Alien: Covenant vs. Alien³

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6 comments

Rac
Rac

I find the lore of the Alien franchise fascinating. The cold, dark, lonely world it creates. The corporate shenanigans to create an "perfect organism". Alien 3 and Covenant may have more in common than one would think beforehand. Covenant left me wanting more, deservedly so. Alien 3 gets bashed quite a lot, but I find it somehow soothing.

I feel like many will disagree with me on this, but I much prefer Alien 3. Whatever else may be said about it, it had a strong sense of identity within the Alien franchise as a tragic slasher. On a technical level it had one of the best (if not the best) musical scores in the franchise and I loved the production design, editing and cinematography. Almost everything about Alien: Covenant feels like it's on autopilot, lifting elements of all the previous Alien films (I get the sense that the whole "building a wooden cabin" monologue was almost a subtle reference to Vincent Ward's abandoned Wooden Planet script for an early draft of Alien 3, though that might be clutching at straws) and mixing them into a film that goes at such a pace as to butcher the Alien lifecycle without offering anything satisfying to make up for it. All the problems of Prometheus are still there, albeit with an overly expository script to dumb the mythology down to a basic level, and the stuff lifted from other movies is mostly cheap fan service and largely uninspired. It's not the worst Alien film, but it's definitely the least interesting in my eyes, which in many respects is more disappointing.

Rac
Rac

Vincent Ward's "Wooden Planet" script came to my mind several times during Covenant.

Alien 3 is almost endlessly fascinating, in how good it is despite the royal screwing-over Fincher got from the studio. Covenant, weirdly, plays it safe. In predictable ways.

These make up one of the closest match ups within the Alien franchise for me. While I think the original has yet to be topped, and Resurrection is the worst of the bunch, these are jockeying for #4-5 for me, as are Aliens and Prometheus for #2/3 (I haven't seen either of the AvP movies). I guess Alien3 doesn't really shir over its predecessors quite as much as Covenant does (which both made a Weyland android almost solely responsible for the events of Alien and onward and also killed off the Engineers before they could answer any of the questions posed in Prometheus) but God, its boring. Imho Michael Fassbender acting opposite himself is the best thing in either movie, but overall I'm giving it to 3 for now.

Gotta go with Ripley on this one

Just couldn't stand Alien 3....