Neil deGrasse Tyson Reviews Everything Wrong With Alien: Covenant

05/06/2017 05:35 pm EDT

America's favorite astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is a frequent guest and friend of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. For the latest episode he decided to forgo his usual spot on the couch and instead recorded a segment reviewing the big summer blockbusters hitting theaters.

Tyson began the segment going over the latest entry in Ridley Scott's Alien franchise, the forthcoming Alien: Covenant.

The Prometheus sequel/Alien prequel focuses on the colonization crew of the Covenant, a big space transport loaded with couples that are meant to establish and populate an Earth-like planet in a far off galaxy. But this is the planet of the Engineers that Noomi Rapace's Elizabeth Shaw and Michael Fassbender's android David set off to find at the end of the previous movie, and not everything is as it should be.

"There is no sensible space mission that's going to send humans to a planet before we send robots," Tyson began saying, "because if anything's going to do some killing, it'll kill the robots first and not the people. And that'll tell us, 'let's try a different planet.' So I don't know what they're doing there."

Well, Fassbender's character has to count for something, right? And knowing the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, those jerks are always trying to put people in harm's way just so they can get their hands on some alien organisms—this film might be no different. But the full scale colonization project? That seems like a waste of resources.

"They're sending, like, people who are just going to make babies and start a new civilization? That's cool," Tyson added. "Turns out genetic research shows that only about 12 families started all human life across North and South America, across the Bering Strait. So it's not a weird thing to imagine just a few fertile couples beginning an entire new generation of the human species."

Well, sorry Neil, but that would be pretty boring to watch.

"But, of course, these are the movies and anytime a movie takes place in space, the plot is people go into space and something bad happens. Something goes wrong. And there you have it."

It's as if Tyson cracked the scientific formula behind making an entertaining horror/sci-fi movie. If only David Fincher learned the code before making Alien3.

Alien: Covenant is in theaters May 19.

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