The Movie “Aliens” Gets the Honest Trailer Treatment

As a kid, I sat shocked watching Alien on HBO, and seeing an alien burst out of his chest. “I just adore it”.

Covenant takes place 10 years after Prometheus, and 20 years before Ripley’s (Sigourney Weaver) first battle in Alien (1979). The third and fourth Alien movies, as well as Prometheus, were disappointments.

If you go back and watch “Alien” (as I did), it’s a great movie, but of course it has those late-1970s special effects and production values (and hairstyles), and a almost 40-year-old vision of what computers and space travel and synthetic robot beings would be like in the year 2122. Investigating a rogue transmission, Oram and company find a planet near their current location that seems to be even better for colonization than Origae-6.

HOLCOMB: “So who among you do you think would be the person who would do the best in a real alien encounter situation?” Danny McBride plays a pilot named Tennessee, the closest thing to comic relief that the drab film has to offer. That means he gets to wear a cowboy hat and talk tough. It’s a great scene, but one couldn’t help but wonder where that kind of fire was earlier in the film. “Never, ever, would I have thought that this would happen”. It just felt so phoney.

In that respect, the movie works. While the crew and passengers hypersleep, android Walter (Michael Fassbender: Assassin’s Creed) cares for the ship. Either one of these things could have been cordoned off from the other and turned into a solid genre exercise, but together it feels confused and overlong, numerous kills packing only as much punch as your average Friday The 13th movie, with about the same level of character development. The new captain, Oram (Billy Crudup), is prickly and weak, uncertain of his authority. It doesn’t. While we do learn about their creation, it’s shoehorned in in a big way and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Humanity may not be a mistake, but once you know how and why the xenomorph was created in Alien: Covenant, you may wish to ask its creator (s) if they were attempting to play God or the Devil. There are actually more infection possibilities than just humans, as seen in 1992’s Alien 3, when we see a face hugger infect a dog. All the others are either bad or just plain terrible. And seriously, we need to give a rest to the exhausted scene of humans on another planet looking at a blossoming flower, only to have something jump on them and devour their face.

There is fun to be had, despite the characters making the same dumb mistakes that were made in the last movie.and the one before that.and so on.

But, make no mistake, Scott bumps the scares up to eleven in this movie. It’s not, because it’s entertaining as it follows its formula, slavishly, step-by-step.

Scott gives us the idiotic mythology about why these things exist.

You know what you’re getting out of any movie in the “Alien” franchise, of course.

Scott says audiences can expect some philosophizing and spectacular visuals, including an idea he came up with to solve the problem of how the ship would continue getting and storing power in deep space: Massive sails, about the size of six football fields that can soak up the radiance in space and store it as power.

Now, I didn’t find this boring. His characters are required to more or less sleepwalk through the plot and like pieces on a chessboard end up exactly where they need to be.

2 stars out of 5.