Review Detail

I watched this edit with my wife after we gave up trying to get through Wraith's edit "Alien vs Predator: Outbreak" which combined both AvP films. As with the AvP films, I only watched Covenant once in the theatre and bought it out of a sense of obligation, having grown up with the Alien franchise, so I didn't remember much of Covenant when watching Wraith's edit. As per Wraith's recommendation, we watched the Extended edit instead of Alien V.

I agree with many of The Scribbling Man's criticisms of Covenant and the Extended edit doesn't fix those, but it does do wonders in other areas of the movie which were sorely lacking in the original release. While Covenant was rightly criticized for being an unworthy clone of Alien, one thing it didn't copy from the original in my opinion was building a sense of camaraderie or give much detail to the characters. Wraith's decision to include the pre-release materials and the very telling Phobos sequence helped a lot. My wife thought the Phobos sequence went on a bit long but it was one of my favourite parts of the edit. The part that felt long to me was David's lengthy exposition tacked on at the end. It seemed to fill in details that should have been better addressed in the film itself, which is of course no fault of Wraith's, but I felt that after the big ending twist, the narration really took the wind out of the movie's sails.

We watched a 16.5 GB copy of the edit which looked and sounded great, and neither of us noticed any A/V issues or other editing errors. Covenant is still my least favourite Alien film, but this edit was a big improvement. I'll hang on to the shorter edit and watch that after a while to see if it improves on the pacing. Unfortunately, as with AvP and Prometheus, the more backstory I get on the xenomorphs, the less I enjoy it. I think part of the magic of the first Alien trilogy was the mystery behind the origin of the species, so even if Ridley does another film to wrap up David's arc, I'm pretty sure I'll be disappointed by it. That said, I'm glad that editors like Wraith will be there to sift through deleted material and such to tighten things up where Ridley drops the ball.