Alien: Covenant
If Prometheus is like the The Phantom Menace, this is like Revenge of the Sith.
Technically impeccable, kinda works as a stand-alone thing, but the title ruins it by association. Plus, every time the anti-marketing mentions the toxic waste spill called Prometheus, it adds another nail to the coffin.
First things first, if you cut that Alien-“inspired” initial credits scene and scrub all references to Weyland Corp, what you get is a solid, yet very derivative action film, with a bit of body horror, but without much of Prometheus grade-A bullshit script. It’s not gonna win any awards, but it’s solid.
Shoehorning the whole Alien mythos and references to Prometheus is just unnecessary and ruins the whole package. The nods would be interesting on an homage, but when it’s the same guy 40 years later, it reeks of showboating and despair.
Word on the grapevine is that the slow, agonising death of the franchise will continue. Can’t please someone take this whole thing and vent it into space? It’s the only way to be sure.
It takes a special kind of obliviousness to watch Prometheus and say “This is exactly what we should do! More of this sort of thing!”. Either that or the bean counter ethos, which is worse?
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.