Alien: Covenant - Trailer

[Brian]

Trailer

I don't know, I'm a huge fan of the Alien franchise but this trailer did very little to stir my enthusiasm for the new movie.

I'll still go see it, of course.

[tgb]

It looks good to me, but so did the trailer for Prometheus.

[Brian]

Maybe I've just been burned too many times by this franchise to get overly excited.

[Holman]

Is this the bridge between Prometheus and Alien? Even with almost no dialogue, it seems more the former than the latter.

[hepcat]

I've read that it is both a sequel to Prometheus AND a substitution for Alien 3. Supposedly Scott wrote the plot for the film years ago after hating what they did with Alien 3.

The return of David is enough to get me to buy a ticket. He was the best part of Prometheus.

[Brian]

That would be my understanding. I vaguely remember reading that Ridley was planning a trilogy of prequels starting with Prometheus. This would likely be the next in the series.

Hopefully it ends up being better than Prometheus.

[Holman]

I've read that it is both a sequel to Prometheus AND a substitution for Alien 3. Supposedly Scott wrote the plot for the film years ago after hating what they did with Alien 3.

The return of David is enough to get me to buy a ticket. He was the best part of Prometheus.

Does this maybe partake of the William Gibson script for Alien 3?

I read it years ago, but seeing the characters tramping through tall grass reminded me of a scene from it.

[Blackhawk]

I... am not sure. It looks a lot like Alien. That's a good thing after some of the directions the other films have taken.

Then again, it looks a lot like Alien.

[Jaymann]

Seems like they could have at least come up with a new variation on the egg hatching thing.

[Holman]

Alien is already older than Casablanca was when Alien came out.

[nasai]

The trailer is a huge disappointment to me. It's gorgeous, but full of overused tropes from every horror movie in existence, let alone too many nods to previous Alien movies. I'll go see it, because unlike most, I actually enjoyed Prometheus, even if it was middling and underwhelming. That said, I don't need another one to remind how yawn worthy the franchise has become.

"The tail between the legs" sequence at the end of the trailer? Yeah.... no.

[Lordnine]

Scenes that were cut from Prometheus (viewable on the Blu/DVD) actually make it a much better movie. I mean, there is still a lot of dumb, but I would say had those scenes been left in, the general reception would have been a lot stronger.

This trailer seems too “in your face”. I rewatched Aliens recently and marveled at the fact that it is over an hour into the movie before you even see an alien.

[Paingod]

I'm not entirely sold on this. I thought Prometheus was okay, but as a monster movie - not an Alien movie.

The trailer is too all over the place, which makes me think the movie is all over the place.

• Covenant is the name of the ship or operation to the Alien world.
• David is back, but is probably a different model and not the original. We get to spend the whole movie assuming he has an agenda.
• No sign that anyone learned anything from the first movie, so likely it's written off as "We sent a team, never saw them again"
• Alien spores infect people with the mutagen? Why are plants suddenly hosts for this?
• No problem with face-huggers, but there weren't any in the last movie and they need a queen to lay them. Where did that come from?
• Not sure how I feel about classic Aliens mixing with Mutant Aliens... It didn't work well for Resurrection.

I want to like it. I'm just not sold immediately and will probably wait for reviews.

[hepcat]

I'm not entirely sold on this. I thought Prometheus was okay, but as a monster movie - not an Alien movie.

The trailer is too all over the place, which makes me think the movie is all over the place.

• Covenant is the name of the ship or operation to the Alien world.
• David is back, but is probably a different model and not the original. We get to spend the whole movie assuming he has an agenda.
• No sign that anyone learned anything from the first movie, so likely it's written off as "We sent a team, never saw them again"
• Alien spores infect people with the mutagen? Why are plants suddenly hosts for this?
• No problem with face-huggers, but there weren't any in the last movie and they need a queen to lay them. Where did that come from?
• Not sure how I feel about classic Aliens mixing with Mutant Aliens... It didn't work well for Resurrection.

I want to like it. I'm just not sold immediately and will probably wait for reviews.

From what I've read so far, you're wrong about David.

No one ever learns from prior Alien movies. Simply because it's almost always a different group. Since mankind has not developed a hive mind yet, that makes sense.

Prometheus was never intended as a monster movie (although it did have face huggers of a sort). But Scott dropped the ball during the final moments of the film and turned it into Halloween X: The Aliening.

[Paingod]

I know they don't learn anything (the "Corporation" just kept sending people to die), but they did acknowledge in a way that it was just greed and the corporation knew something bad was there. These guys seem particularly ill-prepared given what had happened there before. It should have been a pretty big red flag that the ship the company owner and his kids took into space in order to find Space Gods never returned. These guys look like someone called AAA and they were sent out with a tow truck.

[Jeff V]

I must have missed or forgotten something somewhere along the line -- why do ships continue to be sent to the Alien world when they always come back monster-infested? What's there that is worth the risk?

[TheMix]

Someone will probably provide specifics, but the short answer is "they don't". It's not the, or a, homeworld for the Alien species. In the first couple of movies, it was an undeveloped world with no native life ("a rock"). The aliens were found in a spaceship that they hitched a ride with.

I didn't think they even had a world.

And wasn't the premise in Prometheus that some ancient progenitor species created the aliens? They were being stored/imprisoned on that planet.

[Max Peck]

I must have missed or forgotten something somewhere along the line -- why do ships continue to be sent to the Alien world when they always come back monster-infested? What's there that is worth the risk?

Profit. Where you see monsters, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation sees weapon technology.

Besides, the ships mostly don't come back.

[Jeff V]

Besides, the ships mostly don't come back.

I also don't recall seeing the Aliens as possessing any sort of game-changing tech that could be readily adapted to human use. How many ships need to be lost before a planet-sterilizing invasion force is called for?

[TheMix]

I think that they were hoping to breed them. And train them. It isn't that they have tech. It's what they are. They are incredibly tough. They can survive extremes of heat and cold. They can survive in the vacuum of space. They have extremely powerful acid for blood. It they could be controlled...

Of course, everyone else knows that they can never be controlled.

[Paingod]

And wasn't the premise in Prometheus that some ancient progenitor species created the aliens? They were being stored/imprisoned on that planet.

Exactly. They created a powerful mutagenic weapon and stored it there for safe keeping, but somehow it slipped containment and killed them all. At the beginning of the movie, it appears that a purified small amount ingested by one of the Engineers might actually act as a "seed" to jump-start life on a planet. Maybe it's their terraforming process, and the Aliens are just a byproduct they have to contend with?

So we (humans) showed up to find a race of glorious Builders who made the world and left clues on how to find them, and instead discovered a desolate military installation filled with bio-weapons, long since decommissioned and abandoned. Naturally, we stirred the pot and 94% of the people on that trip died.

The motivation in each movie appears to be some kind of personal gain (for the Corporation or a person).

• Alien: Let's send this mining crew to investigate an alien signal and take whatever we can from it. Crew: Expendable.
• Aliens: Let's send these colonists to where we found that alien signal, and then send in Marines to try and recover a specimen. Do you have any idea what one of those things would be worth in our bio-weapons division?
• Alien3: Oh, hey, we see you've got a Queen inside you. Hang tight and we'll be there to, uh "Help" as fast as we can. Ripley: No thanks.
• Alien Resurrection: We cloned you and the Alien Queen and think we can train them as living weapons. Okay, that didn't go as planned. What's in-f&@king-side me?!
• Prometheus: Before Alien, Weyland thought he could find Space Gods and get them to grant him immortality. Turns out they're just a&#holes.

[Max Peck]

Besides, the ships mostly don't come back.

I also don't recall seeing the Aliens as possessing any sort of game-changing tech that could be readily adapted to human use. How many ships need to be lost before a planet-sterilizing invasion force is called for?

The aliens are the tech.

[Jeff V]

The aliens are the tech.

That's hardly the case. A biological agent, perhaps; and one inconceivably impossible to control. Wouldn't it be better to infest a target with something less face-hugging, say, Asian carp?

[TheMix]

There won't be any facehuggers. Well... maybe they would use captured enemies as hosts to create more soldiers. But the alien soldiers don't generate facehuggers. The idea is to have an army of alien soldiers to unleash on enemies. They weren't going to drop a queen down somewhere and wait for her to create eggs, then wait for some of the enemy folks to mosey on by and get infected, then wait for the alien soldier to "hatch", then hope the soldier will go out and kill some enemy soldiers.

The idea was to dump a bunch of already-made alien soldiers on the enemy. Ones that presumably (hopefully) were trained.

[Jeff V]

And that is the definition of an implausibly stupid idea. At no point have these things ever shown they could be tamed. A proof of concept would have to be successful before risking anywhere near what they did thus far.

It would be cool if we could train lions and tigers and bears to do our forest and jungle killings for us, but I don't hear any advocates for that sort of program. I know I should check my brain at the door for these kind of movies, but I like to see some logical reason behind the premise, especially if you're going to drag out the series for decades.

[Isgrimnur]

But imagine that that humanity has only encountered a bear a handful of times. Without a shared history, and encountering them in a modern society, a corporation with no care for its employees might take risks to try and secure a monopoly on a cash cow.

[Max Peck]

Jeff has won me over. In the real world, short-sighted greed has never motivated people or faceless organizations to do carelessly stupid things that lead to unfortunate consequences, so why would it be plausible in a work of fiction?

[Jeff V]

Jeff has won me over. In the real world, short-sighted greed has never motivated people or faceless organizations to do carelessly stupid things that lead to unfortunate consequences, so why would it be plausible in a work of fiction?

Give me an example of a similar project that has been so costly in terms of equipment and life and utterly unsuccessful at any level? This isn't even a caricature of a bad project being taken too far. It's more like a criminally colossal failure that, after all of the principles have been imprisoned for egregious mismanagement, the project doubles-down with a new set of even more criminally incompetent boobs. And then that group is imprisoned and someone else still thinks it's a good idea and they criminally fail yet again. And again!

[Isgrimnur]

The Panama Canal comes close.

The first attempt to construct a canal through what was then Colombia's province of Panama began on 1 January 1881.
...
The dense jungle was alive with venomous snakes, insects and spiders, but the worst aspect was the yellow fever and malaria (and other tropical diseases) which killed thousands of workers: by 1884 the death rate was over 200 per month. Public health measures were ineffective because the role of the mosquito as a disease vector was then unknown. Conditions were downplayed in France to avoid recruitment problems, but the high mortality rate made it difficult to maintain an experienced workforce.
...
In France, de Lesseps kept the investment and supply of workers flowing long after it was obvious that the targets were not being met, but eventually the money ran out. The French effort went bankrupt in 1889 after reportedly spending US$287,000,000 and losing an estimated 22,000 lives to disease and accidents, wiping out the savings of 800,000 investors. Work was suspended on May 15, and in the ensuing scandal, known as the Panama affair, various of those deemed responsible were prosecuted, including Gustave Eiffel. De Lesseps and his son Charles were found guilty of misappropriation of funds and sentenced to five years' imprisonment, though this was later overturned, and the father, at 88, was never imprisoned.

In 1894, a second French company, the Compagnie Nouvelle du Canal de Panama, was created to take over the project. A minimal workforce of a few thousand people was employed primarily to comply with the terms of the Colombian Panama Canal concession, to run the Panama Railroad, and to maintain the existing excavation and equipment in salable condition. The company sought a buyer for these assets, with an asking price of US$109,000,000. In the meanwhile they continued with enough activity to maintain their franchise, and Bunau-Varilla eventually managed to persuade de Lesseps that a lock-and-lake canal was more realistic than a sea-level canal.

[Kraken]

Give me an example of a similar project that has been so costly in terms of equipment and life and utterly unsuccessful at any level? This isn't even a caricature of a bad project being taken too far. It's more like a criminally colossal failure that, after all of the principles have been imprisoned for egregious mismanagement, the project doubles-down with a new set of even more criminally incompetent boobs. And then that group is imprisoned and someone else still thinks it's a good idea and they criminally fail yet again. And again!

Nation-building in Afghanistan?

[Jeff V]

That it does. Good find. The main difference though is that there was still some progress toward the goal, and lessons-learned eventually got it completed. I've seen no evidence of anyone learning a damn thing in the Alien movies, except maybe that Sigorney Weaver (age: 67 BTW) has gotten really good at not being eaten by them.

[Jeff V]

Nation-building in Afghanistan?

That's more of a catch-22. Not trying it doesn't work out very well either. The same can be said about Iraq. I'm not really sure what you can do with a territory inhabited by people who haven't learned the Nationalism tech while everyone else has it and is using it.

[Isgrimnur]

It doesn't help when all the superpowers seem to think that their national security depends on you being in their pocket, while your population is murder on being seen as beholden to foreign powers.

[Kraken]

Nation-building in Afghanistan?

That's more of a catch-22. Not trying it doesn't work out very well either. The same can be said about Iraq. I'm not really sure what you can do with a territory inhabited by people who haven't learned the Nationalism tech while everyone else has it and is using it.

Well, it is a real-world example of pouring endless resources into an endeavor with no tangible progress and no end in sight. Maybe not the best analogy to subduing aliens though.

[hepcat]

I absolutely love it when folks try to convince Jeff he might be wrong.

[TheMix]

For what it's worth, I was done trying to clarify. Thankfully the discussion moved on. But I was starting to wonder if I was being trolled.

Hmmm... I didn't think to check TheList. It's possible that Jeff never even watched all the movies.

[noxiousdog]

I didn't think they were trying to weaponize the Aliens, but instead just study their biology to get weapon science from them.

Still, I checked out of details in this series about 20 years ago. It's more fun that way.

[Brian]

So did I miss somewhere that this is a Judd Apatow movie?

I mean, it says directed by Ridley Scott but how can I take an Alien movie seriously when the cast members include James Franco and Danny McBride?

[hepcat]

I think both are capable of more than just comedy. But I'm a McBride fan boy, so take my assertion with a grain of salt.

[pr0ner]

So did I miss somewhere that this is a Judd Apatow movie?

I mean, it says directed by Ridley Scott but how can I take an Alien movie seriously when the cast members include James Franco and Danny McBride?

You're definitely selling James Franco short - have you seen all the non-comedy movies he's starred in?