Alien: Covenant

I watched this for lack of better options while on the road last week. It's, fine? I guess? I didn't find myself caring much about the crew, beyond my disbelief in how completely Amy Seimetz' characters manages to fuck everything up with the mess on the drop ship. Abandon a crew member with a hostile alien, then come back with a shotgun and fail to kill the thing (actually impressed she didn't kill her crew mate by mistake). Let it escape quarantine, then blow up yourself and the ship. The Three Stooges would be impressed with that level of incompetence.

Other than that, I didn't have much of a reaction to it. Didn't find myself caring about the crew. Guess I laughed at the two characters getting killed while fooling around in the shower. Ridley Scott decided even hundreds of years in the future and light years from Earth, horror movie conventions must be upheld, and horny people must die. Also, there were times David and Walter looked so vastly different, even though both are played by Michael Fassbender and supposed to look identical, I wondered how I was supposed to believe anyone would confuse them.

Maybe the issue is simply it's a prequel, and I didn't need to know how the Xenomorphs came to be. The notion some mind deliberately created them might actually make them less interesting to me than if they simply evolved naturally. Going back to the notion I talked about last week with Life, that there will be all kinds of things out there in space we are unprepared to deal with, because they're beyond our frame of reference.

I get that it ties to what the one scientist told David in Prometheus, that humans created androids just to see if they could. Or the big aliens seeding planets to see what comes forth, but not being pleased when the answer was us. Everyone wants to play God, nobody likes their results. David is trying to explore whether he's capable of creation, while also being a bit of a spurned child and/or lover. His creators didn't live up to what he desired, so he will create something even better to destroy them.

That bit where the chest-burster emerges and mimics David spreading his arms, presumably because the android's the first thing it sees was just stupid, though. Trying to be too cute there with something they've pretty well-established is a relentless murder machine. Oh, it stopped to mimic its creator (which it would have no way of recognizing), how adorable! Sure, whatever. 

It's funny though, having seen all the movies set later on, to think the only reason David's plan for Xenomorphs to wipe us out can work is because some humans are complete dumbasses. They see the acid-blood rampaging kill-beasts and think, "There's money to be made here." Otherwise, they'd have just been a bunch of eggs stuck on a single lonely planet on the ass-end of space. I don't think I can give David credit for the level of perception necessary to factor that into his plans.

Also, what does it mean that the colony ship detects another planet that seems perfectly habitable, much closer than the one they're headed for, and it turns out to be a death trap? It feels like there must be some point to how that turned out. Was it supposed to be that people make mistakes because they look for the easy path? That colonizing an entirely new world is going to be too complicated to just decide halfway there to take a detour instead?

Maybe that humans will ignore evidence contrary to what they already want to do. Daniels pointed out that it was strange they somehow never detected this so-inviting planet until now, but the captain overruled her. I assume the reason they didn't detect it until then was the interference from the storms (unless it was supposed to be the result of some alien technology), and that's the sort of thing that could have been determined if they sent a message back to HQ advising someone send a probe or survey crew later. They didn't though, and they weren't prepared for what they encountered.