Here we have the overplayed John Wicktioner formula at it’s lowest ebb, a pipette of decent action diulted into a Pacific Ocean of terrible decisions, lame writing and awful CG ornamentation.
Ke Hu Quan is always a pretty genial presence, but he seems utterly adrift here and fellow Oscar winner Ariana DeBose is profoundly dislikable in a role that simply doesn’t work on any level. Their chemistry, which should be the beating heart of this film, is dead on arrival.…
Grimey, exploitative schlockfest that’s maybe the closest I’ve seen to a straight up horror movie from Hong Kong. Borrows ideas liberally from places like Amityville and baldly steals it’s soundtrack from places like Carpenter’s The Thing. Really comes to life in the last half hour, but spends too much of its time on some of the drabbest, most hideously decorated sets I’ve ever seen. The biggest source of nightmares from this film would be one particular bed’s headboard: a massive, slime green, fake leather monstrosity that, in some shots, seems to stretch off into infinity.
A coked-up looking Franco Nero playing space Jesus lays out the story for the The Visitor at the start of the film, but it's so utterly incomprehensible that I was worried that there might be a test later. Something to do with birds, aliens and cosmic powers at war with each other. The upshot is that John Huston is God (maybe?) and is sent to Atlanta to deal with the latest incarnation of an intergalactic evil: an 8 year old…
I guess the intent with Alien: Covenant here is to bridge Prometheus and the original, but what you end up with is, maybe appropriately, an ugly hybrid: Prometheus without the grandeur, Alien without the atmosphere. The first half is pretty successful, with the wheels slowly falling off as the film rattles along, finally plummeting into a finale that belongs in a B-movie like Life rather than a Ridley Scott film.
For those who found the actions of the crew in…
