Alien Covenant (2017)
Alien Covenant (2017)
Directed by Ridley Scott
Story by Jack Paglen and Michael Green
Screenplay by John Logan and Dante Harper
Based on characters created by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett
Rated R
The Alien franchise is one that I haven’t been the most invested in over the years so I’m kind of laissez-faire about it even when it takes a nose dive on occasion. The first Alien (1979) by Ridley Scott is unquestionably a sci-fi/horror masterpiece and its more action oriented sequel Aliens by James Cameron from 1986 is awesome as well. But it is often agreed that 1992’s Alien 3 (the very troubled debut feature by David Fincher) is what started the franchise’s downhill slope. I personally like Alien 3 (especially the assembly cut) and if I am honest with myself, Alien 3 is my favorite of all the Alien sequels/spinoffs, warts and all. But I believe that it was Alien Resurrection and the two terrible Alien vs. Predator films that truly killed the franchise.
Then in 2012, Ridley Scott released a prequel of sorts to the Alien Series entitled Prometheus and it was…not great. I feel making the space jockey (the big creature in the chair in the first movie) a big tall humanoid albino and going into how the Xenomorphs and even humanity came about in this franchise were bad ideas and I’m not alone in that. But I’m usually a forgiving person and I was willing to see what was next in Alien Covenant. If it didn't satisfy me in terms of narrative at least I could get a decent monster movie out of it since the original creature is back, right?
So is it a better movie than Prometheus?
Kind of.
Is it a good movie?
Well… that depends on what expectations you have going into it.
The space colonization vessel Covenant with a crew of 7 and over 2000 colonists in hyper sleep is on course to a habitable planet when it is hit by a neutrino burst which causes damage to the ship and numerous deaths to the sleeping colonists with the ship’s captain being among them. During repairs, they get a transmission from a nearby planet that looks hospitable. The new captain named Oram (Billy Crudup) decides to go and investigate with objection from Daniels (Katherine Waterston). When they arrive on the planet, they find the famous space jockey ship and discover that Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace from Prometheus) was there on board. Some crew members come into contact with foreign spores from which comes aliens that burst from backs and throats and all hell breaks loose. The android David (Michael Fassbender who also plays the android Walter on the Covenant) saves them and leads them to safety. There the crew discovers what happened to Shaw and what David has been up to for the past 10 years.
I won’t go into spoilers but I will just say this now. When it is revealed how the Xenomorphs came about many will likely go “Ehhhhhh…..” just as I did. It’s not that it is the stupidest explanation in the universe but it’s just I feel that there never really should be an explanation of how the Xenomorphs came about. I’m not trying to act as any major authority on storytelling or trying to tell the filmmakers how it should have been done. It is just my point of view. The reason the Xenomorphs have both terrified and fascinated audiences since their official debut in 1979 was that you don’t know what they are, where they came from, who created them, why were they in the cargo hold in the first movie and so on. By giving them a creation backstory, it takes away the mystery and what makes them terrifying to a certain degree. Sure, you can know a lot about something and it can still be scary, I still feel an air of mystery helps sell terror as well. Sometimes the questions are more interesting than any answer.
The other big grievances I have is that the movie is not really much fun to watch. It wasn’t completely boring but it was hard to get really immersed when it tries to combine philosophical ramblings mixed with violent deaths. I realize it is getting harder to scare audiences nowadays and thus the film was more focused on its central story to carry it but since that didn’t quite work for me either the film got tedious at times. Two sequences involving aliens attacking people were pretty good but, on the whole, the film wasn't really exciting.
I guess I can't say that I got a good monster movie out of it.
Dang it.
Also, none of the questions that are brought up in Prometheus are addressed in this film. The biggest one, of course, is why the engineers were going to go to Earth and wipe out the human race with the spore stuff. In Prometheus, Shaw and David make a big deal about going to the space jockey home planet (which is where Alien Covenant takes place by the way) to find out why they wanted to wipe out humans but nothing is done with that. David doesn’t address it in any way, shape or form and it seems to have been swept under the rug. They could explain that in another film but who’s to say that anyone will care by then.
As it was with Prometheus, Alien Covenant is a gorgeously shot movie. It looks amazing and once again Scott shows he is a master of his craft. The sets and props are fantastic! From the human ships and vehicles to parts of the alien world shown to us, everything looks and feels real.
The performances from the cast, particularly from Fassbender (in both his roles), are pretty decent even if the rest of the cast is pretty forgettable which is an upgrade from Prometheus’ irritating and stupid. I didn’t have any interest in any of the characters, except David and by extension Walter, because they weren’t really set up to be characters worth following. The film should have given us small insights into their personality and what makes them tick so we can relate to them. Not every character needed that but the primary ones sure did. Because of this, I didn’t really care about them once they started dying. In fact, you could separate all the characters into two categories; characters who are directly involved in the plot like Oram, Daniels, Walter and Tennessee (played by Danny McBride by the way), and characters you know will not make it to the end i.e. the rest of the crew. The best characters are David and Walter (David was the best character in Prometheus as well) and their interactions and dialogue are some of the best parts of the film. The profundity of their conversations, however, wasn't as good as, I feel, to Alien 3 which didn’t relate to the Xenomorphs or the act of creation but rather about the nature of the situation of the prisoners on Fury 161 in relation to the company and the outside world. David is built up as being really the only character worth following because he is the most developed and has an interesting agenda that makes one want to see where it goes.
From what I understand, Ridley Scott regretted leaving the Alien franchise to other people’s devices (except Cameron’s Aliens I suppose) and is attempting to do a kind of retcon as well as provide a prequel series of films to try and steer the franchise into what he considers the right direction. I will usually defend filmmakers when they decide to do what they want with a property even if fans occasionally become outraged but it is on the filmmakers whether or not it truly sinks or floats in the end and that doesn’t mean I always have to like it. Even though I don’t care much for certain things in the new Alien films, I kind of do have to respect Scott for sticking to his guns as I have Peter Jackson on The Hobbit Trilogy or even Zack Snyder on his DC films. I know lots of fans are foaming at the mouth over this movie but they don’t have to watch it and I’m not sure they could do any better.
In the end, I find Alien Covenant to be not that great but I don’t think it’s as terrible as I have heard. I just don’t think this is a film worth getting upset over since it didn’t really move the series forward nor did it really make it backslide. I could nit-pick this film all day long but what good would that do? All it boils down to is that Ridley Scott, like all other directors, are as good as the scripts they work with. He is a very prolific filmmaker and thus he is bound to have a lot of hits and misses. Alien Covenant just happens to be a miss. It will rank among his mediocre works like Body of Lies (2008) , Robin Hood (2010), Prometheus (2012), GI Jane (1997) and others.
Will I see another Alien film from him? Perhaps. I am curious as to how Scott is going to get the space jockey ship on LV-426. But, if I were you, I’d skip Alien Covenant and watch Lifeforce instead.
