Yesterday this clip was released to the internet…

This clip, listed as a “Prologue” to Alien: Covenant, was supposedly not directed by Ridley Scott (who made the original Alien, Prometheus, and this film) but rather his son Luke Scott.  The clip, obviously, is intended to get potential audiences interested in the upcoming film and will likely NOT be in the film itself.  This clip features no blood, no guts, no “horror” but subtly references the original Alien.

IMHO, it is a freaking bore.

Sorry, but nearly five minutes of seeing these uninteresting people -and one robot- talking (for the most part) nonsense before giving us a little hint toward the horror that one imagines is to come didn’t work for me.

Worst, it reinforced another fear I have: That Alien: Covenant is a subtle remake of the original Alien.

Yeah, the cast is larger and the effects are better and instead of “space truckers” we’ve got colonists going to the mystery planet, but otherwise it looks essentially the same.  Check out the movie’s actual trailer:

Let’s see…we got a disparate cast of “regular” people who go down into a planet (at night, with rain/bad weather, another original Alien element), they explore, they find a crashed ship with an “egg”, one of them apparently gets the face hugger, and all hell obviously breaks loose and an Alien creature has a target rich environment in which to operate.

Okay.

To be fair, there are other things here, one of which is hinted at it the movie’s trailer.  The bug that heads for the man’s ear, for example, may be some kind of permutation of the alien creature as well, though given its size its also quite possible this is something else.

There is also the question of the movie’s relationship with Prometheus and, more specifically, actress Noomi Rapace’s Elizabeth Shaw.  IMDB revealed she is in the film and I can’t help but wonder just how big a role her character has in this, especially when this is the plot description Twentieth Century Fox provides for this movie:

Bound for a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy, the crew of the colony ship Covenant discover what they think is an uncharted paradise, but is actually a dark, dangerous world, whose sole inhabitant is the synthetic David, survivor of the doomed Prometheus expedition.

Is Elizabeth Shaw dead?  Will we see her only in video and/or flashbacks?  That would be a shame given the way Prometheus ended.  Now, I’m not a huge fan of Prometheus (one of the more beautiful nonsensical sci-fi films I’ve seen in recent years), but in Elizabeth Shaw we had a survivor.  A woman who faced incredible horror, including being impregnated by the alien creature yet managing to rid herself of it, before leaving the plague planet in search of answers to the questions of related to the Aliens and those who created them.

It would be a big shame, again IMHO, if it turns out her character is dead.

Anyway, I’ll be a damned liar if I said based on what I’ve seen so far -which, again, is rather disappointing- is so disappointing I plan to miss the film.

I caught Prometheus in theaters and even though I thought it wasn’t all that good, I do not regret going to see it.  I was just too curious to see Ridley Scott take on the universe he started so brilliantly with Alien.

Yes, I will catch Alien: Covenant, most likely at some point during the first week of its release.  Unlike Prometheus, I’m going into this film with far more guarded optimism.

Surprise me, Mr. Scott.

Please!