Miles of Movies

                                                                                                      Alien: Covenant is about a group of couples that                                                                                                are going to start a colony on a planet they’ve been                                                                                                  preparing and investigating for years. So when their                                                                                                ship gets a strangely human signal from a nearby                                                                                                    planet that seems to be even better suited for their                                                                                                  colonization mission, they decide to go investigate.                                                                                                  Unfortunately for them, this planet is inhabited, and                                                                                                not by humans.

                                                                                                    This film is supposed to be the sequel to                                                                                                              Prometheus, a film met by quite a lot of polarizing                                                                                                    reviews that compare terribly stupid scientists with some philosophy about life. And though it’s certainly true that the scientists in that film are stupid, the scientists in the first half of this movie are worse. Ridley Scott and the writers of Alien: Covenant learned nothing from the criticism and delivers even more idiotic scientists in what is the most frustrating hour of a movie that almost made me walk out on it entirely, which I never do. The amount of terrible writing and frustratingly incompetent and frankly insulting level of stupidity on display in the first hour almost broke me.

       Luckily, it gets better afterwards when we are introduced to a character from Prometheus, who shares with us what happened after the events of that movie. It was at that moment that I realized that these Alien prequel films are just like the Star Wars prequels. The story that is operating as the “big picture” behind the movies is solid, but the execution is terrible. The philosophy and backstories of what is actually happening behind the scenes of this film is actually fascinating. It’s just so poorly executed!

I almost want to recommend this film to you just so you can understand how frustrating this movie is. It is the very definition of a mixed bag and, even though I liked Prometheus for the story that it was trying to tell, I can’t say I really like this movie as much. It’s a combination of Prometheus and Alien and can’t quite figure out which one it wants to be. Clearly, you can’t do them both.