Also, like RandomNobody mentioned, the sex scene in the Covenant trailer is probably where my eyeballs rolled out of my face.
I actually KIND of liked that since the original tail-between-the-legs death scene was VERY intentionally meant to be a rape metaphor, and in this one, it's the guy getting shredded to bits and he's properly exposed in that moment as well, so it has a similar but different tone to it coming from that point of narrative view, even if we don't know why they're banging in a waterfall at that moment with a Neo/Xenomorph stalking about.
i liked resurrection for the bit when winona ryder says "all aliens, please report to level one"
aliens is alright, but it's a big shift in tone compared to the first film. i can't imagine alien featuring bill paxton going on about his squad of ultimate badasses and shouting stuff like 'game over, man! game over!'
actually, i think the whole colonial marines thing was one of my least favourite parts of the series overall. i'm just not that interested in them. which might be why i wasn't too disappointed to hear that the colonial marines game was actually shite. (if isolation had been like colonial marines, i would have been very sad)
plus in aliens you had the xenomorphs just running into gun turrets until they ran out of bullets. they like the movie monster equivalent of a small child who never learns the stove is hot even after getting burnt 25 times. i thought they were meant to be smart.
i guess they're just prometheus-smart.
(also are they going to explain why everything in prometheus looks shiny and modern and everything in alien is retro-modern. is there going to be a film showing the change in aesthetic trends. couldn't you have based the designs on the film you're meant to be working your way towards)
That moment is so good.
Also, Aliens has armed forces whereas Alien didn't. I still think of it as the difference between surviving to build a hive vs. using that hive makes for those tactics to be understandable even if they're far less interesting. The story of the colony being overrun would be an interesting one, since it'd be like Alien on crack.
FWIW, Initial control over survival is central to Alien films feeling scary. 1, 3, & AvP:R, the Xenomorphs are put there without any real control of the people who need to survive it, whereas in 2, 4, AvP, & Prometheus, all the people put themselves there (silent machinations of Weyland-Yutani notwithstanding), and then just need to escape. That's the essential difference in seeing them as action or horror films and the difference between the Aliens themselves as being a true horror, or as a monstrous obstacle — and again, I can't quite tell where this new one lands.
Insofar as aesthetic differences, I always found that one to be easy. Luxury yachts, cargo ships, and battleships used in 2016 all look extremely different and have varying levels of technologies on them and people aboard them. Realistically, space travel would exacerbate those differences even more significantly, so while it can feel a little bit disjointed, I don't really see major issues with it — even ignoring the actual years in which all those films were made.
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