Review: Ridley Scott's 'Alien: Covenant' is a Miscalculated Sci- Fi Misfireby Adam Frazier. May 1. 6, 2. 01. 7In 1. Ridley Scott made his feature debut with The Duelist, which won the Best First Film Award at the Cannes Film Festival. His next film, 1. Alien, catapulted Sigourney Weaver to stardom and would go on to be considered one of the best sci- fi films of all time. A thriller about an extraterrestrial organism that stalks the crew of a spaceship, Alien launched a mega- franchise of movies, novels, comic books, video games, and collectibles that remains a pop culture mainstay nearly 4. In 2. 01. 0, Scott decided to return to the universe he helped create with Prometheus, a prequel to Alien that would explore the origins of the franchise's iconic Xenomorph creature, as well as the .

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Prometheus is a collection of exquisite broad strokes, with stunning imagery and a compelling performance from Michael Fassbender, who plays the android . Ambiguity isn't a bad thing in filmmaking, but it's frustrating when things are left open to interpretation because the filmmaker doesn't have the answers, or is purposefully withholding them so he or she can stretch out one potentially great story into a series of diminishing returns. Enter Alien: Covenant, the sixth installment in the Alien franchise, taking place ten years after the events of Prometheus and eighteen years before Alien.

Directed by Scott and written by John Logan (Gladiator, Skyfall) from a story by Jack Paglen (Transcendence) and Michael Green (Logan), this prequel- sequel attempts to delve deeper into the mythology established in Prometheus while giving fans . In Scott's words, .

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While en route to the planet, a neutrino burst damages the ship, killing its captain and waking the crew from cryosleep. Among the surviving crew members are Daniels (Katherine Waterston), head of terraforming operations; first mate Christopher Oram (Billy Crudup) and his biologist wife Karine (Carmen Ejogo); pilots Tennessee (Danny Mc. Bride) and Faris (Amy Seimetz); head of security Lope (Demi.

Joining them is . The crew tracks the source of the message and Oram, motivated by his faith, charts a new course that will take the Covenant to a potentially habitable planet that is seemingly too good to be true, and is. Upon landing on the hauntingly beautiful world, a member of the crew, Ledward (Benjamin Rigby) comes into contact with deadly spores – the mysterious . When he reaches the craft's Med Bay with the help of Karine, things go horribly wrong. Here we witness the birth of the Neomorph, a new breed of alien with translucent skin that shares more in common with a beluga whale or goblin shark than H. R. Giger's biomechanical design.

Things spiral out of control as the Neomorph rampages through the Lander, destroying everything in its path. Help arrives in the form of a mysterious hooded figure, who leads the survivors into an abandoned city. The unexpected savior turns out to be David from the USCSS Prometheus, who's been stranded on the dead planet after he and Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) crashed there a decade ago. In his isolation, the eccentric android has been exploring the creative side of himself–playing music, painting, drawing, and performing bizarre experiments with the Engineers' virulent mutagenic pathogen.

Meanwhile, back on the Covenant, Tennessee grows increasingly worried about his wife and plots a rescue mission through the planet's stormy atmosphere to retrieve the crew. At its best, Alien: Covenant is an uninspired remix of Alien and James Cameron's 1. Aliens. Every scene is engineered to remind you of a moment from those two films, and the characters are nothing more than shallow stand- ins for the iconic roles that came before. Take Waterson's Daniels, for example. Clearly, she is to be a Strong Female Lead.

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Unfortunately, Daniels has even less characterization than Rapace's Shaw in Prometheus. At least that character had something going on. Daniels, on the other hand, spends most of the movie as a passive background character, offering little to the narrative or the audience's emotional connection to it. Suddenly, in the film's groan- inducing third act, she becomes John Mc. Clane, swinging from a ship as it spins out of control, fighting a Xenomorph in a scene that apes the finale of Alienand the Power Loader sequence from Aliens, minus all the suspense and excitement.

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It's empty, ineffective, and feels like pandering. If you thought the characters in Prometheus were dumb, wait until you witness the idiocy on display here. One character successfully locks a Neomorph in a room only to open the door, slip on a puddle of blood, shoot her gun into the ceiling, and let the creature go.

Then, as she chases the monster around the Lander, she shoots directly into the ship's fuel cells and blows herself up as the Neomorph slips out unscathed. Then there's another character who goes down into a creepy cave with the untrustworthy David, who tells him it's . To quote Ripley, . Why root for humanity when characters prove time and time again how unworthy they are of saving? Like a bad slasher movie, at some point you stop caring about the kids and start cheering on the killer because at least they have some personality.

If there's one thing the movie has going for it, it's Fassbender's mesmerizing peformance in a dual role as David and his benevolent successor, Walter. What's frustrating, however, is how the events of Prometheus, and what David's been up to since, are barely touched upon in this film. We are treated to only glimpses of the Engineers' homeworld and what happened between David and Shaw there.

Again, everything is left up to interpretation–we're supposed to do all the heavy lifting for the writers because they're too busy rehashing every beat from every other Alien movie ever made. And when Scott and his crew do introduce something new, like a particular revelation about the Xenomorph's origins, it's largely blasphemous. The mystery behind one of cinema's greatest monsters–if not the greatest–is explained away, turning the . Anything worth exploring further is glanced over in favor of presenting something you've already seen done (better) a dozen times before. The special effects don't help either. While Prometheus used a combination of visual & practical effects to bring the Engineers and their world to life, Alien: Covenant uses millions of pixels to animate the Neomorph and Xenomorph, robbing them of any sense of realism. The thing about Alien and Aliens is that the effects in those movies will stand the test of time – whether it's Giger's creation or Stan Winston's Queen Alien, the creatures feel real because they are in- camera effects; they interact with the actors and their surroundings in real time.

Here, the threat never feels real. The only thing these shiny, parasitic organisms look like they've burst out of is a Playstation 4. Even Dariusz Wolski's cinematography–which was also one of Prometheus' strong points–can't imbue this much artifice with soul. With a poorly conceived story, disposable characters, and a profound resentment for the Xenomorph itself, Alien: Covenant is one of the weakest entries in 2. Century Fox's franchise. Prometheus and Jean- Pierre Jeunet's underwhelming 1. Alien: Resurrection, look like masterpieces in comparison.

Technically speaking, it's a better- made movie than the AVP spin- offs, but not by much. There's an argument to be made that Paul W. S. Anderson's Alien vs. Predator has more respect and reverence for the franchise, and a better understanding of why people dig it, than this film, which appears to have been made by focus groups. Talking to Yahoo! Movies in 2. 01. 4, Scott said, .

He continued, . I think you've got to come back with something more interesting.? Clearly, Scott was pressured to cram as many Ovomorphs, Facehuggers, Chestbursters, and Xenomorphs into his epic sci- fi creation myth as possible.

Overlooked Sci- Fi Movies You Need To See. With Star Wars revived, Star Trekrebooted and more installments of the Alienseries on the way, science fiction reigns at the box office. In an era of computers, smartphones, Siri, and digital everything else, technology shapes our lives more than ever before, and moviegoing audiences have more of a taste for the fantastic and surreal images of sci- fi than ever before.

Sci- Fi movies, are, of course, nothing new. Since the earliest days of film, directors and writers have tried to explore new realities by mixing tech and fiction. While some sci- fi outings become instant classics, others fade from view.

For a select few, that’s a disservice. Some films like Tron, Blade Runner, or The Thing fell through the cracks and audiences of their time dudn’t connect with them.

One of the many virtues of home media is that it allows cinephiles, like those of us here at Screen. Rant, to go back and reevaluate movies that get overlooked during their box office run. The titles contained herein didn’t attract audiences of their day, or fell out of the public consciousness. That’s a shame—each one is a masterpiece of sci- fi cinema in its own right. Think you know them? The Farthest (2017) The Movie High Quality.

Check out our list of The Greatest Overlooked Sci- Fi Masterpieces. Brazil. Terry Gilliam gets little respect in Hollywood as a visionary director, which is our loss. The man has made some spectacular films, including the little- seen masterpiece Brazil. A sort of dark comedy take on Orwell’s 1. Bob Hoskins, Robert De.

Niro, Jim Broadbent, and—in a rare leading role—Johnathan Pryce. Set in a weird dystopian future populated by skyscrapers, secret police and a lot of air ducts, Brazil follows one man’s obsession with finding the woman of his dreams. Sporting astonishing art direction, and a script that plays even more timely in a world of paranoia (the movie’s take on terrorism is especially prophetic, and hilarious), Brazil confused audiences in 1. Unlike that novel, Brazil sees its ending as a happy one, owing to a frequent theme in all Gilliam’s work: crazy people are the happiest in the world! The Fountain. Darren Aronofsky puzzled audiences and critics alike with his enigmatic The Fountain. Viewers were divided in their opinions of the film, regarding it as a modern masterpiece or a bombastic work of ego. In truth, it’s probably both.

Regardless, The Fountain holds a special distinction among modern sci- fi, as it doesn’t feature superheroes, space battles, or aliens. Instead of venturing into far outer space (though it does feature scenes in space), it probes human history and the depths of the human spirit. Set in three separate time periods, it features conquistadors searching for the fountain of youth, a man mourning his dying wife, and a bald guy eating a tree in space. It’s that kind of movie. What’s really going on here? Are the couples reincarnations of one another?

Parallel lives lived in parallel universes? The dreams of one another?

Like the visual poetry of 2. A Space Odyssey or Mulholland Drive, just when The Fountain seems poised to reveal its secrets, it recoils into an enigma.

Cube. This little seen sci- fi thriller became an instant cult film when it debuted in 1. Shot on a single set with a group of unknown actors, Cube finds its characters kidnapped and held in a giant series of connecting cube rooms. How did they get there? What is the function of the cube? And how can they escape? Cube adds tension to the proceedings by introducing a group of unstable characters, any of whom could end up dead at any time.

The lack of stars in the cast only underlines that anything- goes quality. A higher- profile film with big- name actors in the leads would telegraph to the audience that their characters would live through, at the very least, most of the movie. Director Vincenzo Natali crafts a latter- day masterpiece using a simple sci- fi premise and building a mystery as frightening as it is captivating. The film also proves that even sci- fi movies don’t need ridiculous budgets or special effects to achieve greatness. Contact. Audiences that saw Robert Zemeckis’ Contact in 1. The film did well at the box office but, though Oscar buzzed, he didn’t grant the film any major nominations.

Maybe viewers accustomed to bloated space operas couldn’t stomach the film’s subtlety. Based on the novel by astronomer Carl Sagan, Contact follows a brilliant scientist obsessed with discovering alien life.

She discovers an ominous radio signal containing instructions to a mega- machine and the world goes nuts. What does the machine do? What do the aliens want? And how can humanity adapt to knowing that it is not alone in the universe? Contact takes a realistic examination of the current state of civilization, and asks stark questions about how man would react to contact with aliens.

In a post “War on Terror” world, certain developments that seemed ridiculous in 1. Thoughtful, endlessly provocative, and utterly captivating, Contact deserves mention alongside classics like 2.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a seminal sci- fi masterpiece. Dark City. Viewers who have taken in Alex Proyas’ Dark City know that the Wachowskis, along with just about anyone else in Hollywood to make a sci- fi blockbuster in the past 2.

Little seen in its day but widely influential, Dark City deserves the same reverence and classification as Blade Runner. Both are overlooked masterpieces of sci- fi cinema. Also, like Blade Runner, Dark City takes the neo- noir approach to sci- fi.

In a city that never sees a sunrise, a group of bald, mysterious men wander about drugging its inhabitants and manipulating their memories. Just what do they want, and how does an anxious scientist (played by Kiefer Sutherland in a marvelous, pre- 2. Dark City raises questions about how memories affect our emotions and how our minds create our own reality. The incredible art direction of the movie, employing lots of scarlet lips, black leather trench coats, fedoras, and strange clockwork machines should have won an Oscar and gets rehashed just about everywhere today.

For a stroke of moviemaking brilliance, take a visit to Dark City. AI: Artificial Intelligence. This long- in- development collaboration between Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick hit theatres in 2. Boasting a remarkable cast, lead by Hayley Joel Osment, it left audiences frustrated and confused. Beautifully photographed and with two great performances by Osment and Jude Law, it offered a look into a technologically advanced world populated by companion robots. But what, if anything, was it trying to say about all of it? Audiences puzzled over the last 1.

Osment’s robot protagonist David interacting with even more highly advanced robots, and scenes in which his human “mother” is cloned. After fifteen years of debate, the perhaps overly- subtle meaning has started to become clear. The robots of the future are programmed to love humans, which have long gone extinct. David actually knew humans, and therefore is a kind of cybernetic messiah to these sentient toasters. Taken in that way, the film examines the responsibility of humanity to its own creations. The movie might have been an instant classic upon its release had Spielberg focused more on the emotional attachments of humans to machines.

But the director made a more unusual choice instead. Does that subtlety, or the focus on the plight of, well, A.

I., make the film any less of a classic? The Dark Crystal. Now here’s a film that is totally, utterly, unique.

The Dark Crystal served as Muppet- mastermind Jim Henson’s attempt to branch off into more serious and fantastic filmmaking. Sci Fi Movies Dvd Green Inferno (2015). The movie tells its story with just puppets; no humans ever appear on the screen.

The puppetry, and the choice to tell a dark sci- fi/fantasy story put off audiences who were expecting the whimsy and slapstick of the Muppets. After doing moderate box office numbers and receiving mixed critical response, The Dark Crystal fell by the wayside. But the movie wouldn’t go away.