Why Did I Do This To Myself?

 Alien: Covenant (2017) A colony ship makes the wrong decision every single time, resulting in death and all the worst possible outcomes.  

Directed by Ridley Scott                          Starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup

Why I Liked It – I didn’t.  Some of the CGI effects were pretty good.

I can not explain why I put this movie in my “to watch” queue.  I hated its predecessor “Prometheus” (I called it “… drivel, tedious, badly acted, unimaginative, pretentious, and utterly unworthy of the amount of movie spent to make it.“), so maybe it was a moment of weakness.  A moment when I thought “Well, it has to be better than that, right?”

And yet…

This movie revolves on one of my least favorite movie tropes.   The “Let’s do the least logical thing for no apparent reason” trope.  Covenant is a colony ship, filled with the first generation of a new human planet light-years from Earth.  Origae-6 is the only acceptable planet out there and that’s where they are headed.  A solar flare damages the ship, some of the crew is revived from cryo-sleep to deal with it and their captain is killed in a horrible accident.  So when they stumble on an unknown habitable planet that has an unknown human presence on it, of course they throw everything out the window to land!  They lack the experience, the manpower and the resources for this.  They have a vital cargo that needs to get to their target.  They could send a message back to Earth noting the position of this anomaly.  But no, the heck with that!  Let’s go someplace we know nothing about.

It turns out as you would expect.

A dumb script filled with dumb characters making dumb decisions.  The action scenes will be enough to make some fans happy, but the “Alien” franchise continues its slide into high budget garbage.

I watched to the end just to punish myself for making such a stupid decision.  If you’re into CGI stuff, there’s some interesting bits here and there.

Rating – ** Not Impressed