I saw Alien in the theater in 1979.\u00a0 It was one of the earlier movies produced with Dolby Sound and the theater in Times Square was extremely proud of their superb sound system.\u00a0 And that was all that the movie can be said to have excelled in.\u00a0 It was without a doubt the loudest movie I have ever been exposed to before or since.\u00a0 Watching the movie back then I determined that rather than make a scary monster movie they made a painfully loud monster movie.\u00a0 So, whenever the monster was about to jump out of the dark, they would turn the volume to eleven and the audience would jump out of their seats holding their ears in pain.\u00a0 I guess they figured we might mistake burst eardrums for fear.\u00a0 The movie is basically shot in the dark and you can never really see the monster when it\u2019s killing someone so it\u2019s really not scary, just annoying.<\/p>\n
In the mid-eighties James Cameron was paid to make a sequel to this film with a troop of \u201cspace marines\u201d added to bump up the body count and allow Sigourney Weaver to become a female Arnold Schwarzenegger and hopefully add some more sequels to the franchise.\u00a0 Admittedly Alien 2 was better than the original but that\u2019s not really saying much.\u00a0 Then they made a third one which really sucked and finally a fourth that most normal people just ignored completely and so it was hoped that the series had died its natural death.<\/p>\n
But sometime in the 2000s someone had the bright idea of having the creature in the Predator series meet up with the Alien creature and this spawned a new series of bad sci-fi movies.\u00a0 But at least these weren\u2019t \u201cserious\u201d science fiction films, whatever that means, and so the \u201cintegrity\u201d of the Alien franchise was maintained.<\/p>\n
In 2012 they dragged the director of the original Alien, Ridley Scott back to make a prequel called Prometheus.\u00a0 It included a bunch of crap about how humanity was the product of genetic engineering by an advanced race called the Engineers.\u00a0 And this gets all mixed up with the Alien monster showing up on a planet where one of the Engineer\u2019s ships is holed up for some reason and the Earth crew\u2019s android turning evil.<\/p>\n
Well anyway in 2017 they made a sequel to Prometheus called Alien: Covenant.\u00a0 Here a human colony ship headed for a new world intercepts a message and finds one of the characters from Prometheus and starts falling victim to the alien monsters again.<\/p>\n
So, what\u2019s the best way to say this?\u00a0 Oh, I know!\u00a0 It\u2019s the same stupid story from 1979 all over again.\u00a0 It\u2019s exactly the same plot and even the same character stereotypes.\u00a0 There\u2019s the plucky young woman with a knack for killing monsters on space ships.\u00a0 There\u2019s the android who is fascinated by the creature and will allow the humans to die in order to learn more about the creature.\u00a0 And then there is the rest of the crew who are just fodder for the creature on a killing spree.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s all there is, over and over and over.\u00a0 Save yourself the trouble.\u00a0 It\u2019s not fun and it\u2019s not interesting.\u00a0 The characters aren\u2019t great, the special effects are no better than any other CGI sci-fi movie and you already know the plot from the beginning.\u00a0 Hollywood, try to come up with something different for once, please.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I saw Alien in the theater in 1979.\u00a0 It was one of the earlier movies produced with Dolby Sound and the theater in Times Square<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237,4,243],"tags":[2405,43,2577,38,1355,44,265],"class_list":["post-11475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-movie-reviews","tag-alien","tag-movie-review","tag-prometheus","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-sci-fi","tag-science-fiction"],"yoast_head":"\n