 Today, we not only reflect on two bad movies, but more the deaths of their respective franchises. It's Alien Covenant vs. the Predator on movie feuds, so sit back, relax, and I'll do the fingering. Then Covinshit features a double dose of Michael Fassbender for some fastbender-on-fastbender action. It's too fast, too bendurous. As the actor plays super-dick Android David and country bumpkin Android Walter, they take turns blowing each other's flutes, making xenomorph babies, styling hair, and having long boring discussions. It's all very uninteresting, and definitely what I was looking for from my Alien movie. One of the highlights from the previous film, Prometheus, was the explorer-turned-survivor Shah. So naturally, Alien Covenant killed her off-camera. In her place, we have a really poor, ripply impersonator named Daniels, played by Catherine Waterston. Her biggest character trait? Her dumb haircut. The rest of the film consists of a throwaway crew of a colony ship who have apparently never received a day of training in their lives. Speaking of dumbasses, let's talk about the Predator cast. Not to be confused with Predator or Predators. This is the fourth installment of this shit-show-of-a-franchise, AVP 1 and 2 Excluded. We once again pretty much ignore the movies that came before it, outside of a couple of hat-tips here and there. The focus is now on an American sniper named Quinn, played by that prick from Logan. He is joined by Olivia Munn, or as I call her, Olivia Yum, because I'm an adult. She has the difficult task of trying to figure out how to breathe through her nose, and she fails that task miserably. As she is seen in a perpetual state of pissed-off confusion, mouth agape at every turn. I think she's a biologist who brings forth absolutely no information to the table outside of stating the obvious as it's happening, like, oh look, that Predator is ripping a man's face off. The cast isn't all bad, and there are quite a few funny moments throughout. Keegan-Michael Key and Jake Vucey being the standouts for me. Yvonne Strahovski, I think I'm saying that incorrectly, but she's in a few other things here and there, but she can also be seen playing the wife in this until she's just gone with no explanation, because the writers forgot that she was even in this movie for a while. Last and certainly least is Jacob Trambly, the Jake Lloyd of the picture. He has been gifted with Asperger's, which, according to this film, is like having a really high midi-chlorian count. He can remember how every single half-finished chess game was set up in a classroom. He can crack alien technology, and he can color one hell of a mean alien map from memory. The kid's on the spectrum, baby. He's got spectrum powers. These skills, amongst others, are often necessary, as he's left alone multiple times in this picture because the adults are absolute trash, like during a fire drill, or going out to trick-or-treat alone in the middle of the night. Thanks, Mom. Let's talk about the title characters now. Alien Covenant features, you guessed it, aliens. This time, the black goo takes form of much deadlier versions. An airborne virus, faster, smaller albino xenomorphs, and of course those large, lumbering ones we've grown to love over the years. David is doing evolution wrong, though. An airborne virus is the ultimate threat. Hell, those little white devils are far more dangerous than their evolved form. I mean, at the end of the day, I guess David really just wants to be a good dad. And he's nailing it. He's doing fathering right. We even get a touching scene of him showing his baby xenomorph how to raise its arms for the first time. Mmm. It's truly, truly stupid. Remember what a fearsome badass hunter the Predator was? No? Neither do I. As this 2018 film tries and succeeds at wiping away his legacy, we're first graded to him as he gets his ass properly handed when the film starts up. The human didn't even give enough shits to go finish the job. Just leaves him for dead on the ground like a little bitch. Here our Predator does manage to kill a bunch of helpless scientists, only to once more get properly owned by a bigger, slower version. There are also Predator puppies, because who cares anymore? Speaking of not caring, let's talk about these stories. Alien Coven Thy Audience's Time is the story of a director who didn't like what he did with Prometheus anymore, so he retconned most of it. I also think he really has a thing for Fastbender. Not only did he give the guy two parts, he made his character David the creator of the alien species, playing God in his little workshop, tinkering with herbs and spices, until he accidentally added one ingredient he shouldn't have, chemical X. His 300-point plan is made complete when he successfully tricks a space crew full of dipshits to abandon a decade-spanning colonization journey to a well-vetted planet to instead go to an uncharted secret location. Naturally, like any properly or improperly trained-for-that-matter crew, they send like 90% of their team down to investigate. No suits. No helmets. Because fuck it. They did have the wherewithal to check if the planet was breathable, so it's safe to say they did their homework. I mean, I can't imagine there being any sort of foreign toxins or dangerous creatures or really anything new this planet has to offer. It's basically Earth. But what are the odds, really, that our crew member would be affected by any of this deadly stuff? A good, actually, as two of them are infected almost immediately. And within a few hours, the rest of them are attacked by crazy aliens. The MVP, though, has to go to Tennessee's girlfriend, Ferris, who is, by far, the queen of the fucktards. She gets blood vomited on her by one of the infected, suitless teammates, so naturally she carts his ass through the entire ship before getting to the sick bay. She then has the gall to lock her friend in the room with this guy who is now oozing blood from every orifice, stating she has to keep the infection contained. Has to keep the infection contained? You just pranced him around the entire ship. There's blood hand prints everywhere. To her credit, she does contain the alien, who then rips her co-worker's face off. And then she doesn't because she opens the door right after that to let the thing out so she can kill him, but misses blowing up the entire ship, including herself. And she strands the entire crew on the planet. Why not just send the android down to look around? Or a machine with a camera? Why take any time at all to think through things? Bottom line, I wanted all these people dead before the movie was over. And in that sense, my wish was granted as David takes care of business. The whole thing caps off with our love to hate him android regurgitating up some alien embryos to colonize the original destination. So not only did David accomplish his mission, but that of the now dead crews. My god, they were the worst. I had recently rewatched the three previous Predator movies before witnessing this fourth move. It's not really a movie, whatever this fourth thing was. Regardless, Predator is the only one I love. The rest are pointless retreads with nothing new to offer in the slightest. So going in, my expectations were very low. The Predator managed to be even more dumb than I could have possibly comprehended. It's basically a hard R Transformers movie in terms of logic. Peadog crash lands on Earth after being chased all around space by what I only assume the Dwayne Johnson version of the Predator would look like. Not all is as it seems though, as this Predator isn't here to stalk and kill its prey, it's here to save it. Why you ask? I don't know. That's a good question. One that the writer and director, Shane Black, didn't think through. In fact, I'm not sure the revelation even hit him until the last five minutes of the script were written. Up until that point, our Predator's seen killing 20 to 30 people and even takes the time to skin a few. So after he crash lands, Call of Duty cover art character steals his mask and gauntlet. Then goes to Mexico to mail it back to a PO box that no longer exists. So naturally it goes to the home of his ex-wife and son. Meanwhile, Lil Snapper is struggling to find that perfect Halloween mask. As luck would have it, he finds his answer after rummaging through his father's top secret mystery box. With the power of Asperger's on his side, he's able to figure out alien technology, firing up the mask, locate a ship, and get that tracking beacon set up. Oh, and he also wins the Halloween contest. I'm joking. That's silly. That doesn't happen. He murders a teenager on the second level of a house, possibly kills the family as well. Who knows? Boys will be boys. There's no consequences in this film. Eventually, American Sniper is arrested for being a well-respected Marine. He teams up with a rag-tag group of deplorables and meets Olivia Yum, who jumped into their hearts on the top of a bus after parkouring up the side of a scaffold chasing after the Predator, who just got done slaughtering some of her coworkers because she's a biologist. Down the halfway mark, the friendly neighborhood Predator is killed by the Indo-Predator. Now the hunt is on when the Indominus Predator starts a literal countdown from his ship. They're playing a real shitty version of hide-and-go-seek tag, except for tag ends with your head getting blown off. This ending caps off how I think everyone thought it would. Predator's seen a dying and sniper guy getting his own alien Iron Man suit so that he can fight alongside the Avengers in Infinity War Part 2. Look out, Thanos. Disney owns everything. We could see John McClain in there, even. Yippee-ki-yay, alien fucker! Ridley Scott makes beautiful-looking movies, yet Alien Covenant's not something I'd hang my Xenomorph on. It's mostly a lot of nighttime boredom with little of interest going on, and the visually stunning shots are ruined by plot. The score by Jed Kurtzel has familiar blends of Prometheus and the 79 original mixed in, but like everything else in this disaster, I couldn't appreciate it. For the most part, the Xenomorph being fully CG didn't really bother me. The problem was the lack of creativity and fear. This movie is dumb from the ground up, with little room at all for scares. The most disturbing scene in this flick is that of the large featureless albino alien ripping the head off one of the victims. Although it's not near as disturbing as the event that immediately follows, which is the captain seeing the beheaded crew member looking at David asking no questions following him into a deep dark cellar and becoming chestburster material. How... How did those eggs get there? Doesn't a queen alien need to lay those? Did... Did David lay the eggs? I'm asking too many questions. The predator uses a fair amount of practical effects, all things considered. Plenty of CG is a foot though, and the ships and weaponry have a bit of a cartoonish plastic look to them. But it kind of works with the cartoonish plastic script. I'm not sure how Shane Black screwed this up so monumentally considering some of the good work he's put out in the past, but Jesus Christ, this is a mess. He opts not to use the tried-and-true predator vision outside of one or two shots. Hell, he barely uses the camouflage after the initial crash. The predator dog CG is ugly to put it lightly, and fucking got awful bad awful to put it harshly. You have Olivia Yum in this flick, so naturally they had to write a scene and objectifying her with some bullshit sterilization procedure, requiring the participant to strip down naked. There is nothing scary or sexy in this situation. If you're gonna put your actor or actress in a vulnerable position, at least use them, you know? Give me a side boob or a side dick. Don't just show a shoulder up and have no tension. What's the point? Alien Covenant at least had the wherewithal to handle their gratuitous shower scene properly. Side boob on point, possible side shaft on point. No, I don't think there was side shaft, but side boob for sure. The original Predator score makes its glorious return. There is nothing quite as chilling as hearing that familiar beat fire up as a bunch of jackasses on a football field try to wrangle up alien predator puppies by hitting them with their cars. The tech in this movie doesn't even attempt to make a lick of sense. Force fields activate one panel at a time. Human text and Crayola drawings are deciphered on the fly. Alien weaponry is kind of self-aware and battles whenever the hell it feels like it. I guess it's when the person's being attacked, but there was plenty of times where it was just kind of picking and choosing when they wanted to do stuff. To the Predator's credit, which there is very little to grant, some of the kills and gags are quite enjoyable. Tripwire decapitations go a long way in my book. There's also a couple deaths by force field and a reoccurring gag of people dying by their own weapons. That alien tech can be tricky. Let's wrap this up. I want to be clear here. There is no winner in this feud. I'm going to grant I granted one to the Predator, but that doesn't mean it's a winner. That just means I got some entertainment out of how stupid it was. There were some funny moments, but there were truly some unintentionally funny ones as well. Alien, a David story had nothing going for it outside of not only burning the Prometheus bridge, but that of the original by discrediting what the xenomorph was. There is a less is more phrase that is just lost in Hollywood. You have something good. Let it stay good. We don't need to go back and ruin it. Oh, where did the alien come from? How was it created? What is his motivation? I don't want to know. The reason Predator won and alien works so well was because you had no idea what these things were. They were in the shadows, ominous, scary creatures that were very deadly and were better than humans at hunting. That's all you needed. We had to figure out how to survive. Now we know everything about these fucking things. There's nothing scary. Oh, okay. They were made by a crazy ass robot who had a God complex because he wasn't loved enough. So he sat away in his little cave mixing and pounding potions and spices. And there you go. That's your movie. That's the alien now. This is more than just reviews. This is movie feuds. And I think now it's time for AVP three where we find out David also created the Predator species by sleeping with a xenomorph who is in disguise. Yeah, it was a deceptomorph as they're commonly referred to. Now the series got stupid. Thanks for watching The Feud. If you want to keep up with the show, make sure to subscribe to Adam Does Movies for all the latest movie feuds, Adam Rance and the stupid cringe show that I produce. You can also check out my playlist. I've done a ton of these episodes. So there's plenty of hours left to watch. Take care. And stand here for a little while while you decide your future.