Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Alien Covenant. In case you did not notice the alien in the previous installation of the franchise, they put it back into the title. And because Fassbender was the only well received part of the previous installment, they just made him both the protagonist and antagonist in this installment.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: He's right. We do double down on the Fossbender, don't we?
[00:00:22] Speaker C: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And. Well, good reason. Like, as much as I'm last time, he's also really good in this one.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: So. So right off the bat we, we do get more Fassbender, right? We have him playing two characters and I gotta say, I liked both of them and they were cool. And one of the most interesting and, and just kind of, kind of mind bending moments in this movie for me was when he is teaching himself how to play the flute. And they're standing there interacting with each other as the camera is slowly panning around and I forget that this is the same person.
I watch it again and again and I keep forgetting that this is the same person playing both roles. And the only time this has ever happened to me before is probably just recently in Sonic 3 when Jim Carrey plays himself and his grandfather and they do a dance duet, which is pretty good. Another movie, though.
[00:01:21] Speaker C: So what you're saying is your favorite part of this movie is when Michael found Fassbender is fingering himself?
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:01:27] Speaker C: Yes. Okay.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: As soon as I said flute, I was like, yeah, I know where this is going, but whatever, let's go for it. Yeah, okay. So I thought that was amazing. Again, his acting in this movie was stellar.
[00:01:43] Speaker C: If we're gonna go straight to that part, I don't disagree. I think Michael Fassbender did an amazing job where he was playing two different roles and he wasn't. If you've never seen the movie, A, why are you watching this? But B, what we're seeing is David the Android from 10 years ago, the first or the prototype, and I believe it's Walter who is the next generation Android. Now, Walter is a bit more sophisticated and has like an American accent, whereas David has like a British accent. And Michael Fassbender pulls both of those off brilliantly so that you can always tell who exactly you're looking at.
Well, theoretically.
Well, just by the way.
Okay, fair. They tried to pull it off that you couldn't, but. Yeah, I'm with you.
Now my question for you is, is David?
Okay, so David brings up some. Some, like Walter is more of a servant, whereas David is more of a free thinker. Right. But Walter corrects David a couple of times. So is David smarter than Walter or is David inherently flawed?
[00:02:50] Speaker B: This, this is a great question.
David shows David, the one who is the older model, who is supposed to be the inferior one, who does have some obvious problems. I mean, he's psychotic.
He. He shows Walter that there is humanity in him, that he has a soul or is capable of love by showing his.
His reaction to, I want to say Shaw. I'm getting the characters. Shaw was from the previous.
What's her name?
It is Shaw. Elizabeth Shaw.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:25] Speaker B: All right, so he kind of shows, he shows, he teaches Walter that he is more than this, than the subservient robot that he believes him to be.
And yet Walter shows how David is flawed. And it's a really interesting dynamic.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: Now, I'd argue a little bit that just because you kiss somebody forcibly doesn't mean you love.
[00:03:47] Speaker B: No, he.
[00:03:48] Speaker C: Walter.
[00:03:49] Speaker B: Walter protects her and loses his hand.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: No, I know, I know, but I'm just saying David's form of showing love is kissing himself.
[00:03:58] Speaker B: Right?
[00:03:58] Speaker A: And other ladies that he wants to disembody.
So I don't know.
[00:04:04] Speaker C: I don't know.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: Maybe he doesn't quite understand what love is.
[00:04:07] Speaker B: But yeah, I would say twisted appreciation more than a love kind of.
[00:04:14] Speaker A: I mean, maybe obsession.
[00:04:16] Speaker B: Yeah, she did put him back together and she was more kind to him than anybody in that first movie. So I get that now he talks.
[00:04:25] Speaker C: About loving her, but does he not also speak of having killed her?
Because doesn't he threaten Daniels? I think it is saying, I'm going to do the same thing I did to you. I'm going to do the same thing to you that I did to her.
And he's clearly talking about like experimenting on her or something. Like.
So when he says I loved Shaw, does he even know what that word means?
[00:04:49] Speaker B: That's kind of one of them debatable things, I think.
[00:04:51] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's the idea. It's like David believes he can love.
[00:04:57] Speaker C: He.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: I think he. He believes he understands what love is.
Whether that is what humans feel and believe love is, is, I think two different things. I think David spends a lot of time for how much he hates humans and how much he thinks he's superior to them. He wants to have all of the same feelings and I don't know things that human have, except for the flaws, of course, which is in his eyes, aging. And I think that's the only one.
People hate each other and they're greedy and everything else. But so is he at this point, right? Like he just wants to be a God and create his own life at this point. Right. And he's doing that in a way.
He. He found a way to do that because he can't obviously make love and create life that way. But he is doing it in the same way the engineers do it.
[00:05:52] Speaker B: His. His form of love is almost like love without emotion. Right. There's no, there's no emotion behind it. It's a fascination or an appreciation or even a curiosity.
And. And he extrapolates that into love because he doesn't have the capability for emotion. Kindness, caring, hatred. None of that, really.
Maybe hatred, yeah, maybe a distaste for somebody else. But I think it's more of just a desire to be more than what humans are treating him as. Not even really a hatred towards them. He just wants to prove that he's more than this, than the servant that they want him to be.
[00:06:37] Speaker A: I mean, he does state he also wants them to go extinct, right?
[00:06:41] Speaker C: Yeah.
For all of his hatred of humanity and, and the engineers and people who created him, he certainly has a love for the arts that humans have created. Like many times he shows appreciation for both poetry and music, for sure.
[00:06:57] Speaker A: And he's got his sketches and things like he's, he's all about art. And in the beginning of the movie, you know, he's looking at the statue of David. So I think Waylon, the creator, instilled a lot of that from his own, you know, enjoyment of the arts and things. And so he. He put that into David's programming probably.
[00:07:19] Speaker B: But I mean, there's. We're way off topic here with this one. But there are correlations between computer sentience and artistic patterns of such complex recognition that the pattern becomes an art form. And so it could be that David sees art as super complex forms of some sort of communication or something. And he believes himself to reach an artistic level because he is so complex.
And that's where that distinction between machine and soul begins. Because a lot of people might think that the human wet brain is just a computer that's so incredibly complex that we now have a soul. And it's just layers of complexity. There's a lot to that, and that's not really what this movie is about. But I. I think that could be an interesting way to look at his appreciation for the arts is that it's just supremely complex. Pattern recognition. Let's point out the fact that we jump into this movie and we're all about androids and souls and art and hatred and emotion and all this.
And we're not even talking about aliens.
Right, I know. And they went out of their way to put Alien in the title and put some aliens in this movie as opposed to the previous one.
[00:08:39] Speaker A: I think, I think this group here talking now feels that Prometheus wasn't the best movie, but it was a good sci fi movie and it asked a lot of great big questions. Unfortunately, it didn't answer as many as it maybe should have. But it's set up for this sequel.
And so I think that's why we just gravitate naturally to that. And we also were talking about Fassbender, so that kind of just leads into it naturally.
Whereas a lot of people when they saw Prometheus were upset that there wasn't enough Alien in an Alien movie.
And Ridley Scott was on the book saying I wanted to make a different movie because I felt the fan base was tired of just the same old alien running down the hallways and killing people. And then Prometheus got hit hard with bad reviews and then he's like, oh, I was wrong. People still wanted that. I think in reality, Ridley Scott was tired of the alien running down the hallway bit and wanted to explain, explore bigger ideas.
And so when it came to the sequel, he had to hard adjust and try to, I don't know, wedge in both things, the bigger ideas from Prometheus, but also reestablish it as an Alien movie.
More forward facing. And I don't know how well it was a success. I felt it was kind of a train wreck.
[00:10:05] Speaker C: Yeah, I don't know that the lack of aliens was the problem with Prometheus. In fact, I think Prometheus is actually pretty stellar and we'll, we'll discuss that.
I think my issue with Covenant is a lot like Brian's issue with Alien 3, I believe it was where in the opening monologue, or not the open, the opening scenes, you see a bunch of flashes and basically it takes away and destroys everything that was built on Alien 2, which is, well, Aliens, sorry, which is Brian's favorite movie. I feel like Prometheus was actually pretty darn good and set up a lot of really interesting questions that this could have answered or at least, you know, taken the ball and run with it. And instead it almost went out of its way to kind of crap on everything that came before it. And that really bothered me. Like, I don't know where you guys land on this one, but like the way Brian said watching The Aliens, Alien 3, it. I can't remember the wording you used, but it like you were Offended by that movie because of the things it did to aliens. Like, it almost made Aliens worse retroactively. I feel that about this movie. Like, I feel like this one did so much damage to the lore of the franchise coming before it that. I don't know, like you keep saying you want a third David to finish off the trilogy. I'm terrified of what they would do if they had a third movie and where they would go because so much of it now doesn't really make sense to me or will have to be completely shoehorned in to make any logical leap. And I.
I just liked my aliens before this movie. I'm actually kind of sad. I've seen this movie now.
[00:11:36] Speaker B: I. I hear you, Dan, and I understand what you're saying because I was a purist of the Alien franchise. Alien Resurrection bothered me a lot because they changed the alien into a monster movie. And it was terrible.
But I found out that there is alien lore, especially novels and comic books and stuff, where the aliens are a virus, it's viral, it's the goo. And that's what we get in Prometheus. And it is more thoroughly explained in Covenant.
And we see the planet having utilized it, the goo that is to change life into other forms.
And we have what could have been done better, but we have explanations from David explaining how he nurtured the xenomorph goo into the alien that we found in Alien and Aliens. And that was his creation, his gift, which he utilized Shaw from the Prometheus movie to do that.
One thing they don't mention is how we get an egg.
So I think that somehow David made a queen alien come out of Shaw and that queen laid the eggs which gave the face huggers which carried on into this movie, giving us the traditional original alien xenomorph that we've seen in the film. I didn't like this at first, Dan either. I. I didn't like it because it changed everything we knew about aliens. And it was all about this viral passing into people. And like, we had different ways. Like the thing, the one virus popped out of the guy's back, which was really cool. Scary sequence, I'll give you that.
[00:13:31] Speaker C: It was cool, but it made no sense, right? In the Alien universe.
[00:13:35] Speaker B: In the Alien universe because we're not used to people being impregnated. We're used to people being impregnated by a face hugger. And now they're being virally attacked, right? And we saw that with Halloway when he had it dipped in his water. And now we're dealing with this goo and how the goo interacts with people and changes it. We saw a little bit of that change in Alien 3 with the dog or slash ox. Alien. That came out right. That was face hugged by a. The face hugger went on different creature and we got a little bit different variants and. And they just kind of took that way further than I was comfortable with. I've accepted it. I've accepted it.
[00:14:16] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:16] Speaker B: And so it wasn't what I wanted, but thank God it was an alien resurrection.
[00:14:23] Speaker C: I would take Alien resurrection over this one.
[00:14:25] Speaker B: Oh, man, get out of here. You're absolutely wrong.
[00:14:28] Speaker A: After watching not Romulus, I haven't seen Romulus yet. After watching Prometheus and Covenant, I've got like my own theory now of like, of how everything connects within all the movies I've seen up until this point. And Romulus might blow this whole thing out of the water.
But I haven't done read any of the comic books or novel lets or any of that stuff. So my theory might be way out of whack. Anyway, I don't know if I'm gonna. Oh, you want me to go into it now?
[00:14:55] Speaker B: I want to hear this.
[00:14:56] Speaker A: This is.
[00:14:56] Speaker B: This is what we're here for.
[00:14:57] Speaker A: Okay, so here's. Here's my breakdown.
As far as I know.
It seems to me the only thing that makes sense is that aliens already exist in the world and that engineers found those aliens and extracted and or created the black goo via reverse engineering from the species, the xenomorph species. And that explains why in Prometheus you see the mural of the alien in like a crucifix position. Like they almost worshiped them or revered them in some way because they allowed the engineers to become creators and become gardeners they call them, and you know, create earth and people and whatnot.
Now the eggs are a whole nother issue, but it makes sense that aliens existed prior to engineers because there was the eggs that David creates, but there's also the eggs on the abandoned ship crashed in the original Alien movie that was supposed to be like thousands of years old, well before David ever created aliens.
So that's like my belief that aliens are already an existing species, and engineers utilize that species to create the goo that can either create life or destroy it. They can use it either way. And it also in Prometheus, I felt like the goo was slightly different when they ingested it to create life and when they used it to destroy life. Now on top of that, I feel then that David believes He engineered the goo into xenomorphs, but he just re engineered something that was already in existence. And he believes he created. He believes he is now a God because he can create life, but he's actually just furthering the evolution process back to the original creature that already exists. He just doesn't know it. And he gets to the point of getting them back to an egg like thing. Now run asked, maybe he created a queen how to get the egg. Maybe only David can tell us what came first, the chicken or the egg. But that's my theory.
I don't know if it makes any sense, but it kind of makes sense that it encompasses all the movies and all the different aliens and why there's eggs sometimes and not other times. That's, that's how I feel it in my head.
But it could be way out, way out left field.
[00:17:27] Speaker C: So I also had that joke about the chicken and the egg thing because, yeah, we get the eggs, we don't really get a queen. We have no discussion of the queen. And my understanding is the way David is looking at the alien that comes out of the Captain, whose name I'm blanking on, I feel like that's the first time he's seen a typical xenomorph like what we would expect to see.
Maybe I'm wrong on that because he has the face huggers, but he has no biological thing for the face huggers to attach to.
[00:17:55] Speaker A: Correct. On this desolate planet.
[00:17:57] Speaker C: Now, yeah, I read a similar theory to what you're talking about.
[00:18:01] Speaker A: Oh, okay.
[00:18:02] Speaker C: And I hate everything about it because it makes this movie even less.
Like, like, I, I don't know what the point of this movie is to begin with, but if you're telling me that he didn't even create the xenomorphs and the xenomorphs were already around, it makes the movie make even less, like, why? Why does this movie exist? Like, like Prometheus raised a lot of interesting questions and this one just kind of went like, nah, all that, like, we don't really want to talk about any of that nonsense. And it really bugs me because, like, I love the alien ship in Alien where they find it. And it's like this guy is fossilized. Like he's been there for centuries. And now we see him be like, you know what? Actually, like, David created these things nine years before this. So this has been here for nine years or less.
What?
I don't love any of that.
[00:18:52] Speaker A: In my theory, David, David didn't create them.
[00:18:54] Speaker C: Right, I know, but Then why does this move? Like, what is the point of this movie if it's not to show that David created.
[00:18:59] Speaker A: I think it's kind of like Brian said. This is a trilogy of David. This is. This is the Android story. This is exploring who created who and that whole mystery of life. And that's all it is. It just happens to be based in the alien universe and gives further depth to the alien lore. I mean, what more purpose do you need?
[00:19:22] Speaker C: So if there's a third. If there's a third David movie for the David trilogy that Brian keeps talking about, what you're going to have is David fly away in his spaceship and discover another alien ship and be like, hey, I found these cool. Or an engineer spaceship, and be like, oh, aliens exist here. So I didn't create them. I guess I suck. And that's the end of the movie. Like, I don't understand how this is satisfying when it's wrapped up. Like, I don't. I don't like the idea whatsoever of David having created the aliens, but I really hate the idea of it, like, happening so quickly, and then it's like, no, you didn't actually do anything. They were already around. Like, it's.
[00:19:57] Speaker A: I don't.
[00:19:57] Speaker C: It's just. Okay, everything about this movie.
[00:20:00] Speaker A: I mean, one thing, it's like, is David inferior to humans? Is he inferior to engineers?
[00:20:08] Speaker B: He.
[00:20:08] Speaker A: He has a God complex, so at some point he has to fall. He is an antagonist, right? He can't just go around destroying the universe and overrunning everything with aliens.
So either way, he's going to lose and find out either he didn't do it, he's not as good as he was or thinks he is or something. Right?
Something's got to give on that. Okay.
[00:20:32] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:20:33] Speaker B: So a lot of this is going on the foundation that you think that David didn't create the xenomorphs. But I really do think that David did create the xenomorphs.
What I believe is that the engineers utilize this form of technology, this biological technology, and they use that to combine with. They use that technology combined with their own DNA, broke it down and poured themselves into the river of Earth and seeded Earth with life. And. And humans eventually evolved over a long period of time from that life.
And then humans then come in contact with that same technology, but a weaponized form of it.
Now, remember, humans being adapted from engineer biology via this technology, and then come back around and encounter it again in a weaponized form, and it kind of goes amok. And David harnesses that and Steers it in a direction to perfect it, in his view, into the ultimate creature.
So basically, he took what the engineers started, and then they created the humans, and then humans mucked it all up. And David came and used those pieces to create the xenomorph, which he believes is the purest form. And if you watch the movie in Covenant, you see the different iterations of the xenomorph that he creates until he comes to what he believe is the final product. But it does require more human hosts for the face hugger to go on to, which is why he just pops a Android boner when she says there's, you know, 20,000 people on the colony ship, you know, because he's like, oh, I get a lot of practice there.
So I think that's what it is. And I would love to see the David trilogy finalized because there are so many unanswered questions, like, how do we get those eggs? How do we get the eggs in the movie Alien? Where do they come from?
What's. Where's going to be the connection to Alien Earth that's coming out soon on Hulu, which I'm very curious to see how that ties into things. Is that going to be the colony ship that David took and he takes it to Earth and we have an apocalyptic TV show? I don't know. There's a lot of questions there. But I really want the trilogy to happen. I do believe that David. David created aliens as. As his thing, which is kind of weird because humans created David, engineers created humans, all this kind of creation.
[00:23:07] Speaker A: So you're right.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: It's real messy. It's real messy.
[00:23:12] Speaker A: I like plot holes because of the plot hole of the alien mural already on the engineer ship and the alien eggs already on the engineer ship in the first movie. That doesn't line up timeline.
[00:23:25] Speaker B: Right.
[00:23:25] Speaker A: And then my, my theory obviously isn't perfect either. There's a problem with engineers. If they created aliens or already created the goo from the alien space species, wouldn't they have all kinds of documentation or information about that, that David had, like 10 years on a planet of them to find and utilize and discover? Like, it doesn't make any sense that David wouldn't find that out. Right. Okay, so that's a huge plot hole in my theory for sure.
[00:23:54] Speaker C: Yeah. I, I do want to clarify.
We are to believe that the planet he finds and the aliens on that planet are engineers, right?
[00:24:02] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:24:06] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:24:06] Speaker A: Because that, and that's, that's a great question, because in my mind, and a Prometheus are like let's go to their home planet and ask them why.
And then they show up on this planet that looks like it is pretty much just innocent, very early technological band of people who just straight up die, have no defenses against a weapon they in theory created. Well, and it doesn't make any sense.
[00:24:33] Speaker C: They seriously look like they're wearing rags and like staring up at this spaceship like they've got their own floating scorpion tail thing. But they're looking up at the spaceship like they've never seen one before.
To me, it looks like blew my mind.
[00:24:46] Speaker A: It looked like at first they were like almost praising it and then it turned to, oh, damn, this is death to me. It felt like this was another Earth that they gardened and grew. These, this civilization very well could be more.
[00:24:59] Speaker B: Could be that their society threw off the shackles of technology and went to more of like a Buddhist style method. And those are, are their robes that they wear. And they've given up technology for generations. And so when they see the ship come in, they're astounded. They don't know if it's, you know, maybe they took that weaponized technology and put it on a planet so that they would lose that knowledge because they knew it was going to destroy themselves.
I mean, there's a lot of things. Another thing that could be tied up in a, in a, in a tree, in a trilogy for sure.
[00:25:28] Speaker A: And that's, that's all things they didn't.
[00:25:29] Speaker C: Explain or touch on whatsoever.
[00:25:31] Speaker A: Yeah. But again, a trilogy in theory could at least put some closure to it maybe.
[00:25:38] Speaker C: But.
[00:25:40] Speaker B: Big challenge, big challenge to try and tie up all these loose ends. But I mean, let's.
So we started with Prometheus, which was a movie that wasn't supposed to be an Alien movie. And they forced it in there and it was a, it was a great movie without it being an Alien movie.
[00:25:55] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:25:56] Speaker B: And it kind of messed up what we loved about Aliens. But it also, this trilogy also opens up the possibility of a way wider expanse for where this could go with a viral like alien rather than just this animalistic style alien. And I don't like that as much.
[00:26:15] Speaker C: Wanted to open that door.
[00:26:16] Speaker B: I don't want it to either. That door's wide open. That's the cannon now. So there you go.
[00:26:22] Speaker A: I mean, let's, let's.
[00:26:23] Speaker C: Look, you said yourself you're the biggest Alien fan here. You said you had to like make your peace with it.
[00:26:28] Speaker B: I did and I made my peace with it and it sucked. It was a hard pill to swallow. But, you know, what if you put aside that this movie up the Alien franchise in that way, these Prometheus and Covenant are entertaining, really cool sci fi movies.
[00:26:44] Speaker C: I don't feel like Prometheus messes with the alien lore nearly as much as this one does.
[00:26:49] Speaker B: Well, I think. I think this one tries to shore up what Prometheus fucked up is what I think they're trying to do.
[00:26:55] Speaker A: I think. I think it was like, what was it, Fox or Disney? I don't know which it was at the time.
[00:27:00] Speaker C: They were like.
[00:27:01] Speaker A: They're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. The fans hated that there was no aliens. We have to be. This has to be an alien horror movie with chases and deaths. And Ridley Scott was like, okay, just write the stupidest death scenes ever imaginable and put it in this movie. It was so bad. This is not a good movie.
[00:27:22] Speaker B: What's wrong with the death scenes?
[00:27:24] Speaker A: They're horrible.
[00:27:25] Speaker B: The.
[00:27:25] Speaker A: The characters are horrible. What the hell?
[00:27:27] Speaker B: Floating in the fountain. Didn't.
[00:27:29] Speaker C: Didn't feel. I'll give you. The fountain was cool.
[00:27:31] Speaker A: I've got a couple of questions. I got a couple questions here.
[00:27:33] Speaker C: Oh, I got so many.
[00:27:35] Speaker A: Here's. Here's a question. Okay. In this movie, how many characters did you like or empathize with?
[00:27:42] Speaker B: 3.
[00:27:43] Speaker A: Which ones?
[00:27:44] Speaker B: Okay, well, David. David and David or David and Walter were two. I loved both of those versions of the characters. I wouldn't say I empathized with them. You know, they're.
[00:27:53] Speaker A: No, but you like. That's fine. That's fine.
[00:27:55] Speaker B: Okay. I liked Edwards. Was it Ed. Am I saying her name right? The lead female actress. Daniel.
[00:28:01] Speaker C: Sorry.
[00:28:01] Speaker B: Daniel.
[00:28:01] Speaker A: Sorry. She was okay.
[00:28:03] Speaker B: She's no Sigourney Weaver by a long shot, but she was decent. I could get on board with her. Having to wake up out of cryo sleep and then see your husband incinerated right in front of your face was super duper shocking, kind of unreal. I don't get why they, like, ignited him in the tube or whatever.
[00:28:19] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:28:21] Speaker A: Lazy. Lazy writing.
[00:28:22] Speaker B: Lazy writing. Sure, I know. Hey. They put like a beam through Newt, and that was realistic, and I still hated it. They lit this guy on fire in his cryo tube and I was like, whatever. I'll whatever. But it was a shocking sequence, and she, like, dealt with it, and she kind of got over it and moved forward from it and her. And I think it was Tennessee is the other character. I liked Tennessee.
[00:28:45] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:28:45] Speaker B: I felt like they tried to go back to Alien, how these were people that you could kind of relate to. They were space faring and super futuristic and everything. But they were also this kind of like somewhat down to Earth faction, even though I didn't really get with their whole church thing, but like they were just trying to resettle, you know, they were settlers and he seemed.
[00:29:05] Speaker C: They were the dumbest settlers I've ever seen.
[00:29:09] Speaker B: Well, I didn't think so. I was okay with them, though.
[00:29:12] Speaker A: They're, they're, they're the transport. They're the scientists. The settlers are the ones in cryo. That'll.
[00:29:17] Speaker B: Right. But they were too, like, they signed up to just be the mission crew for the settlement. Yeah, they were going to be settling this planet with them. They were just also the mission crew.
[00:29:26] Speaker A: Yes, but also they were like the, they had doctors, they had scientists, they had geologists. Like, they had the smart people to make sure that the planet who did.
[00:29:36] Speaker B: Not act very smart. I will agree. The smartest in their group did not act very smart. The, the truck drivers of the group were doing the right things and, and these scientists were acting scared and rational.
[00:29:49] Speaker C: Your definition of the right thing is taking a crew of 2,000 people through a heavily guarded atmosphere to try and save four people. That, that's cool.
Okay, so you don't risk 2,000 people for seven.
[00:30:04] Speaker B: Hey, it worked. It worked.
[00:30:06] Speaker A: Well, they got.
[00:30:06] Speaker B: It worked in the end. It was the right move. He knew his ship, he knew what to do.
[00:30:10] Speaker C: You're right.
[00:30:11] Speaker A: David. David's got them all.
[00:30:12] Speaker C: Yeah, I was going to say they're all dead now.
[00:30:14] Speaker B: Yeah, that's true.
[00:30:14] Speaker C: You're also Lunar lander, which is like one of their only vehicles, and they're like, well, it only has to work once. Like, no, like you're going to settle a planet, you're probably going to need this thing more than once. Like, nah, it's fine. We'll just destroy it.
[00:30:27] Speaker B: Getting their actions, whatever. Were those people relatable in the characters? The way they acted, their emotions?
I felt, yes. We talked about that in the first movie. We liked that those people were down to Earth, that they, they were relatable. I could relate to a handful of the characters in this movie. The ones that had more lines, the military guys, they were completely forgettable. The scientist characters did really stupid things, were scared all the time and made tons of mistakes and they were not very relatable.
But the, the leftover crew on the ship and Edwards and even, even the androids I could get in with and they were characters I could attach myself to.
[00:31:11] Speaker A: Okay, I, I'm, I'm okay with the androids. I don't Feel like you can empathize with them, but you can enjoy them because they're good. And it's Fassbender and he's great. Right, Obviously.
So I'll give you two. Because you said the main character, who I disagree with hard. I felt she was a way. I was okay with Daniels and I. I didn't mind Danny McBride either. I felt he. He was the only one that felt to me like a character out of the original alien. Like people. He felt like a down to earth person. And yes, he could make a bad call, but you understand why, because he cares. He wants to see his wife.
[00:31:44] Speaker B: That and that he was shook up by that call. And I felt that that was. That was a great. Like, I understood what was going on. It made sense to me, even though it was an illogical move.
[00:31:55] Speaker A: Yeah, that, that's fine. I'll give you that one. But the rest of them are just cannon fodder and make the most horrendous decisions throughout the movie that it just.
[00:32:03] Speaker B: Takes me out so fast and constantly splitting the group.
[00:32:07] Speaker A: Yeah, it did it in Prometheus as well. But it bothered me more in this one for some reason because there were worse decisions. Dan, what about yourself? Did you. Did you.
[00:32:15] Speaker C: I don't know that I liked David.
[00:32:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:32:18] Speaker C: But I liked his performance. Like, I liked watching Michael Fassbender even though I hated him the entire time. Like, at no point did I. You. I know, I get it.
[00:32:25] Speaker A: Did you enjoy hating him? Right. That's. That's the other way you could go about it.
[00:32:29] Speaker C: I was.
[00:32:31] Speaker A: Or do you just hate because he's creating aliens? You can't even go near it.
[00:32:35] Speaker C: So there's so many things there. Like, I think Michael as doing a fantastic job. As I said, the two different accents between the two characters, like every time even I rewatched a little bit of it just before we got live.
He does a really, really solid job with that. And I really like that. It shows that they're like upgrading and changing. They didn't just make another David, they actually did improvements.
I hated so many things that went on around him.
There's a moment I'll give it to like, again, just praising Fassbender for a second when he's like blowing on the nose of the horse with that white alien and the captain shoots it. The horror on his face is so genuine and realistic.
[00:33:16] Speaker A: That was real emotion.
[00:33:18] Speaker C: Yeah. Like you legitimately, for a brief second sympathize for him because like, oh shit. Like, he actually does care about this thing.
So like Again, all the praise for Michael Fassbender, but.
[00:33:29] Speaker B: Which was crazy, because caring for that thing was so unrelatable for me. But to showcase his relation to it and feel it and know it and believe it was. Was really incredible, because how could anybody care about that thing? And then you're like, oh, okay. Because he doesn't. He doesn't have human emotions. He has his Android equivalent.
They're his creation. It's his baby. Yeah.
[00:33:53] Speaker C: Yeah. I think that every single character in this movie, throughout the entire movie, was making the 100% wrong call with every call they made. And it made it incredibly hard for me to sympathize or enjoy any of their characters now. I think most of them did fine job as actors. I think Danny McBride did a fine job. I think whoever played Daniels did a fine job. I think Michael Fassbender did a wonderful job in both of his roles.
I even the shit Billy Crudup, I think, did a great job, even though I hated his character. I don't know how realistic it is. You put somebody that spineless and with no intelligence and no charisma in a second in command position. I don't know how you get that person that high up in the ranks. That doesn't make sense.
[00:34:36] Speaker B: Can I ask this question as well?
[00:34:38] Speaker A: That's, like, my next question, though. Like, why did they write his character to be so unlikable?
[00:34:44] Speaker B: I don't know.
[00:34:44] Speaker A: Reason.
[00:34:46] Speaker B: Yeah, it didn't. It didn't jive. Like, there was. There was no reason for it.
[00:34:50] Speaker C: It felt like they. Okay, so the two ways that you can kill characters off in movies is you either write a character that you hate so when they die, you're like, yes. Oh, my God, finally. Or that you love, and when they die, you go, oh, no.
And I didn't love any of these characters, and their deaths didn't seem tragic enough.
[00:35:07] Speaker A: Like, I didn't.
[00:35:08] Speaker C: I didn't hate them to the point where I wanted them to die. You know? I mean, like, it's not like the lawyer from Jurassic park where you're just like, yeah, eat them. Like, it was just kind of like, okay, it happens. Like, that person died. Okay, now this person died. Oh, that person who I don't even know their name just died. Like, at no point was there any fear involved. No point was there any sadness involved. It was just kind of like, okay, next one.
[00:35:25] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:35:25] Speaker A: To me, it felt like, oh, we need gruesome death scenes. What's the easiest way to get these people to die? And to me, that's Lazy writing.
[00:35:33] Speaker B: I can. I can agree with that. The scene. Especially the scene.
[00:35:38] Speaker C: Cool.
[00:35:38] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:35:39] Speaker B: Yeah. The scene where the alien pops out of the guy's back and she's locked in the room and one girl is panicking, the other's panicking, trying to get out, and there's. She's shooting the ship up with a shotgun and doing stupid things like that. It was a very intense and exciting scene and I was on the edge of my seat and it didn't matter. Like, it didn't make any sense or anything. Great sequence. I just wish that I gave a shit about either of those characters.
Or even the soldier. The soldier who. I don't even remember what he looked like. Like, I don't. He was the guy with cigarette. That's probably what his name was in the script. He was so forgettable. And no one cares about him being ripped apart from the spine out. We were more interested in how's this chick gonna get out of this locked room. Which was an intense sequence, but it just didn't matter. And then the whole ship blows up. Anyways, I. I would argue that that's.
[00:36:34] Speaker A: Not the best example of a good sequence because it was almost Evil Dead splat stick. When they're just slipping on the blood, right?
Closes her foot.
She clearly aims for a big old explosive thing that's just out in the open for no reason. It was. It was almost laughable. Did it look great? Absolutely.
[00:36:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:57] Speaker A: But it. It was so badly written that I just couldn't. I couldn't even buy into it.
[00:37:04] Speaker C: This movie desperately needs an Ellen Ripley. And when I say that, I don't necessarily mean a badass female character. I mean somebody literally anywhere in the chain of command who goes, hey, wait a second, guys, that's a bad call. Like, that's what we liked about Ellen in the first place. She's so relatable because she's like, maybe we don't let the infected person with an alien on his face back on the ship. Maybe we don't do that. And this one, they were just like, no, let's break it. Like, she had them quarantined in that room with the alien. She could have waited for backup. And instead she goes in there with. I don't even remember, like, some shot shotgun with one bullet slips on blood. And then it's like, ah. And panics and has to run away. And you're just like, why didn't you just leave the damn door shut? Like, I'm sorry that that person's gonna die. But, like, now at Least not everybody's dead.
At no point did anybody think about anything beyond the next eight seconds. Also really bothered me.
[00:37:56] Speaker B: So what's her name? Edwards. I think I'm getting Daniels. I keep going. Edwards.
Again, not as memorable as Sigourney Weaver.
Daniels did make a big protest about what they were doing in the beginning with landing on the planet. But at the same time, I'm looking at, at it from his perspective and I'm like, yeah, I don't really see the downside in checking out this planet either. I know this is going to be a bad move, but I don't, I understand his want to go down there. And I don't see why she's throwing such a conniption fit over it, even though that's what like an Ellen Ripley would kind of do. But there just wasn't a basis for that fit that she was throwing.
There wasn't.
[00:38:38] Speaker A: There wasn't. Yeah, go ahead, Dan.
[00:38:39] Speaker C: 1. Why don't they have spacesuits? Like we've seen that they've got spaces because they've gone out in space. Even if you're going to a planet, even if the air is breathable as we see in this movie, it doesn't mean that the environment do it in Prometheus.
[00:38:51] Speaker B: Why are they going to do it in this one? Yeah, well, sure, but at least they. I agree. I agree 100%. Wear a space suit. Don't get contaminated. That is like rule number one from Star Trek. Like, we know this.
[00:39:02] Speaker C: Yes. But two, they're colonizers. They're not explorers. They don't have a ship built and ready for this. They should have, I think they should have stayed on their ship. I understand the argument for like, hey, this is lazy and we're here, but this is not what you're prepared for. This is not what you, like, nobody's ever going to find you again. If for whatever reason you ever need help down the road, humanity has no idea where you are.
[00:39:25] Speaker A: I think you're going to. The other thing I was just going to add, like, the movie attempts to make this a logical choice in the beginning by burning James Franco alive. Rest in peace, James Franco. For your five second cameo.
They attempt to be like, oh, anything could happen in seven years. We could go through another completely random thing that could completely screw up everything and we could burn alive in our completely safe cryogenic unit. And so everybody's like, seven years.
This is a perfect good planet. Let's just colonize it. I get that's what they were trying to do.
But it's still like everything you ever learn about anything is if you're going to do it, you have to do it right. Take every single precaution.
[00:40:12] Speaker B: Right.
[00:40:13] Speaker A: Otherwise stick to the frickin mission.
[00:40:15] Speaker C: Hey guys.
[00:40:17] Speaker A: Hey.
[00:40:17] Speaker C: Let's, let's pull off over here.
[00:40:18] Speaker B: Check this out.
[00:40:19] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:40:20] Speaker C: Exactly. We're gonna be on this mission for the next like 12 years. But instead let's go down to this planet and let's not even wait for the storm to end. Let's just fly directly in the middle of a hurricane. Because it's an entire planet, we can go literally anywhere.
[00:40:32] Speaker B: Prometheus, they land just before a big storm and they. I gotta open my Christmas presents right now. But at least they didn't land in the storm. Just wait. It's been there for 2,000 years. It's not going anywhere.
[00:40:42] Speaker A: Bad writing.
[00:40:43] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure.
They literally go into the middle of the hurricane. Like, at least in Prometheus the storm comes after the fact. Yes. They're just like, cool. Let's just fly into it and see what happens. And the ship almost explodes and the big one above them is like, well, if they can do it, let's try with this thing you're like, what are you doing?
[00:41:00] Speaker A: Anyway, I felt, I felt, I felt there was a lot of problems with the script. I don't know if you noticed that.
[00:41:07] Speaker B: I think, I think there are a ton of problems with the script. None of it is. Makes any sense. It's all forced to get you to have fun in these individual sequences.
[00:41:17] Speaker C: Did you?
[00:41:19] Speaker B: In the individual sequences? Yes, I did. But when you put them all together. No, it kind of upsets me. And remember I. My original thought for the David trilogy is that this changes what I love.
And I have a very hard time accepting it.
And this is one of those things we'll circle back around when we finish the entire franchise.
But there's lots of changes that were made to the franchise because of these two movies, Prometheus and Covenant. And do I like what they did in these films? Definitely not. Do I like what they could do because of these films?
Possibly, but it doesn't need to happen.
[00:42:01] Speaker A: Right.
[00:42:02] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:42:03] Speaker A: It leaves open some possibilities for interesting takes on future movies, whether they choose to go down those routes or not.
[00:42:11] Speaker B: One of my favorite things in Alien 3 was the dog style Alien. Even though it didn't look amazing. I like the idea of this slightly different creature because of the computation between a dog and a facehugger. That was really cool.
I don't know if we needed to go the Goo route to get such a wide angle on this. But at the same time, Alien Resurrection was a horrifying take on the same principles. Just done. Completely different.
[00:42:40] Speaker C: Yeah, similar.
[00:42:42] Speaker A: Ish. Yeah.
[00:42:45] Speaker C: Okay, I have a different line of questions because maybe I missed something.
[00:42:51] Speaker A: Oh, okay. Okay. Okay.
[00:42:53] Speaker C: Prometheus ends spoilers with David and.
Oh, crap. Shaw. Elizabeth Shaw, leaving the planet in a spaceship. She builds him over time. He falls in love with her, so we're told. They get to this new planet, I am assuming at some time before they get to this new planet, he kills her. Right. Because she's not probably going to be there while he's massacring the planet and be okay with it.
[00:43:14] Speaker A: I mean, at minimum, she's tied up.
[00:43:17] Speaker C: Sure. Okay.
[00:43:19] Speaker A: Why? I think he wants to keep her alive for all the eggs inside of her. Let's be honest.
[00:43:25] Speaker C: Why does. Okay, so when the ship shows up, when he shows up at the alien world, it looks like he is in full control of what he's doing. And he releases the bomb and it kills off. We're supposed to believe every engineer on the planet? First off, I just want to say that creature.
[00:43:41] Speaker A: I think.
[00:43:41] Speaker C: Sure. That scene actually does look pretty dope where the. The. The. The virus is coming out of the ship and it's spinning like DNA strands. I thought that was actually pretty cool. That was a nice touch.
I'll give it praise where it deserves it, but it's very limited.
Why is the ship crashed? If he's in full control of it, why does he not have access to a ship? Because it now seems like he's stranded on the planet. Why would he crash the ship if we see him in complete control of it?
[00:44:07] Speaker A: I don't know if it is crashed or he.
[00:44:09] Speaker C: You see it. All the trees are broken down and they follow the passive destruction.
[00:44:14] Speaker B: Maybe she saw what he was doing and she ran and grabbed the control yoke and said, no, don't do this whatsoever.
[00:44:21] Speaker C: We are led to believe that he kills her in experimentation.
[00:44:25] Speaker A: Yes, that is.
[00:44:26] Speaker C: That is what he basically says.
[00:44:27] Speaker B: But we don't know if it was before or after he released the plague on the surface of the planet.
[00:44:31] Speaker C: I guess that's fair.
The other thing is, at one point, we see something on a table with its abdomen ripped open and guts kind of everywhere. Can you picture what I'm talking about?
[00:44:45] Speaker B: Isn't that Shaw?
[00:44:46] Speaker A: Shaw?
[00:44:47] Speaker C: Is that Shaw? Yeah, that's my next question.
[00:44:49] Speaker B: She's like, mummified.
[00:44:50] Speaker A: Her head.
[00:44:51] Speaker C: Yeah, it shows a head and it's got hair and I wasn't sure because none of the engineers confused. Okay.
[00:44:57] Speaker A: A lot.
[00:44:58] Speaker B: A lot of formaldehyde on that one. Yeah.
[00:45:00] Speaker A: Now that brings me up a question. If I can just squeak it in here.
[00:45:02] Speaker C: Go for it.
[00:45:03] Speaker A: Because you and Brian both were not.
[00:45:07] Speaker C: Scared in the garden.
[00:45:09] Speaker A: Oh, who cares?
It's a tribute. Whatever. Right?
You and Brian both had a little disdain for how Alien 3 handled two characters that died off screen.
What did you think of Elizabeth Shaw dying off screen?
[00:45:29] Speaker B: Pissed me off.
It was. It was again. It was again the exact same thing.
[00:45:34] Speaker A: As Alien 3 that everybody hated about Alien 3.
[00:45:37] Speaker B: Exactly. No, I was. I was upset that we lost Shaw, and the best that we got was this crappy recording of her singing an old country song. Great song, by the way. But didn't.
I was. I was pissed. I was like, that's it. She was a good character in Prometheus. Not amazing, not stellar. She was good, though. I liked her. I wanted to see more of that. And. And they did her dirty by. By. They. They neuted her.
They shooted her.
[00:46:03] Speaker A: Replaced freaking Danny with her 100.
[00:46:07] Speaker C: If they'd had her still be alive and he was, like, harvesting eggs or something from her ongoingly, like he was just torturing her over time. That would have been horrifying. That would have been kind of interesting.
[00:46:20] Speaker B: But, like, would have been okay.
[00:46:21] Speaker C: I don't know.
Every.
[00:46:24] Speaker B: I'm trying to deleted her. I didn't like how they deleted her. I think they just.
[00:46:30] Speaker C: After at least show her in flashbacks, this is what happens.
[00:46:33] Speaker B: Or. Or find a video file of her explaining what David really did. And they go, oh, my God, we've been led astray by this Android or something. I don't know.
Anything. Give me anything other than her just being dead.
[00:46:48] Speaker C: Yeah. All right.
[00:46:50] Speaker B: Explain Dan.
[00:46:51] Speaker C: Oh, my God.
[00:46:55] Speaker A: I mean, it's the first time he was landing the ship. Maybe he was just growing pains.
[00:46:59] Speaker C: Really bad at it. It's not even close to the city.
[00:47:02] Speaker A: I know, but it's not like. Is it destroyed? Destroyed? I don't know. I didn't.
[00:47:06] Speaker C: I didn't think. It's leaking a lot of water and stuff like that. I don't think it's space worthy anytime soon. I don't know.
[00:47:11] Speaker A: All the spaceships in this. These movies seem to have water. Always drinking.
[00:47:14] Speaker C: No, this is like waterfall. This wasn't just like, wet.
[00:47:17] Speaker A: Right, Right, right.
[00:47:22] Speaker B: Yeah.
This should be crashed. Didn't make a lot of sense to me either. It's.
It's one of those things where I feel like maybe there was more plot here and it got snipped. Out and lost and we lost some of the whys and hows.
This is why I so badly.
[00:47:38] Speaker A: 20 minutes was edited out from the original cut just to pare it down to make it a more, you know, audience length of enjoyment. So no, I know at least 20 minutes of footage was cut out and I know the script went through three or four writers this time around as well.
[00:47:56] Speaker B: So that, that's never a good sign. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I I this again. And, and I'm going to say this so many times, I really want the trilogy to try and wrap up so many of these loose ends. I'm hoping that they can get some really solid writing that could bring it back around and at least give me some peace, at least end some of the torture that these movies have put us through by taking us on a ride to. That did need to happen, right? This could have just been a cool movie that wasn't tied to the Alien franchise.
[00:48:29] Speaker C: What I have a question for you specifically. Run. What could they do in the third movie? You can think about this. If you want to take like five, 10 minutes, you haven't already got this, but I'm assuming you have. What could they do in the third movie that would justify these first two movies existence and make it worthwhile and make it fit the Alien franchise in a way that you're happy with and not make you feel like you are taking a giant pill and you have to choke it down.
[00:48:50] Speaker B: Explain how the eggs got there. In all cases, I want to know how the eggs got there. I want to come back around and find out how they got those eggs on that ship. How the engineer had his chest burst out. If David did create these, these eggs, I want to know how that happens. I want those dots to be connected because it doesn't look like they can.
[00:49:18] Speaker A: I connected him for you in my theory, man.
[00:49:20] Speaker B: Yeah, but not satisfactory.
[00:49:23] Speaker C: No offense.
[00:49:26] Speaker B: I can't talk fully about that. But David created. David created the xenomorph that we know and love from Alien. And I want to know how that egg got on to that ship in the first Alien movie. Thousands of that egg, thousands of that.
[00:49:41] Speaker A: Egg, thousand years ago.
[00:49:43] Speaker B: Connect this time because I mean, Covenant does happen chronologically before Alien.
[00:49:48] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, but like nine years, like it's not much.
[00:49:51] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't care. It it, I do.
I mean, but I mean, it took, you know, it was so many years. I don't know whether it was 50 or maybe just a couple of months between the alien and Aliens and the queen laying Those eggs on LV426 and the, the people going over there and finding all those eggs and bringing it back to the shaken bake colony.
There's any amount of time that could have happened there. So nine years is fine. That's fine to work with.
I just want to know how or are they going to take this colony ship and connect it with Alien Earth and this new TV series coming out? What's going to happen there?
[00:50:31] Speaker A: I doubt it, too.
[00:50:32] Speaker C: I have not seen a trailer for Alien Earth, so I'm going entirely off of nothing. My guess is now that Disney's in charge, you're going to see something completely unconnected to anything. And it's just, hey, what if we took aliens and put them on Earth and that's literally all they thought about?
[00:50:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:50:48] Speaker C: In any way. I'm gonna be shocked.
[00:50:50] Speaker B: I'm gonna be kind of worried about that because this is the Walking Dead with aliens.
Because I'll tell you guys this much, many of our answers, many of our questions are not answered in Romulus.
[00:51:03] Speaker A: Oh, I would assume so. I would.
[00:51:05] Speaker C: I'm assuming this is just a horror movie, just a Alien 1 remake.
[00:51:09] Speaker A: I assume they probably touch on a few things from the franchise, but don't you.
[00:51:14] Speaker B: There's, there's lots of connections in Romulus, but they don't answer enough of our questions. And I need an end to the David trilogy, and I want them to. To close the time, the, the timeline so that we have David's egg on the alien ship in Alien the first movie. That's what I really want to know. And if we can get there, I can maybe live with some of these changes. But I need to know, and I need Will to know that David created this alien for sure.
[00:51:44] Speaker C: Obviously he doesn't deny that. He just thinks that he was already created.
[00:51:47] Speaker A: It happens in Covenant. I just feel aliens existed prior and he evolved them in. Into aliens and feels he created them for the first time. Now that, again, you may know the answer that that's not accurate, but that's just what makes sense in all of the movies I've watched up to this point.
[00:52:05] Speaker B: I, I think, and I don't know for sure, but I think that Romulus presents the case that David did create them, but it doesn't necessarily seal the deal. And I think there's some room, room to negotiate on that, but I think they presented that David did create it, but they, they go in a different direction altogether. And we'll get back to that next week.
[00:52:24] Speaker A: I'll find out next week for sure.
[00:52:26] Speaker C: So I don't know how familiar you guys are with horror movies, but you know how they, like, they just released a Halloween, except for it's not Halloween 14. It's like Halloween 2. And they just ignored all of the other Halloweens. They just went from like, Halloween to this one. I want that. I want, like, Alien.
Just like. And I liked Prometheus, but, like, it's not worth it. Just get rid of it. Just get rid of all of it. Just be like, nah, screw it. Let's go back to them being bugs. Let's go back to them being like an alien species that is just hyper evolved.
[00:52:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:52:57] Speaker C: See what that looks like. We don't have to make it like a horror movie every time. We can mess around with it a little bit. But, like, this virus thing is not working for me.
[00:53:04] Speaker B: Yeah. And when you. When you get into it, a lot of the novels and comic books cover the virus thing. They cover the transmorphism. I'm making up words here. The change in the biology of the alien structure. And it comes down to its root as a. As a. As a virus that adapts to whatever it comes in contact with.
These movies just showcase that to a lesser, greater degree in ways that we like or don't like.
Like I said, I'm not happy with how it happened, but I think that there is the opportunity for good things to come.
[00:53:43] Speaker A: I don't disagree. Like, the. The idea of the goo and what properties it holds is interesting. How it came about is complicated to.
[00:53:55] Speaker B: Say, to say the least. Yeah.
[00:53:57] Speaker A: The most positive thing I could say maybe wasn't always best executed. And I think had Ridley Scott had his way and could just make the 3 David trilogy on his own, it would have been a much more clear, concise picture. But because people wanted more action and more death, it got very convoluted and now may never see an end. And that's fine by me because I think both of these movies don't really stand alone. And together they don't feel finished.
[00:54:29] Speaker C: I mean.
Yep. Sorry. I was just gonna say, in fairness, both Prometheus and Covenant did make their money back. Like, neither one of these were flops. They might not have been highly regarded, but they both made money.
[00:54:42] Speaker A: But how much money possible? Making your money back and making bank or two different things.
[00:54:46] Speaker B: Well, okay, fair enough.
[00:54:47] Speaker C: They didn't like. They didn't hit like a billion dollars, but this one almost tripled its budget like two and a half times. That's not.
[00:54:52] Speaker A: That's not bad.
[00:54:53] Speaker C: It's not bad. And I think Covenant did even better. Sorry. Prometheus did even better. I don't have those numbers directly in front of me.
[00:54:58] Speaker B: And then. And then Romulus did really well. And that's why they opened the door to maybe finishing the David trilogy, getting the TV series going, and they've already greenlighted a sequel to Romulus. Yeah. So, Dan, to. To. To. So we can stop kind of beating a dead horse here. How did you.
[00:55:18] Speaker C: This horse for a while.
[00:55:20] Speaker B: How did you feel about the pacing of this movie, the action sequences, and how long it took for us to get to the actual classic xenomorph?
[00:55:30] Speaker C: So I was never bored. And that was one of the things I was looking at when I was reviewing this.
[00:55:35] Speaker A: This.
[00:55:36] Speaker C: It keeps its pace pretty well. There's always something happening. There's always stuff going on.
It's just usually what is happening, I'm just mad about. So it wasn't like I was enjoying it. I just wasn't bored. Like, at no point was I, like, man, I'm gonna look at my phone for a little bit because there's nothing going on. No, there was always something. And, like, the movie looks good. The sound is fine. The acting is fine. Like, it's all.
[00:55:57] Speaker A: It's Ripley Scott. It's. It's.
[00:55:59] Speaker C: It's all well done.
I just don't like the decisions or the writing. Like, that's the biggest issue for me. Like, the plot and the enjoyment were both low because I was just angry the entire time. Like, at no point was there somebody was like, oh, thank you.
No, just the entire time, like, oh, this guy. Like, can we get past the trope of when there's clearly an evil person and then you have no weapons and nothing to do with them, but you're like, you know, I got to take you in.
And then they die instantly. Like, can we get past that? Because that was, like, four times in this movie where they're just like, you know, I can't let you do that, David. Oh, that's a shame. Like, kills them.
[00:56:36] Speaker A: Or, like, come look at this egg. It's completely safe.
[00:56:40] Speaker C: Put your face in there. Yeah, I'd really like to know what you're doing, David. I'll tell you in a second. First, come look at my death trap.
Oh, my goodness. Or at the very end, she's in the pod and she clues in. Like, wait a second. Are you David? And he just has that small space. Like, why would you let him know that? You know, like, you're dead anyways. But, like, why would you let him know that you Know.
Oh, it just. That kind of shit bugs the crap out of me. But, like, now, the flip side of that is when Walter confronts David and David does spike him in the neck, he does this weird, like, spider dying thing where he just, like, curls up into a ball. I like that. That was.
[00:57:13] Speaker B: That was way cool. Yeah.
[00:57:14] Speaker C: Yeah. He just, like. And just, like, drops to the floor. Is like. Okay, you got me. Like, there's some good ideas in this. They're just not the plot. They're, like, visual things that are cool.
[00:57:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:57:24] Speaker C: I don't.
[00:57:26] Speaker B: It's got a lot of great pieces. It's got a lot of great pieces. None of them fit together well.
[00:57:33] Speaker A: Yeah. It really feels disjointed. Like, the first half the movie's like, all right, we're colonized. We're doing this thing. We're, you know, moving on into this great thing. And then it's like, okay, now we have to be an alien movie. Just forcing all this action of aliens kill. Killing things. And it just felt like two different movies kind of mushed together. It was like a Prometheus portion. And you better have aliens in this movie. Just make it work. Yeah, it just. It never felt could.
[00:58:02] Speaker C: So I don't.
[00:58:03] Speaker A: It never felt mixed well enough for me.
[00:58:06] Speaker C: David releases a virus onto the Engineers.
The virus murders all the engineers we see in seconds.
Yeah. Is that the same virus that is in the mushrooms that the people hit that gets, like. Goes into the guy's ear and up the guy's nose?
[00:58:23] Speaker A: Doesn't look like.
[00:58:24] Speaker C: Because those ones create aliens. And if that's the case, all those Engineers should have created a bunch of aliens. There should be a lot more life on that planet, even if the life is, you know.
[00:58:35] Speaker B: So remember. Remember, the engineer in the beginning of Prometheus drank the goo. It broke his body down, and it created a world of life which was ear. Earth. Or at least we're supposed to.
[00:58:47] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:58:47] Speaker A: Or an Earth like.
[00:58:48] Speaker B: Or an Earth like things. So he dumps the goo on them and it breaks them down and it creates a bunch of flora and fauna which have its own ways of creating life and editing. So you get these pods which spit out goo and go into their ears or nose or whatever and infect them and create a completely new form of life coming in contact with the goo. There were no humans to interact with. The goo were only engineers on the planet. And maybe crickets and birds or something.
[00:59:21] Speaker C: Okay, Two, two. Two things there. One, the alien at the beginning of Prometheus is broken down at a cellular level that Thing disappears entirely. These things are still there ten years later, however long. They're all like frozen in time.
[00:59:32] Speaker B: What do you mean? The engineer that's broken down in the beginning, Prometheus, Correct?
[00:59:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:59:36] Speaker B: Okay, you said alien.
[00:59:37] Speaker C: I'm sorry, the, the engineer at the beginning of prom is broken down on a cellular level. Like that's right. Who rips him apart? The goo in this one looked almost more like a symbiote from Marvel.
They're all like fossilized. They're all still there. Like they are not broken apart. They're not changed into life in some.
[00:59:52] Speaker A: Hundreds of bodies saying yeah, we could trust this David guy. This, this seems just fine.
[00:59:57] Speaker C: Which also makes me think that he's not able to use their bodies for anything, for any of his experiments and stuff like that. So again, when he finds the 2000 humans, he's like, oh, I can do so many things with this. But he had the entire race of the engineers and he didn't, it didn't feel like he kept any of them alive to do anything with. He just kind of mopped.
[01:00:13] Speaker B: We're using the goo technology.
One could be fertilizer and one could be Roundup, right? We don't really know. Well, I mean they said it was a weapon. It was weaponized. It was meant to destroy Earth. So he drops that on the engineers and destroys them.
And then from there he's going through and trying maybe you know, living on their planet, on their ship, and he's going through their files and then maybe he, he figures out how to use the goo to create actual forms of life. We don't know. None of this is explained. Well, these are great questions exactly.
[01:00:48] Speaker C: I agree with that point.
[01:00:50] Speaker A: I think all of that is explained fine. Like it shows different bugs and things that he was doing, dissecting and things. I'm sure he. Because as we, what we know is it's designed to eradicate fleshbound life, which is humans, mammals, animals, that kind of stuff, birds, what have you. But that's why it makes sense that there were still insects for him to test on. That makes sense why he would have kept Shaw alive to experiment on her eggs. And, and that's where you get all these weird, deformed, alien esque like creatures. Like I think that is explained well enough by visual storytelling in this movie.
[01:01:27] Speaker C: It.
[01:01:28] Speaker A: And then obviously he's at a standstill. He creates what like three or four eggs that he's got down in his little cavern.
He gets the face hugger kind of established. But now he needs, luckily I agree with that too.
[01:01:45] Speaker B: We don't know why dropping the plague bombs on them annihilates everything and not creates any form of life. We don't know how those pods on the planet got their little spurts of the goo in them. Is that because he dropped the plague bombs on the entire planet? Sure. Is that something that he did after the plague wiped out all life and completely destroyed it? We're not really clear on that.
[01:02:10] Speaker A: No, no, that's, that's.
[01:02:11] Speaker C: I'm actually going to go on will side on this one for a second because like you, you make a decent point. They dropped a weapon on these people and maybe that changed the environment. Like let's, let's take it out of alien contacts for a second.
Let's say you drop a nuke, right? It's going to change the environment around it. So maybe it's that the residual of the goo is what affected the plant life and stuff like that and changed them and evolved. Right. I get behind that. I can get behind that. I don't like it, but I, I make some.
[01:02:40] Speaker A: Let me ask you this. If you came across these little pod things, would you poke them with your finger and just inhale all the dust?
[01:02:47] Speaker B: I wouldn't go on the planet without a freaking helmet.
[01:02:51] Speaker C: That.
Okay.
[01:02:53] Speaker B: I mean back to Prometheus. I'm not gonna take my.
Because. Oh, looks like oxygen. Let's pop this.
No, I'm not gonna do that because I'm a scientist. A top tier scientist. That Wayland spent ungodly amounts of money risking his life to go be a professional on this planet. And no professional scientist is going to pop their lid on that planet. And these guys, colonists are not going to go out there on foot and just explore.
They're not going to do that. So you're super huge flaws in the writing of, of both the, the Prometheus and Covenant movies. 100 agree on all that.
[01:03:33] Speaker C: Yeah. I also don't think you do the Star Trek thing and send the captain down.
No, I'm pretty sure the captain stays with the ship. James T. Kirk be damned.
[01:03:42] Speaker B: It's. We got red shirts for a reason.
Yeah. And, and I think as soon as they see hey, this is wheat from Earth, right then and there you pump the brakes and we go, okay, this is something seriously wrong here. There. There's what's going on? Let's reconvene Alabama.
[01:04:03] Speaker C: Before that.
[01:04:05] Speaker A: Yes, they did hear the song before.
[01:04:06] Speaker C: So they already know there's something weird happening.
[01:04:09] Speaker B: Right. You know, there's a human leading them there. But the. The planet's already been colonized and there's nobody there. Hey, why is David growing wheat? If Shaw was killed before they got to the planet, shouldn't Shaw be the one growing the wheat to sustain herself?
[01:04:26] Speaker A: I think the engine.
[01:04:28] Speaker B: Engineer. Engineer.
Engineers. Who engineered the wheat?
[01:04:33] Speaker A: I think so. Because it was big. So they.
[01:04:36] Speaker C: They're big.
[01:04:39] Speaker A: I think it was an engineer thing that was previously already established on the planet.
[01:04:44] Speaker C: Well, the Engineers are genetically human. Right? And if all life on Earth came from them.
[01:04:51] Speaker A: We share the. We share DNA. I can't say they're human when they're.
[01:04:55] Speaker C: But, like, when they. I thought when she did the tested, it was like 100 or something.
[01:04:59] Speaker A: We share what?
We share 100 DNA. That doesn't mean they're human or we're human.
[01:05:04] Speaker C: No, yeah, sorry. I didn't mean they were human. I just mean.
[01:05:07] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:05:07] Speaker C: Yes, it would make sense that they would also eat wheat.
[01:05:10] Speaker B: We. We are supposedly of engineer DNA.
[01:05:13] Speaker A: Except the celiacs.
[01:05:16] Speaker C: What?
[01:05:16] Speaker B: That's right.
[01:05:17] Speaker A: I assume they're celiac engineers as well, and they don't eat meat.
[01:05:23] Speaker C: Good point. Good point.
[01:05:26] Speaker B: I'm not sure Dan understands what we're making.
[01:05:28] Speaker C: A little bit.
[01:05:29] Speaker B: Okay, okay.
[01:05:32] Speaker A: Hey, just be happy you're not a celiac. Okay.
[01:05:35] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:05:35] Speaker A: Should we rate this movie that maybe some of us like and some of us don't?
[01:05:41] Speaker C: Oh, why not?
[01:05:42] Speaker B: Okay, I.
[01:05:46] Speaker A: All right.
[01:05:46] Speaker C: I was gonna do this at the beginning of the episode, and then I completely forgot about it, so I was like, all right, we'll just do it at the end before we score.
I don't think we have to. I'll go first. Why not?
[01:05:56] Speaker B: Sure.
[01:05:56] Speaker C: Actually, you know what? I want you guys screen on this one because I'm doing something we've never done before.
[01:05:59] Speaker A: Oh, boy.
[01:06:01] Speaker C: I watched this movie.
I hated this movie.
And it changed what I thought. Okay, so last week, when we did Prometheus, we watched it and I was like, okay, all of the pieces are really, really good. And it should, by my rating score, get an 84. But it just didn't quite feel like it should be an 84. And I took it down to a 75.
[01:06:22] Speaker A: Yeah, you're retroactivating.
[01:06:23] Speaker C: We watched Covenants, and I hated it so much that I immediately watched Prometheus again to be like, did I like that as much or does this ruin it for me?
I'm giving Prometheus back the score deserved. I'm putting Prometheus back up in an 84 because that movie is really good, and I do really enjoy it, even the what? Fourth time that I've seen it now. Now, that being said, I really didn't like Covenant, but I might. There's a small part of me that does want to watch it a second time now that I have, like, floorboard expectations because I came from Prometheus, which I was actually relatively high on into this one, hoping for Prometheus with more answers, Instead, got a slap in the face. So maybe now that I'm expecting a slap in the face, I can take the big pill that Brian took and kind of enjoy it.
So before we go into my rating on this one, I am changing my rating in Prometheus. That doesn't really matter because there's seven movies in this franchise. The ratings are pretty much.
[01:07:20] Speaker B: That's okay. As you. As you watch this franchise, it changes the way you feel about previous movies. It really does.
One way or another, you will feel differently about the rest of it because you kind of have to.
Unless they reboot this fucker, you're gonna have to just live with it.
[01:07:38] Speaker C: Yeah, unfortunately. Well, I don't have to rewatch any of them ever again. Well, I mean.
[01:07:43] Speaker A: Or you take the. Yeah, you take the home alone approach and just say, oh, there's only two Alien movies, and just be happy with your life.
[01:07:50] Speaker C: Yeah, I might say. I might say there's three. But, yeah, that might be the end of it for me. Now, that being said, I've heard wonderful things about Romulus, so I am super curious for next week, but. Right, okay. Let's get into this for now.
All right. I've already told you, I hate this movie. We don't need to beat around the bush on that one. That being said, kind of like last week, all of the pieces are really well done. Like, Ridley Scott really does know how to craft the craft of making a movie. The music in this is fine. Sorry. Is great.
It has that same tune that we had in Prometheus. It was really weird to me that David could play it. Like, David could almost hear the music of the background, which I'm not saying I disliked. It was just weird for me. Like, it kind of took me out of the movie for a second when I realized that's the tune he was playing. But it was okay. The movie looks gorgeous. There's a couple of parts of this movie where I thought it looked worse than Prometheus, which is weird because it's five years newer. But then when you take a look at the budget, it's almost half of what Prometheus budget was. So you kind of give It a pass on that one. But there's a couple of times I'm like that it doesn't look great. There's other times where it looks amazing.
It's a little effect but like the head bobbing in the water of the fountain looked cool every time the alien, aliens looked cool every time. Like it? The movie looks good. The acting I think is phenomenal, especially from Michael Fassbender. And even though there's characters that I don't like, I still think they did a good job. They mentioned Danny McBride as Tennessee. Hated everything about the decisions he made the entire way along.
But he felt, I'm gonna say real, I don't know, that he would really get the job he had. That seems like something you don't give to somebody who makes those kind of decisions. But I understand somebody who's like my wife is down there. I'm going to risk 2,000 people to go and do it.
Don't like it, but it's understandable. He did a good job with it. Now we get into the plot and the entertainment value. For me, the plot was so ridiculously stupid to me and really just hurt a lot of what came before it that I, I have massive issues with this one. And as I mentioned, the entertainment value was there in the sense that I was never bored, but I was almost just watching in disbelief of the things that were happening and what they were doing in front of my eyes. More so than enjoyment or like, oh my God, I can't see. I can't wait to see what happens next.
So those ones really brought it down. So even though the pieces, the filmmaking art is there, the actual story hurt it so much that I gave this one a56, which does technically mean I liked it more than Alien 3, but is the second worst alien movie on the list for me.
That's a score.
Ryan, you said you've come to terms with this one. I would have loved to have gotten your score after you watched it the first time, but oh yeah, the first.
[01:10:31] Speaker B: Time was so for me and I can, I can just jump into this. For me, the first time I watched Prometheus and then into Covenant was really, really disappointed with things after re watching the films. After going over some of the lore and the fan based ideas of what's going on, I realized that there's a lot of opportunities for good things to arise from this. If I can just get over the fact that aliens are goo and sometimes they come in the form of bugs.
I like the bugs. I'd like to just Keep it as bugs. And I'd like to have space Marines fighting them all the time. And that's all I really want.
But that's not what I get. Instead, we get goo. And I've kind of come to terms with that. And I see how there can be some really cool things that happen with it. I can also see from the movie Alien Resurrection how there can be some really stupid things, some really disgusting things that come from it.
And I think we'll see next week maybe a better take on things, but maybe not. I don't know. Well, that's, that's gonna happen next week. But for right now, the plot is the one thing that really took me out of this. We talked about how everybody makes stupid choices, and they do. They just make really bad choices all throughout the film. Nothing really connects. Nothing makes sense. Even when somebody is doing what should be the right thing, that's the time when you're like, well, maybe they shouldn't actually be doing that right now. Because now the stupid choice that I know they're making does make sense, the way they're presenting it. I'm talking about when they decide to go down to colonize this planet or check out this planet. How they go about it doesn't make sense. But why they go about it does to me.
Yeah, the plot sucks. Nothing connects the way it should connect. And so that is disturbing.
One other thing, and we didn't touch on this too much, is that the transition from colony mission to an alien movie was jarring. In fact, I think there's something like 17 minutes of an actual xenomorph in this film. And it almost felt like they just hard stuffed that one in there so that the fans wouldn't bitch too much like they did about Prometheus.
I mean, the. The captain gets a facehugger wrapped around him in the most ridiculous way anyway. Like, duh, come take a look at my booby trap. And then what feels like 12 seconds later, we've got a full grown xenomorph attacking people.
And that bothered me. But it did make for a fun sequence, right? Flying around on this spaceship where it's practically zero G. They're spinning that thing around so crazy with this ridiculous grabber claw that has no right being attached to a cargo ship.
What are they grabbing with that claw? The claw that literally squeezes an alien into pulp. What would you logically use that for? My God, I don't know. But it was really cool to watch it squeeze that alien into pulp. So again, a super fun Sequence that makes no sense whatsoever. And this movie is absolutely packed full of them. A whole bunch of things that have no right being together in a movie. They don't make any sense. But individually, those pieces were a lot of fun for me to watch.
When I stopped and thought about the movie as a whole, I really just wanted this movie to not exist. I really don't like where it took Prometheus, which was already on a bad route.
I don't like where it took it and then it just ends it on a cliffhanger and I get no resolution. And that really frustrated me. I think they're going to have an incredibly hard time wrapping up this trilogy. They damn well better answer some of the questions. The biggest one being where do the eggs come from in the first Alien movie? Because this is supposed to be the prequel that starts at all.
And it's not. It just doesn't. Doesn't feel right.
So they're gonna have some trouble there. So the plot just absolutely killed it. However, the acting.
Fassbender, of course, was phenomenal. Danny McBride, a great character. Doesn't make any sense, but great character. I like the lead.
I keep calling her Edwards Daniels. Daniels was a great character.
Didn't really do much for me. But in the spirit of an Ellen Ripley, she again was okay. I would have rather had Shaw than Daniels, but she was okay and. And I was happy enough with it. But Fassbender's interaction with his himself was a breathtakingly good scene. Not just the fight sequence, but when he is teaching himself how to play the flute. And the way he kills himself. Just the visual from that death sequence, the, the. The. The dialogue building up to it. The way that they can communicate to each other and the way they insist expect each other as they approach.
So amazing. I instantaneously forget that this is one actor playing both roles. So phenomenal job in the acting and the special effects to showcase those sequences. The special effects to showcase the alien popping out of the guy's back or jumping at them through the cornfield. Not cornfield, the wheat field.
The beautiful scenery as they're climbing through the mountains. I didn't really like the way the spores were portrayed floating through the air and going into their earlobes and rear canals and stuff that was kind of whatever. But otherwise the effects were really, really good. And I enjoyed the look of this film. The sound effects and music were spot on. I felt they. They built a very good climatic scene intensity.
The sounds of like when her husband is burning alive in his cryo. Tube, which, again, doesn't make any sense and terrible writing and all that. But it was a very intense sequence and got me pretty excited. And a lot of that is because of all the sirens going off and the screaming and the yelling and all that sound being forced into your ear canal like some sort of a spore from an alien planet.
So I did like that. Does this movie hold up?
We'll see.
We'll see.
I don't think it does. I think the more you think about this movie, the more it falls apart.
But I'm hoping that there is an opportunity for an extraordinarily good writer to try and tie this together and make me at least be satisfied with what has occurred so far. I had a lot of fun watching the bits and pieces. I try not to think about the big picture. For me, the whole movie gave a 72, which is lower than Prometheus, but much higher. Much, much higher than Resurrection and higher than Alien 3 because Alien 3 missed the point.
[01:17:25] Speaker A: All right.
I just have a lot of things that are the same that. Both of my colleagues here said the movie looks good.
It doesn't look as good as Prometheus did. And Dan mentioned that the budget for this one was lower, but that said they made Prometheus as a 3D movie and that that colossally increases the budget. So because they made this one not as a 3D, it. It substantially lowered the budget for the movie anyway. I also think that's why Prometheus looks better, is because they spent more time making it just look grandiose and epic. And. And I think they established that really well.
This one looks fine. It just doesn't look as grandiose and. And awe inspiring. And that's. Whatever. That's fine. Aside from that, I maybe harped on this a little during the episode. The writing in this is tragic.
Character development is horrendous, and decisions made were just. They felt tired. They felt like, oh, this character. Let's. I'm going to go for a piss. It's like the most basic setup for a kill I've ever seen in my life. And they do this about 16 times in the movie, so it gets old pretty quick.
Highlights of this movie. James Franco dies immediately. I don't even think he's credited in the film, so that's a plus.
And it ended eventually, so that's good. But most importantly.
Hey, stop. I'm trying to rate this movie here. Most importantly, I think what this movie encompasses and really hits home for the audiences. And I think this is an important message that we didn't really talk about, and that is don't work with your husbands and wives at the office. It just doesn't work out. Okay? It just doesn't work out. And you saw it here.
Keep family out of business. It doesn't. It doesn't work out. Overall, this movie got a 61. There's fun elements. There is fun death scenes. It is an Alien movie. It's just not a good one.
And it is better than Alien 3. I don't care what these two boners tell you, this is a straight up better movie. This is worse than Alien 3 by far.
[01:19:42] Speaker B: Yes, Alien 3 is better than this movie.
No, it's not a minus. My. No, my score for Alien 3 is lower than this movie.
[01:19:50] Speaker A: I know. That's because you misrated Alien 3. I'm just telling you.
[01:19:53] Speaker B: I may. I may. You know what? I may have.
[01:19:56] Speaker C: No.
3 is bad, guys. Like, at least this one tried.
[01:20:00] Speaker B: Yeah, I. I had fun watching this movie. And a lot of times my fun score will carry a movie a lot more.
[01:20:07] Speaker C: More.
[01:20:07] Speaker B: Even though this movie was frustrating to watch and made no sense, the individual sequences were so entertaining to me. I mean, I just. I just go, okay, this movie isn't going to win awards, but it entertains me. Whereas Alien 3 depressed me.
[01:20:23] Speaker C: Okay, so that brings Alien. It didn't really change our scores all that much. I took Chop place from Will, so now I'm the highest rated for our rating at 75. Brian's sitting at a low 71, and Will has 72 for a grand score of 72. This movie brought our score down all of one point. I don't think Romulus is going to take us down to the point where it hits Predator or Max, Mad Max levels or even worse, but we'll have to see.
I keep hearing good things about this one. I'm hoping it'll, you know, at least keep it where it is. If not, go up higher.
[01:20:55] Speaker B: But I'm kind of blown away that I'm the lowest score on the franchise so far.
[01:20:59] Speaker C: You're. You really tanked it with your resurrection. You.
That movie.
All right. And that was our episode of our rating. Talking about Alien, Covenant. What do you guys think? Did we score this one really high? A little too low. Probably too low for a lot of you. Let me know down in the comments what you think and what franchise we should tackle next. We still have one Alien movie, and then we're gonna go back to Mad Max Furiosa to finish that franchise off. And then after that, we haven't really settled on what we're gonna do, so leave a comment down below if you've got an idea of what you'd like to see us tackle. We record this live over at Twitch TV Themongoolie show, so if you want to head over there and hit the follow button, you can interact with us as we're recording this. Or if you enjoy this here on YouTube, hit the like button. Hit subscribe and you'll see when more great content comes out. As always, I hope you're safe. I hope you're well. Good luck to you.
