The teen age date-night crowd at the weekend multiplex are likely to be the most irritated by Alien: Covenant, a movie in which no actual aliens appear until nearly an hour in (and the familiar franchise one takes even longer to show up). Director Ridley Scott quite plainly cares not what you think, however, as he actually has serious sci-fi on his mind; whether he achieves his goal is another matter, but Covenant feels more like an episode of Star Trek in the Alien universe than a thematic extension of Ellen Ripley’s Another-Alien-Believe-It-Or-Not.
What we have here is more like the second half of Prometheus than a true stand-alone, and that notion may send shivers down the spines of haters. If that film dealt with man finding gods and realizing they hate their creation, Covenant proceeds further along the creation chain with a man-made android making new life to supplant his own progenitors. Mankind just gets it in every direction in this cinematic universe: our own institutions, our own creations, our literal creators and everything in between wants us dead. People thought Alien 3 was dark, but Scott is quickly proving himself to be the most cynical hand in this franchise. Along the way, we learn that Earth is a mess and people want to leave it to start new colonies, and considering that in almost every movie, humans stupidly reach out to touch something dubious which will probably kill them, maybe we don’t deserve to survive.
Before we get to any of the killing, however, we’re along for a ride on the starship Covenant, a colony ship whose crew are dramatically woken up by some kind of ion pulse that damages the solar sails (You keep expecting the movie to reveal the pulse was deliberate, but it never does). This gives Scott a chance to stage his own version of 2001’s space-walk/external repair sequence, which, credit where credit is due, looks fantastic. And has no bearing whatsoever on the rest of the plot.
When the captain (a one-scene-and-done James Franco) burns to death in his sleep pod as a result of the accident and hapless Billy Crudup takes over, the Covenant detects a signal from a nearby planet they’ve never before charted…and it’s playing John Denver music. As nobody in the future likely remembers the dramatic irony of Denver dying in a plane crash, the decision is made to try to colonize this reasonably safe-seeming world instead of the one that’s still seven years away. And believe it or not…that’s a bad decision.
Revealing too much of what happens next isn’t fair, but as the opening scene of the movie features Michael Fassbender’s David robot from Prometheus, it’s not really a giveaway to mention that he’s involved, and has become very much the kind of angsty man-adolescent nerd gone bad we’ve been seeing a lot of lately, from Kylo Ren to nu-Ghostbusters‘ Rowan. David is super-intelligent, but also immature, and at the mental age where he’s both starting to obsess over hobbies and decide his parents (humanity, in this case) are stupid and lame – one could read this as Scott’s denunciation of obsessive Aliens fanboys who want a Neill Blomkamp movie instead of his. And real-life fanboys will find plenty in here to nitpick, as Scott not only retcons the Alien vs. Predator movies out of existence here, but Predator 2 as well (unless Predators develop time travel, which is possible), not to mention contradicting other details, like, say, what your basic chestburster actually looks like.
One of the problems with new Alien movies is that you can never, ever recapture that first experience with H.R. Giger’s biomechanical horrors, and how downright weird and frightening they were the first time. Now that they’re everywhere in pop culture, we know their danger but there’s no mystery – they might as well be angry bears or sharks. Covenant, like Prometheus, works best when it’s not bound to them, rather than in formula-following moments of chasing a xenomorph through spaceship corridors: an empty city like Charn from The Magician’s Nephew is darkly enchanting, and a strange new life form offers evolution more mysterious, but insufficiently explored. The Engineers are unfortunately dismissed rather quickly, godlike creatures being presumably much harder to write for than mindless carnivores. Instead we have Fassbender doing double-duty, also playing the dubiously American-accented (and more benevolent) android Walter; it’s ironic that even a Brit like Scott accepts the Hollywood frame of American = good.
Like Alien 3, Covenant has plenty to interest, but not a whole lot to scare. It’s as if David himself had made it to study clinically, and possibly bio-engineer the demise of the series. I’d love to see an Engineer-centric epic, but it’s pretty plain we’re never getting it, except maybe in comics. In the meantime, let’s see more Neomorphs in the next one.
By the way: Jack Daniel’s is still available next century. That’s as optimistic as it gets.
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Aileen Corcoran