecked for it.

The characters in Promethus meanwhile are very threadbare, seemingly solely motived solely by a desire to put themselves in the dumbest situations possible. The only ones who got rock solid explorations of their characters were David, Holloway, and the second-choice captain guy from Covenant. Caveat that the Covenant guy starts off compelling, but then the plot has to move forward into xeno-murder so he becomes a raging moron to drive the plot forward.

It's not that characters can't make dumb decision, but good horror movies show good, even smart people, make bad choices for sympathetic reasons. Their bad decisions screw them, but they don't make bad decisions because they're idiots.

Prometheus and Covenant just have really dumb people being really dumb, in situations where their supposed expertise should have told them better. Or even where their immediate knowledge of the situation would make even a dumb person say 'this is a bad idea.' The best explanation I've seen for Prometheus actually is that the characters are dumb because who signs up for a space mission without knowing what the mission is for? Someone who desperate and probably not actually that good at what they do.

 creeping-deth87 wrote:
Any time anyone points out the stupidity of the characters in Prometheus and Covenant, I have to wonder how many horror films they've seen. The entire genre is built on characters making dumb decisions.

The stupid person in Alien who makes the bad decisions is actually neither. He’s an evil robot.

Besides, you’re describing a subgenre of slasher horror. I don’t recall lots of dumb decisions in movies like The Thing, The Exorcist, In the Mouth of Madness, Suspiria, the Terminator, etc. uninformed decisions, sure, but not dumb ones.


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Lordofhats said it better.

I don't mind some stupid descisions - - people do do stupid things all the time in much less stressful situations.

For instance I think the characters in the Thing mostly do react well to the situation - I saw one viewer say they were doing stupid things but again this does not take into acount the incresing tiredness (Mcready even states he has not slept for days) coupled with paranoia.

In contrast I thought the characters in Promtheus were stupid all the time but it also does not help that people seem to have pointless roles.

Covenant was IMO better - there are some dumb things but nowhere near as much as Prometheus who make no good desicions

Promtheus irked me. As they land we see a series of structures and they just run off to the first on and everything goes down. What amazes me is the lack of surveying ahead of scampering off to the first structure. Heck, it should have been empty. But where were the drones that they could have easily packed with them to let them do an actual survey before disembarkation. No, can't do that they were all in a hurry to run off and meet God or what ever.
One of many complaints I have.

I do like David as a character and really wish we had a conclusion to his story even if we didn't get what we wanted from the xenomorph side of things by the end of Covenant.

Prometheus and Covenant were messy. But I can cope with messy. What I can’t cope with is giving a boring answer to an interesting question, outside the realm of science.

Where did Xenomorphs come from?

Weird God Aliens who are space jockeys but also not space jockeys because that fossilised thing from Alien was actually their space suit and they made this mutation goo for reasons that aren’t adequately explained then C-Creepio goes insane at the slightest provocation and does things with the mutation goo and wipes out the not-space-jockeys again for not terribly well described reasons and then he remains completely radio rental and decides to spread his children across the galaxy but in a way which in no way explains how we got from that sad state of affairs to what Ripley and Co find,

Oh yeah and the not-actually-space-jockeys all well powerful and able to spread among the stars but also all happen to live on a single planet in a single, convenient settlement.

Covenant was slightly better than Prometheus, but still it had uninteresting characters (other than the androids), nonsensical plot and almost all payoffs and revelations were unsatisfactory.

My reaction to Romulus trailer... :yawn:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Prometheus and Covenant were messy. But I can cope with messy. What I can’t cope with is giving a boring answer to an interesting question, outside the realm of science.

Where did Xenomorphs come from?

Weird God Aliens who are space jockeys but also not space jockeys because that fossilised thing from Alien was actually their space suit and they made this mutation goo for reasons that aren’t adequately explained then C-Creepio goes insane at the slightest provocation and does things with the mutation goo and wipes out the not-space-jockeys again for not terribly well described reasons and then he remains completely radio rental and decides to spread his children across the galaxy but in a way which in no way explains how we got from that sad state of affairs to what Ripley and Co find,

Oh yeah and the not-actually-space-jockeys all well powerful and able to spread among the stars but also all happen to live on a single planet in a single, convenient settlement.

About sums it up yea

I think it's fair to compare promethis vs covenant to avp vs avp-r.

The first of each of those is complete nonsense. Crap movie with idiot characters and a complete lack of understanding of the franchise.

The second isn't a great movie. But at least it made a bit of sense, had some cool gak, and the creatures behaved the way they were supposed to.

I can agree on that.

AvP Requiem mostly suffered from being way, way too dark. So when the objectively fun bits kicked off you just couldn’t see the fun.

Other than that? It’s really pretty enjoyable. And I for one really liked that Alien shriek when they’re shot appearing again.