Chirrut believes in the Force. Baze doesn't. Chirrut's example brought Baze around. It's a small arc but it's there, and it's not shabby in the emotional payoff when it happens.

There are other X-Wing dudes. They could all just slam into pylons and die for all I care. I don't know these nameless twats, and the movie can just have another dozen of them show up without it feeling weird at all, so who gives a shit that they did that little stunt?

This is the second case where someone has told me that I'm not paying enough attention to a movie, when the things being pointed out are these one-liner moments in a sea of boring dialogue coming from flat characters. I remember those scenes, they just didn't have any impact on me.

I just didn't care about any of the characters. It felt like they could do pretty much anything at any point because there wasn't really a strong sense of character to any of them. He shoots the dad, he doesn't shoot the dad... Either one makes sense and neither feels like much of a change in the character. He already seems mildly conflicted earlier when the guy gives him the order before they leave. It's weak. He should be 100% "Yes sir, I totally fucking agree, and I'll kill this bitch as well if she gets in my way!". Then we have some events happen and he ends up in that conflicted state and then doesn't do it.

The robot wasn't funny. The film annoyed me with its non-stop references to the original films... That probably had a huge impact in how invested I was in the movie. Every five minutes something from the previous films was brought up for no reason, and R2 and 3PO were actually a plothole when they showed up. They should have been on the ship or on Alderan or something. I dunno where Leia is in this movie, as I didn't get to that part of the flick. I still haven't finished it.

I just wasn't invested in anything, probably just due to being kicked out of the film all the time with all the little stupid things they kept throwing in there for no reason except to have fan service and to try to tie things directly to A New Hope. CGI Tarkin was OK in the first scene he was in and just kept showing up and getting worse. It felt like the prequels. It felt like a big-budget fan-film that's taking the goofy Star Wars bullshit far too seriously. That's the one thing about TFA that I liked. It wasn't taking everything so fucking seriously and was just having fun and being melodramatic at times. There are serious moments, but the film isn't like a grim drama with action beats. It's an adventure film. That's what I miss about older flicks. They were actually fun adventure films. This new breed of this sort of film is mostly exposition-heavy dry dramatic crap with dull characters with no arcs or very shallow arcs where they barely change as characters, and then they put action beats that are far too overstated and 'epic' and are constantly trying to impress me with their visual splendor.

Little things. The X-Wings show up at the shield thing and the very first thing they do is start flying through the little struts around the entry thing. That's like a late-stage desperation act that should happen later when one of the X-Wing pilots is being chased by three ties and can't shake them, so he starts flying through that area to see if he can shake them off or get them to kill themselves. In this movie it's just some bullshit they do to show off the cool idea the guys in charge of the CG portions of the film had during their meeting where they just tossed out a bunch of cool moments to have in the action scenes. It's not tied to anything I give a shit about and they give me no reason to care if they make it or don't make it. There are other X-Wing dudes. They could all just slam into pylons and die for all I care. I don't know these nameless twats, and the movie can just have another dozen of them show up without it feeling weird at all, so who gives a shit that they did that little stunt?

Things like that. It didn't make me feel anything. I felt nothing for a lot of this movie. I was just mostly bored. I dunno.

I would also like to see the original version of the film that was shot. I'd like to imagine that most of the fan-service bullshit were later additions to the movie done to make it feel more Star Warsy.

I share Prax's opinion of Grizzly Man, fwiw.

Yeah, sorry, I've kinda gotten burned out on talking about SW on the Internet so I'd been skimming the R1 posts. Retroactive humor appreciation!

Turns out Ridley Scott actually listens to criticism.

SPOILER Show

Instead of another pretentious story that asks questions about our origins (and has no clue how to answer them), this time we got a much more straightforward Alien movie. Some plot points from Prometheus are continued, but it's clear that Ridley wanted to push aside its more controversial aspects and go back to Alien's horror roots.

Shaw, the previous film's annoying protagonist, got killed offscreen by David, who's much more interesting to watch. Even the problem of her religious motivation ("it's what I choose to believe") gets mentioned - the company didn't trust Billy Crudup with a command because of his faith. Did the writers actually listen to the DiF commentary?

The David/Walter dynamic must've been inspired by Lore and Data from ST-TNG (John Logan is a fan). The cliché of an evil AI doesn't bother me here - I have no trouble believing that an android with a humanlike psyche and superior intellectual capabilities would've become megalomaniacal. Fassbender's double performance is easily the most interesting one in the movie.

Unfortunately, the other characters don't get much development - their main purpose is to become xenomorph fodder. They're even more reckless than the Prometheus crew; when will they learns that sending people to an unknown planet without spacesuits (another Star Trek trope recycled by John Logan) is a bad idea?

Dorkman's remark about the Alien universe becoming smaller in Prometheus is even more applicable here, when it turns out that the facehugger eggs are a result of David's experiments. It is never explained how they got onto the Engineer ship on LV-426.

The visual side is impressive, but we've come to expect that from Ridley Scott.

To sum it up: Covenant is an improvement over Prometheus, but still has issues.