Chicken Korma of a film

Rating: 4/10 (22 May 2017)

****Spoilers**** This film is a bit like going for dinner at a curry house you've been to before. The first time you went it was brilliant, the food was amazing, the waiters were brilliant - you tried a new dish and it was excellent! So you went back, had one of those meals that sizzle and everyone looks when the waiter brings it in! Awesome! But then the next couple of times you went it's just not been very good, maybe they changed the chef or the menu and to be honest it was pretty awful, OK the Naan bread was nice, but the meat dish, well, was rank. But it's just down the street so you keep going back for more. You've had the tikka which was excellent and the vindaloo which was good but a bit too spicy and made your ring sting for a week and you regretted having it (Aliens Vs Predator 2). So after that you tried something totally new, that everyone told you was amazing and it gave you the S**** for a week. (Prometheus). For some reason you just can't stay away from this curry house - maybe it's the decor, or just that those first two meals were SO good even though it's almost 40 years since you had the first one, and all the chefs are dead or retired. So now you are back and you're going to play it safe: you'll have the Chicken korma. But it's bland and there's not enough of it, and they forgot the naan bread, which is the bit you really liked! You try to find a waiter. But there is no one there. You're all alone in the restaurant and you can't even get that beer! You peek into the kitchen and there is no chef! Just the waiter trying to cook everyone's dinner from a recipe book. And it's a shitty recipe book written by a child who has no idea how to cook or even has any understanding of flavour or subtlety or has ever been in a flipping kitchen! That's what Alien: Covenant is: a chicken korma of a film. The opening scene was like something written by a film school student. It felt like it went on for three hours of pure exposition and they all like Wagner, gimme a break. Then we are into space - lovely cold scary space - and all this stuff was great - loved it - was really thinking this film was on track, then they get to the planet and everyone behaves like a moron just like they did in the last film! It's a new planet and they don't even have respirators! I get sick if I go beyond France - so I take medicine with me! But No. Not an alien planet with spores and microbes everywhere. No just walk around and look at stuff. Split up and take your clothes off if you are a woman and wash in some dark corner with lots of dark tunnels. (How many times do we have to see the close up of her severed head? at least four and I say 'her' because apart from 'T' (For Tennessee - maybe a reference to Dallas in Alien?) I didn't really pick up on anyone's name apart from Walter and Daniels. Then David appears (yawn) and tells them to follow him, which they do without even saying "Excuse me, but who are you?" as you might especially just after loads of your friends have just been eviscerated and he leads them into some sort of medieval castle. All this technology but they couldn't sort out the guttering or the drainage let alone find a sewing machine (maybe they could have asked King Arthur?). In the scene where the big engineers were all standing round like people from Life of Brian waiting for a stoning I swear one of them was wearing Birkenstock sandals. Halfway across the universe and they haven't even got fashion sense. And then (checks watch) it's about an hour into the film and there are no aliens yet and some aliens start turning up and etc etc as you'd expect. They gestate in about 3 minutes and grow to full size without consuming any matter, so they just spontaneously generate matter, which is silly. But this isn't Guardians of the Galaxy and it's trying to be serious and not a little bit silly, so you start thinking about the logic and there is no logic it's just stupid and unimaginative. The foil of the unimaginative is often to hide behind perceived complexity which does not stand up to scrutiny and that's exactly what happened in Prometheus and again in this bland movie. And then there's an alien and he's a big one and he's climbing on a space ship thing that looks like it was designed from Lego and haven't we seen this before? OK the alien(s) can smash glass so let's do this scene yeah? And let's do it again. And one more time OK? Hell it worked the first time so and I've completely run out of ideas so sod it one more time! Yeah! Smash smash. Lovely. Now then. Um. Er. Actually. Do you know what? Lets try one more time what with 5 being the magic number an all. It's quite clear that the film makers don't know what to do with the aliens and they are just cannon fodder in this film which is now all about David and his god-complex and eventually he's going to get to Earth and try to kill everyone, and yawn, is that the time?
Tis a silly film and Ridley Scott should know better. I really enjoyed the bits in the space ship(s), but from the second they were on the planet to the second they left the planet it was utter balderdash. And the bit on the poster - isn't in the film. 2/5 Chicken Korma of a film.