Released: May 2017

Director: Ridley Scott

Rated R

Run Time: 122 Minutes

Distributor: Fox Studios

Genre: Science Fiction/Horror

Cast:
Michael Fassbender: Walter/David
Katherine Waterston: Daniels
Billy Crudup: Oram
Danny McBride: Tennessee
Demian Bichir: Lope

The problem with prequels is that you often know the outcome of that particular story.  Trying to surprise an audience with a prequel is often a tricky business, because of what’s supposed to happen in the story.  It’s a problem that you really can’t avoid, unless you’re willing to change the sequel’s story, and that never ends well.  Star Wars is a prime example.  Everybody knew that Anakin Skywalker is Darth Vader, so seeing Anakin turn in the Prequel Trilogy came as no surprise to ANYONE.  Movies like The Hobbit and The Scorpion King are other examples of prequels.  A prequel isn’t necessarily a bad thing if handled properly.  It can give you more of an insight into a particular world, and explore why things happen the way they happened.  It has to be done right, however, or the audience won’t be as engaged in the story or the characters.  So, we come to Alien: Covenant, a prequel to Ridley Scott’s original film.  Is it the prequel that we deserved or hoped for?  The short answer is no, and I’m going to explain why.

Alien: Covenant follows the crew of the colony ship, the Covenant as it is on a 10-year journey to a planet suitable for colonization.  En route, they are hit by an electrical storm, which causes the main crew to wake up and assess the damage.  They intercept an undecipherable message which leads them to a nearby planet, which is also capable of sustaining human life.  After landing and having issues with the local “plant” life, they come across what seems to be the planet’s lone occupant.  This occupant is none other than the android, David from the Prometheus which disappeared 10 years before.  You know, I thought Prometheus was a damn good movie.  It wasn’t what I expected, but I thought it was better than most people gave it credit for.  So, when Ridley Scott was going to do a sequel that was going to be an actual Alien movie, I was genuinely excited.  Sadly, the wait really wasn’t worth it.  For those expecting an Alien movie, I gotta tell ya, it’s more Prometheus than Alien.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s still an Alien movie, but there are so many issues here that I’m not entirely sure where to begin.  The story is somewhat interesting, but damn if it isn’t predictable.  Again, that’s the nature of a prequel, but I expected more surprises than what I actually got.  I’m not happy about it.  I’m not going to go into spoiler territory, so don’t worry about that.

Let’s get the good stuff out of the way.  The visuals are simply stunning.  Like Prometheus before it, Alien: Covenant is beautifully filmed with some absolutely gorgeous scenery.  The set designs are out of this world.  They really spared no expense in delivering the scale of the film.  The Engineer city is absolutely marvelous.  The ship designs are wonderful.  Michael Fassbender returns as David, but also plays a second android, Walter.  The scenes when Walter and David are on screen together, ironically enough, are some of the best character moments in the film.  Danny McBride is one of the biggest surprises of the film, as he gets to really flex his dramatic chops, and he does a really good job.  The creature designs are also very interesting.  The neomorphs are particularly nasty.  You have one that exploded from someone’s back, and another from someone’s mouth.  This movie definitely has carnage, and the gore factor is high.  The infamous xenomorph that made the Alien movies what they are, also makes a return, and it tears some shit up.  The music by Jed Kurzel is pretty damned good.  It utilizes some music from Jerry Goldsmith’s score from the original film as well as music cues from Prometheus.  The CGI is also surprisingly very good.

I guess it’s time to get into the bad stuff, isn’t it?  Aside from Michael Fassbender and Danny McBride, all the other characters are pretty much disposable.  There’s not one among them that is even remotely likable.  The first two Alien movies were fantastic, because we got to know and like the crew.  We cared about what happened to these characters, so when they died it was shocking.  With Alien: Covenant, we don’t get that.  When the shit hits the fan, the women are freaking out to the point of silliness.  The men are mostly a bumbling bunch of idiots.  Katherine Waterston plays Daniels, but she’s hardly compelling.  She’s no Ellen Ripley or even Elizabeth Shaw.  Those were two very strong female characters.  I don’t really blame Waterston for the way her character turned out, because the writing in this movie is generally not very good.  You really shouldn’t be rooting for characters to die in a movie like this, but most of them are irritating and mostly a waste of space.  Also, I saw the ending to the movie come a mile a way.  Again, this is not necessarily a problem that the movie could have avoided, but it could’ve been handled so much better than this.

To say that Ridley Scott dropped the ball on this one is a massive understatement.  There’s a lot about this movie that I did like, but there was just way too much that felt wrong.  Visually, it’s a stunning film, with top-notch performances from McBride and Fassbender.  It also has some pretty gory action in it, but the overall structure of the film and the almost total lack of xenomorph action brings this movie down much lower than it should be.  I left the movie theater disappointed.  20 years since the last legitimate Alien film, and this is the best they can do?  Now, Ridley Scott is reportedly going to be starting production on the film’s sequel, which is supposed to be entitled Alien: Awakening.  He’s supposed to start shooting the film sometime next year.  I really like Scott as a director, but I think he really needs to hand the reigns over to someone else.  Neill Blomkamp, who directed District 9, was in talks to direct an Alien film which would ignore the events of the third and fourth movies and focus on Ripley, Newt and Hicks.  Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn were both reportedly excited about the idea.  A lot of people of were.  But since Scott took back control of the franchise, that other movie is dead in the water, by all accounts.  Well, I can only hope that Awakening can actually deliver on the promise that was made by Covenant.  Ultimately, I don’t hate the movie.  I did enjoy it, but it was a pretty big letdown.  It’s still better than Alien Resurrection, though.  I’ll give it that.

Final Score: 7.5/10

Released: June 2012

Director: Ridley Scott

Rated R

Run Time: 124 Minutes

Distributor: Fox Studios

Genre: Science Fiction

Cast:
Noomi Rapace: Elizabeth Shaw
Logan Marshall-Green: Charlie
Michael Fassbender: David
Charlize Theron: Meredith Vickers
Guy Pearce: Peter Weyland
Idris Elba: Janek
Sean Harris: Fifield
Rafe Spall: Millburn

When Alien debuted in 1979, it not only launched the career of Sigourney Weaver as an actress, but it also put Ridley Scott’s name on the map as a legitimate director.  It took a while for him to find his groove.  The film that he did right after Alien was Blade Runner.  While that film bombed at the box office, it wound developing a strong cult following.  It actually ended up being one of the best science fiction and detective stories ever made.  Even at his worst, Ridley Scott’s films are still entertaining.  However, Scott would not return to the science fiction genre until 2012 with Prometheus.

Prometheus opens as two scientists, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway discover a cave with paintings on the wall in Scotland.  One of these paintings features a giant pointing to the stars.  It seems that this was not the only cave painting to feature this image.  2 years later, a scientific research vessel, Prometheus, arrives at a planet in a distant solar system.  After waking from hypersleep, the crew of the Prometheus land on the planet to discover a mysterious structure.  After breaching the structure, the crew discovers a secret that could destroy mankind.  The initial drafts of the script for Prometheus actually had the film being a direct prequel to Alien.  However, Ridley Scott and the higher-ups at Fox Studios decided that may not be the best idea, so they retooled the script into what would become the film that we got.  It’s not unheard of.  Scripts often change a lot before they’re finalized, and sometimes the final draft is vastly different than the initial draft.  That’s part of the process.  Always has been, always will be.  The problem is, is that people were led to believe that we were getting another film in the Alien universe, but Prometheus wound up being a very different beast than what we expected.  While the film is definitely set in the same universe, it’s not an Alien movie, per se.  Like everyone else, I wanted a prequel to Alien.  That being said, I was actually pleasantly surprised at the film we got.  It was definitely different.

Before I get into the things that I loved about the film, I want to talk about the stuff that went wrong.  This is a film that has an identity crisis.  It doesn’t know what genre it wants to belong to.  Is it a science-fiction adventure or is it a horror/monster movie?  This clash is present throughout the entire experience and it’s hard to gauge what kind of audience would enjoy this movie.  The reaction to the film was split right down the middle.  People either loved the film, or they hated it.  While the performances were mostly strong across the board, and I while get into that later, special mention has to be made for Charlize Theron as Vickers being the worst performance in the film.  I’m not necessarily blaming Theron for this, however.  The character comes across as your typical corporate sleaze-bag that you see in movies like this: Skeptical and business-minded scumbags.  Theron’s performance is….off.  I like the actress, she’s a great actress, but this was not one of her best roles.  The last problem is also the film’s greatest strength:  The connection to Alien.  The connection is a huge problem, because people had expectations of what the movie was going to be.  Some of the connections were blatantly obvious:  The Weyland Corporation, the derelict space ship, and some of the murals in the main structure were pretty obvious.  Considering the kind of movie that Prometheus is, all that could have been cut out, and the film probably would have been better for it.

Now, let’s get to the good stuff.  Holy shit, this movie is beautiful.  The cinematography is second-to-none.  The opening credits of the film feature some really spectacular scenery.  The visual effects are some of the finest I’ve seen in years.  The set designs and the character designs are absolutely phenomenal.  This is also where the connection to Alien is a good thing.  The design of the alien ship is exactly the same as it was in the original Alien.  The Space Jockey that we got a glimpse of in the original film comes to life here as an Engineer.  The Engineers, according to Dr. Shaw are a race of super-intelligent alien beings that created mankind.  It was a very interesting concept that worked fairly well.  With the exception of Charlize Theron, the acting is actually pretty good all across the board.  The real standouts here are Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender.  These two actors put everything into their respective roles.  Noomi Rapace has some scenes that look really painful, and the amount of physicality that she has to display is exceptional.  Fassbender is equally interesting as the android David.  While the character was programmed a certain way, you can’t help but notice that there is something sinister going on with David.  Idris Elba is always fun to watch, especially as Janek, the ship’s pilot.  The music by Marc Streitenfeld has a very unique quality to it that makes it both epic and intense.

At the end of the day, Prometheus is a pretty divisive movie.  As I said before, when it was released, reactions were split down the middle.  I fell on the side of the people who loved the film, but I definitely understand why some people didn’t.  This was not necessarily a film that people were expecting.  The concept of the film changed so much before production began, it felt like there was going to be serious problems behind the scenes.  The film didn’t do well enough to really warrant another film in the same universe, but now we have Alien: Covenant coming out tomorrow as of this writing, and it seems like it’s going to be the prequel that people were wanting Prometheus to be.  There IS still some life left in the Alien universe, and hopefully Covenant will keep it going.  The Alien franchise is in my top three favorite film franchises.  Prometheus was an interesting experiment that didn’t always pan out, but I honestly loved it.  The visuals, the music and the performances of Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender help elevate a film that could have been a pretty dour experience.  I enjoyed it and I definitely recommend it.

Final Score: 8.5/10

Released: November 1997

Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Rated R

Run Time: 108 Minutes

Genre: Science Fiction/Action

Distributor: Fox Studios

Cast:
Sigourney Weaver: Ripley
Wynona Ryder: Call
Ron Perlman: Johner
Dan Hedaya: General Perez
J.E. Freeman: Wren
Brad Dourif: Gediman
Michael Wincott: Elgyn
Gary Dourdan: Christie

In 1979, Ridley Scott unleashed Alien into the world.  Widely considered to be one of the best science-fiction films of all time, it was also regarded as one of the best horror movies of all time.  The fusion of science fiction and horror had never really been done before.  Critics and audiences alike were blown away by how well-crafted the film was.  Not only did the film give us one of the most memorable movie monsters of all time, but it also gave us a very strong female hero in Ellen Ripley.  When the film came out, it terrified audiences world-wide.  It took the genre of science fiction into a much darker and hostile territory.  Nearly 40 years later, Alien is still regarded as one of the best movies ever made.  Fox Studios had a major hit on their hands, so they eventually tried for a sequel.  When The Terminator made its debut in 1984, Fox knew they wanted James Cameron to helm the sequel to Alien.  In 1986, the action-packed Aliens made just as much of an impact as the original film, even though it was a very different kind of flick.  Sigourney Weaver was even nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress, which is very rare for science fiction films, especially during that period.  That being said, the second sequel, Alien 3 suffered some major turbulence when Fox took creative control away from first-time film director David Fincher.  The resulting film was a bleak and beautiful, yet underwhelming film that truly divided audiences.  In the next two weeks, Ridley Scott will be releasing Alien: Covenent in theaters.  This will be the first real Alien film since Alien Resurrection over 20 years ago.  I will be looking at Alien Resurrection in this post.

Set 200 years after Ripley’s sacrifice on the prison planet of Fury 161, Alien Resurrection sees Lt. Ellen Ripley return from the dead in the form of a clone.  Created by the United Systems Military, Ripley was clone for the purpose of retrieving the alien queen that Ripley took to her grave in the previous film.  After successfully extracting the queen from Ripley, the scientists begin studying the xenomorph, not realizing that the Ripley’s DNA has been spliced with the Aliens DNA.  Teaming up with a group of mercenaries, Ripley must go into battle one last time against the creatures that have haunted her for so long.  Even for 1997, cloning as a plot point was already a well-worn cliche.  As a result, we ended up with a very different kind of movie than what we’ve seen in the past.  Now, I remember when a fourth Alien movie was nothing but rumor and conjecture.  Look, while Alien 3 had its problems, it was still a decent film, but it also had an ending that was absolutely final.  It was absolutely clear that Ripley’s story had come to an end.  To bring her back 200 years later kind of diminishes the sacrifices that the character had made in the previous movies.  The story here is nothing more than a hodge-podge of tired genre cliches.  It’s a shame, too, because I found this movie to be somewhat compelling in certain ways.

I’m going to start with the negatives here, before I go into the positives.  First of all, the entire film has this hideous yellow-green tint throughout the picture.  It was somewhat distracting.  The writing here is also some of the worst I’ve ever seen.  Now, Joss Whedon of Firefly fame, is credited with writing the film.  However, very little of what he wrote actually made it into the final picture.  It was not initially intended for Ripley to return, but rather Newt from the second film.  Nope, if Fox was going to do another Alien film, they wanted Sigourney Weaver to return, so Whedon’s script was thrown out the airlock.  As a result, we have a film that is rather uneven.  The writing doesn’t quite match up with what we are seeing on the screen.  It’s as if the writers and the director are at war with each other.  Don’t get me wrong, there are some very interesting visual cues and shots that I really like, but I’ll get to those later.  The acting is passable for the most part, except for Wynona Ryder.  What the fuck was she doing?  She’s a much better actress than what she displayed here.  Not only that, but the merc’s leader, Elgyn, comes across as a bad-ass, but doesn’t fire a shot and ends up getting killed pretty quickly.  There was a LOT of CGI used for this movie, and even for 1997, it was not particularly good.  Especially when compared to Starship Troopers, which came out the same month.  Some of the visual effects are NOT convincing at all.

Those negatives definitely bring the film down quite a bit.  Let’s talk about the good stuff, now.  The practical effects and creature designs are second-to-none.  The director was not afraid to use make-up effects for the gore, which was plentiful and over-the-top.  The idea that Ripley is now part Alien and part human makes for an interesting dynamic, considering her relationship to the creatures.  Some of the performances are actually rather interesting.  Brad Dourif is always a fun one to watch.  He’s such an amazing character actor, that you can’t hate him.  Not even in this movie.  Ron Perlman is one of my favorite actors period.   He gets to play a guy with a bad attitude, and he chews the scenery like it’s nobody’s business.  Sigourney Weaver, has a very different take on her role this time around, but one of my favorite scenes is when she finds the room with 7 failed cloning attempts.  This is one of the most disturbing scenes in the film, actually.  The detail on these clones is hauntingly grotesque, but Weaver’s performance here really sells how the character feels about the situation, and it’s heartbreaking.  The sound design in the film is equally haunting, especially when the Newborn Alien is killed.  Good god, that’s freaky.  This is a very uncomfortable movie to watch at times and I applaud Jean-Pierre Jeunet for that.

Alien Resurrection is a very strange beast, so to speak.  It’s very different from the previous films in terms of tone and visual style.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but those two things tend to clash from time to time making for a really bizarre experience.  While the practical effects, Weaver’s performance and sound design are all fantastic, the film is hampered by a second-rate story, Wynona Ryder’s abysmal performance, and lousy CGI.  That being said, I didn’t hate the movie.  I first saw it when I was 14 years old.  It was the first Alien film I saw in theaters.  It’s still light-years beyond the Alien Vs. Predator movies, for sure.  I personally don’t think that this film really qualifies as a sequel.  In my opinion, it’s some kind of strange off-shoot.  But it’s a black sheep that holds a special place in my heart.  I know that a lot of people hated it, but I loved Alien Resurrection for various reasons.  I still like it.

Final Score: 7/10.