Quote from: Paranoid Android on Jan 07, 2018, 01:37:51 PM
The one single thing Covenant has to contribute - the sole purpose for its existence - can be summed up in four words: 'David made the Alien'. And that contribution undermines the entire franchise.
No, David making the alien does not undermine the series. It confounds the assumptions of some members of the audience. Some of us thought for a long time the Alien was an ancient, unknowable creature, a reaper for the Old Ones. And the Old Ones sent forth ships piloted by these vaguely elephant-like Space Jockeys. And one of their ships crashed on LV426 and sat there for a long time. And we like the idea. It's dark and mysterious, full of mystery and foreboding. It adds to the feel of Alien. Dark Horse ran with it, wrote a lot of stories. Some of them were great, some not so great. Aliens:Apocalypse is probably the best treatise in favor of this view of the Alien as a dark, eternal force from somewhere long ago and far away.
But we know there are problems with this. How long could the beacon run? How long could the dead ship sustain the energy field covering the eggs? What does that field do? How long can a facehugger live inside an egg? How did WY miss the beacon until the Nostromo mission? If WY knew the ship was there, why send a commercial towing vehicle with an expensive payload instead of a scout ship with a professional crew? Questions, questions. We can debate endlessly why, but the the derelict may not have been on LV426 for as long as we thought. And the Company had a pretty good idea what the Nostromo crew would find on that rock. How did the Company know?
If David made the Alien, the company probably knew because David told them. And David made the creature using black goo, fire of the gods, if you will. He did not make the creature whole-cloth from nothing. He had a lot of help from the Engineer ship. He had to conduct a lot of experiments to get the desired result, but the underlying tech is still of alien origin.
This does not undermine the franchise. And the problem is not the underlying idea, either. It's the execution of the idea in the movies. These prequel movies look good; but the storytelling, pacing, and character interaction are all lacking. As I have said many times, these films could have been great; but they're not. It will be best if the dead franchise lies sleeping until someone finally figures out how to handle it.