Alien: Covenant is a notch better than the expertly crafted but underwhelming Prometheus.

Rating: 6/10 (9 September 2017)

Is Alien: Covenant (2017) really that bad? I did say that it's a disappointing film. What I meant by this is that it's just disappointing and not terrible. In my view, Covenant is a slightly better film than Prometheus (2012) because it makes a little more sense. A few people said to me that they kind of like Covenant. I can understand why they think that. Covenant is entertaining, and it does make more sense than Prometheus, but it also has some of the same problems. Because Covenant is a film by director Ridley Scott, it's a given that it looks very good. And, honestly, I'd like for him to make a sequel to Covenant. I'm a little interested in what he might be able to do with a sequel.
The biggest disappointment of this year at the cinema for me was the film It, which was directed by Andy Muschietti. It didn't even seem like a film to me. More like a collection of nonsense. I can't believe that so many people are praising this film. Sure, it's kind of entertaining, the acting is fine, and there's some humor, but this is where the good stuff ends. And, unfortunately, I fell for the hype. I had a good feeling that I'd be somewhat disappointed by this film because it's hard to adapt Stephen King's thick novel to film, but I didn't think that it would be such a mess. Now I understand why Cary Fukunaga dropped out during the production phase. It seems that he intended to make a good film that respected the material in the novel. The film that we got in the end has few similarities with the novel. What made my viewing experience worse is the fact that I finished reading the novel just several days earlier. It was still fresh in my mind, and I remembered pretty much everything that happened in the novel. When I was watching the film, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. There was plenty of swearing that isn't in the novel. There's no explanation of who Pennywise is. The film is set in 1989, but the filmmakers still decided to make the characters do what they did in 1958. This doesn't work at all. I can't imagine children, and even grownups, behaving like this in the 1980s! I still can't believe that I wasted my money and time on this turd. Avoid it!
So, I finally finished listening to the audiobook of Stephen King's It. It took quite some time because it's about 45 hours long. I didn't get as much enjoyment out of the novel as I did when I read it years ago. I still enjoyed listening to most of it, especially the first half, in which King explains the history of Derry. It's when the reader doesn't yet know what It is. The novel is by no means a masterpiece, and I don't like a few aspects of King's writing, but It still seems pretty good to me after all these years. Now that I'm done with It, I'm listening to Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, which is a novel that I've wanted to read for quite some time. Instead of reading The Idiot, I decided to listen to the audiobook since I had a few credits to spend. What's also worth noting is that I've noticed a rather interesting trend in American fiction of the 1980s. I'm now reading a few American science-fiction novels from the 1980s, and something that pops up even in the genre of science-fiction of this period is anti-Soviet propaganda. I'm sure that many people know about the writer Tom Clancy, about the fact that his novels are pretty much anti-Soviet, pro-American military propaganda. Well, all of this isn't a coincidence. The fact that Ronald Reagan praised Clancy's propaganda novel The Hunt for Red October (1984) wasn't a coincidence too. As historian Andrei Fursov explained, the Americans, when Reagan was president, intentionally raised tensions with the Soviet Union. The Americans released a lot of offensive anti-Soviet propaganda in the 1980s. The fact that Hollywood released many action films in the 1980s also wasn't a coincidence. The Americans were intentionally trying to create an atmosphere of tension, violence, and confrontation. They did this because they had a strategy of trying to weaken the Soviet Union and possibly cause it to collapse. It's because they saw this as one of two ways of getting out of the economic crisis that was affecting the West since the early-1970s. The other way for them was war. In the end, we all know that the Americans succeeded, thanks to people like Mikhail Gorbachev. The collapse of the Soviet Union allowed the capitalist ruling class of the West to postpone a serious economic crisis until 2008.