Tag: alien: covenant

This is kind of depressing.  I keep waiting to hear how I can go back to the Alien series… and I keep getting crushingly disappointed. Why can’t they get a good script?  From what I can tell from this trailer, Alien: Covenant would have been good if it had good material to work with*.

Moe Lane

*You can have a movie with a good script but flat-out awful cinematography.  That actually happens a lot, to the point where it should be its own category at Sundance. HEYO!

They’re already resorting to found footage to promote Alien: Covenant.

:pause:

OK, I stopped caring about this franchise after Aliens, like many other people, but: that makes no sense in this kind of setting. The entire point of ‘found footage’ is to promote a feeling that this horror story is actually going on, only it’s been covered up or declared a fake.  That doesn’t really work when you know perfectly well that there are no interstellar colonization efforts going on right now.

And I say this as somebody who will watch and like found footage movies. I enjoyed the hell out of Cloverfield, for example. But this ain’t doing it for me.

It’s a nice little clip, actually. Sets up nicely the tensions, the attitudes, and the realization that whoever sets up colonization efforts for Earth in this series should be taken outside and beaten with a stick. Also: since there’s no rotating crew quarters then I can only assume that they’re using some sort of gravity control. In which case: JEEZ, cyrosleep.  Constant-boost that bad boy to .99999c or something and time-dilate your way to the new planet. Unless there’s superluminal travel, in which case why cyrosleep anyway?

I’m just going to come out and say what I’m thinking, here:  these idiots in Alien: Covenant kind of encapsulate Niven/Pournelle’s old saying “Think of it as evolution in action.”

And I don’t believe I’m the only one thinking it, either.  This entire escapade, from what I can tell, fell off of the stupid tree and hit every door down. You don’t walk onto the surface of a new world without wearing a spacesuit. Doesn’t matter if the air is breathable: in fact, you take double precautions in that case.  Why?  Oh, I don’t know: maybe because there’s a possibility that something in the ecosystem might be eager to take a bite out of you? Continue reading The Alien: Covenant “Bring in the Fool-Killer!” trailer.