‘Alien: Covenant’. An utterly ineloquent rant, which is all this movie deserves.

Colin Edwards
Jul 20, 2017 · 3 min read

“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair”

Well, I was certainly in a state of fucking despair after ‘Alien: Covenant’ I can tell you that!

I hadn’t been doing that badly with it either until a certain point at which I snapped like an excessively pulled-back frenulum. My expectations were also super low, especially when you consider this is a franchise that has only provided two genuinely great movies and that ‘Prometheus’s desire to explain back-story and ruin the mystery of everything had really irritated, and actually offended, me. But ‘Covenant’ wasn’t proving too offensive (just shit) and I kinda like Katherine Waterson. And then something happened.

I’m not going to rake over all the issues ‘Covenant’ has as they’ve been gone over ad infinitum elsewhere. For example: the fact the movie is NOTHING but a string of stupid decisions; the fact the film should be called ‘David: The Movie!’ as it is all about him with the alien being reduced to his creation/henchman; the suspensions of disbelief requiring a level of denial that even Albert Speer wouldn’t be able to achieve or sustain for more than a nano-second; the confusing timeline; the bum-headed and shallow intellectualism (can we please have a moratorium on movies using that Shelley quote from ‘Ozymandias’ when a baddie is just about to do his big bad just because he’s meant to be “clever”); the same point except this time stop having androids play classical music on the piano to show they’re “creative”; highly trained specialists making endless and constant highly fucking stupid decisions, the sort of fucking stupid decisions their highly specialised training was supposed to train them against making; the “humans are the real monsters” trope (nope, my gran was a human and a xenomorph of unknown origin is vastly more terrifying than a five-foot woman from Shawlands) and on… and on… and on…

But it was when David was fighting Walter (the perfect metaphor for the onanistic wankery of this fucking movie) and as these two robots fight David yells Roy Batty’s line “That’s the spirit!” at which point I think I woke half the street by shouting “FUCK YOU SCOTT!!!” at the top of my lungs.

Now if Ridley Scott wants to continue to ruin the alien franchise then that’s fine by me. As I said, too much damage has been done already for me to care. But to bring ‘Blade Runner’ into all this fucking mess is just… just… AAARRGGHHHH!!!

Now I had heard rumours a while back that Scott was wanting to bring the two franchises together but I quickly dismissed this as, firstly, it’s a fucking stupid thing to do but also because it doesn’t make any sense in terms of each movie’s universe or their time-line. Alien and Predators together? Sure, why not. Alien and replicants? Fuck off!

I don’t care in the slightest about ‘Blade Runner: 2049’. I don’t need another ‘Blade Runner’ movie and I don’t want another ‘Blade Runner’ movie. I am perfectly happy with the one we have.

Am I being narrow-minded? Yes. Am I protecting myself from having movies I love fucked with in retrospect by inane and, quite frankly, boring and cynical current fare? Absolutely!

So I’ve given up on the Alien franchise completely and there would be only one thing that could bring me back: we’ve had a chest-burster and now a back-burster so why not a bum-burster? It’s the only thing worth adding to this quickly dying franchise.

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Colin Edwards

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Comedy writer, radio producer and director of large scale audio features.

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