The Franchise Continues

Rating: 5/10 (13 May 2017)

The Alien franchise, much like the Terminator franchise, seems to be one of those franchises that simply will not die. Mind you, when I look at the people who swarm into this movie these days a part of me wonders whether they are familiar with, or have even watched, the original movies. Okay, I am probably writing them off as unsophisticated louts a little too quickly because even though there seems to be a sort of expectation among the millennials these days with regards to films, it does not necessarily mean that they automatically reject what I consider to be the classics. Mind you, a part of me, as I sit here writing this review, never expected to consider Alien, and even Terminator, to be a classic movie when I first watched them, but since it is now over thirty years since they first hit the big screen, and the franchise is still going strong, a part of me says that they probably are.
Anyway, Covenant follows on from Prometheus, though the problem is that since it has been a while since I saw Prometheus a part of me does not actually remember what happened in that film. Yet in a way this film is still a part of what is intending to be a prequel trilogy even though from what I remember of the original films, humanity hadn't gone out and colonised the star systems yet. On the other hand, a part of me also expected that there would be a closer tie in with the original movie, however as the film progressed this became less and less apparent, and the connection with Prometheus become more and more obvious.
So, the film is set around the colony ship Covenant that is damaged when it passes through an ion storm. Since the crew are all forced to wake up, they decide to assess the situation and discover that there is a habitable planet much closer than the planet that they are intending to colonise. Well, they decide to take a short cut and go and explore this planet, but it become pretty obvious that this planet isn't as crash hot as it originally appeared to be, but then again that shouldn't be surprising because short cuts rarely, if ever, actually work out the way that they are supposed to work out.
Like Prometheus, this film not only completely ignores the Aliens vs Predator movies (which is a shame because I actually really liked those movies, though I have to admit that I am probably in the minority when it comes to Requium), but it also explores creatures other than the traditional alien. In fact what it seems to explore is how the alien that has become the staple of the horror science-fiction movie (and also a part of modern western culture) came about. Straight out, we do have the alien appear in the film, but like Promentheus it goes much, much further beyond being a simple bug hunt. Mind you, since we are now at movie number six (ignoring Aliens vs Predator), the creators do have to continue to reinvent the franchise lest it simply end up being just another bad sequel that many franchises eventually suffer from. However, my thoughts is that this film was okay, and somewhat enjoyable, particularly since there were elements of this that took it beyond your typical bug hunt. While the twists did turn out to be pretty good, as I mentioned in my Facebook post, this film is going to have a very hard time exceeding the original two.