Quote from: dave1978 on Aug 24, 2017, 11:05:05 AM
Cant help but keep going back to the stats at the top of this topic, 56% of fans will disagree with you and a futher 33% would be on the fence. Give it a rest, your in the minority and no ammount of youtube videos will convince us otherwise.
56% of fans
on this site. 33% of fans
on this site. This silly notion as if polls on this site accurately represent fan response to a film really needs to stop. Go visit the Prometheus fan reviews page. 66.7% loved it and 22.6% were on the fence. Would you say that it would be fair, based on those numbers, to refer to Prometheus as a well-liked film?
What's even more problematic with your post is that you seem to think that what's important is that he's on the minority on this site, rather than what he actually says. Even if Covenant was hated by 99% of the people on this site and only loved by 1%, it wouldn't have made his argument stronger or weaker in any way.
As for what Hide actually said, I don't think Covenant is a master class in how not to direct a film. It was pretty well directed overall, though I'd still put it among Ridley Scott's weaker material. It's still better than what most directors would've done, but nothing that's really praiseworthy either. Examples of bad direction in this film would include leaving redundant scenes in the film, while removing scenes of actual value.
For example: the opening prologue, while being a very good scene, is not needed in the film. Almost all of the information given to the audience in that scene is given to the audience
again via David during his conversations with the Covenant crew in Engineerville. The only thing that scene adds is making some sense out of David's radical character transformation between Prometheus and Covenant. In Prometheus, David was a shady, yet remarkably humane android with a hint at an inferiority complex. He was obeying orders in an attempt to appease Weyland, while also resenting other people for looking down on him. In Covenant, he's basically space Hitler with a hobby for genetics (mind you, his specialty in Prometheus was linguistics). This whole character transformation happens off-screen due to a bad screenplay, so it needs to be explained somehow. That scene's whole purpose is to tell the audience that David's Hitler mustache started growing way back on Earth. If that's the whole purpose of the scene, it could've been completely removed and just served as a quick conversation flashback during the Engineerville parts that would only show the immortality discussion. Everything else is a waste of the audience's time.
Another example is the deleted material. Anyone who watched it can tell that a huge chunk of it is character development. So are some of the viral scenes of this film. I personally don't think adding them to the film would've saved it, but they would definitely have improved it. Their absence is why so many people are complaining about the first act of Covenant being a boring chore; It doesn't do its job of setting up the characters.
And then, there's of course the fact that Covenant looks visually worse than Prometheus. You can cut Ridley Scott some slack for having less of a budget to work with, but I mean, it's not like there weren't interesting locations in this film, such as everything in Engineerville outside of David's hideout. They just weren't utilized for anything. Even inside his hideout, when excluding the room where he did his experiments (which was great), it's pretty bland. No murals, everything is clean, nothing new and interesting...very uninspired stuff. In Alien and even in Prometheus, everything looked gritty, real and original. You wanted the film to give you more time to explore those rooms and corridors. None of that in Covenant.
My main issue with the film is its script, which is abysmal, but I gotta give the screenwriters some slack and throw some more hate at Ridley Scott about it because they had to write their script around his ideas, which, in my opinion, were fundementally flawed.
