Rating 4/10 4/10
Arrival Poster

Hang on to your hats folks, here's a late review of Alien: Covenant.

This movie cost around $100,000,000 to make, so where did all the money go? My lingering impressions are: The dialogue was laughable ... I can’t even remember the music ... it was so dim that they could have used black and white film ... all the characters were forgettable ... it was full of science inconsistencies ... and the plot was a jumble. About 10 minutes total of the movie were great, everything else was just padding written and directed by a committee. The movie fails the ‘revisit test’. I would never buy this movie or sit though it again (except perhaps the 10 good minutes).

Dialogue

All I remember is F***ing alien, F***ng shit, F***ing crash, F****ing blow it out, F****ing anything ... The word was used so many times that I could feel that even the actors were bored with it and could no longer make it sound convincing. You can throw a few F****s into an action movie as a valid way of highlighting and releasing tension sometimes, but when it’s overused as it much as was in this movie, it becomes irritating and distracting.

Also, what was that stupid banter about tits and dicks when they were going in to land on the planet? We actually laughed aloud in the movie because it was so ludicrously out of context. Was it supposed to be some sort of cool militaristic banter reminiscent of Aliens (1986)? Dunno, but it was just stupid. About 90% of the dialog in this movie was worthless filler.

Characters

Each major character was introduced briefly so that you might bother to recognise them when their guts exploded later in the movie. It was clear that the scriptwriters didn’t waste time on character development, as they knew all the crew were going to explode eventually. They made a vague attempt to delineate the characters by making them variously brave, wear hats, be sassy, be stoic, be worried, etc, but it didn’t matter as we knew they were all going to explode alien guts. And who cared when they did?

Lighting

There is a terrible problem in the last 20 years where movies are desaturated of real colour. The Lord of The Rings series might have started this trend, which has been perpetuated by super-hero movie franchises. The symptom of this disease is that whole movies are filtered so much that little remains but blue/teal and flesh colours. Even the recent movie Arrival suffered from a variation of this problem where it was grey-filtered so much that I felt like I was wearing sunglasses indoors.

Covenant was probably deliberately scripted for a dim and dreary planet covered in clouds and storms (actually New Zealand), but it was so dark for so long that it became tiresome and obscured some of the best action scenes.

Music

I’m normally really sensitive to move soundtracks, but except for the clumsy use of Wagner, I can’t even remember a single note from the soundtrack. Did it have one?

Science

I don’t care what ‘science’ is presented in science fiction movies, so long as it’s internally consistent and contributes to the plot. It’s also acceptable to have impossible science, so long as you don’t dig your own hole by attempting to explain it. Covenant had its share of stupid science tropes: computers that talk like the lady in your car’s GPS, interstellar ships with huge ‘rockets’ pushing them, landing ships that would fly like bricks, androids superior to humans, countdowns to destruction, impossible orbits, aliens that grow from spores to the size of puppies in half an hour, and android David is repaired somehow.

Although Covenant didn’t have any grossly stupid science moments, it had enough silly little things to add to be irritating. There is little imaginative science in this science fiction movie and it doesn't contribute much overall.

Good Stuff

Summary

Are you telling me that the famous alien species was created by the genetic tinkering of an android who was sick of taking orders? Is that it?

I’m pleased to find that one of my favourite web sites in the world has analysed the movie and deconstructed it into its component tropes (recurring themes, motifs). See: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/AlienCovenant

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