(Be warned, this review is full of spoilers, intended for those who have seen the film or just don’t care!)
‘Alien: Covenant’ is Ridley Scott’s latest addition to the Alien franchise he began, back in 1979. The shame is that, after all this time, he appears to have difficulty returning to those heights.
First, a quick run-down for those who haven’t seen the film but don’t care about spoilers… (skip to the next paragraph if you’ve seen the film) The Covenant is a colonisation vessel that detects a mysterious yet human signal that leads them to a seemingly safe and habitable alternate world to colonise. The crew consists of your usual compliment of individuals, with small quirks to differentiate them. The replacement captain (after the original dies from an early accident) is religious and worries that the crew don’t respect him, there’s a pilot who wears a cowboy hat so we know he’s a little reckless, there’s an android crew member called Walter, who is identical to the ‘David’ android in Prometheus (the previous film), but with an American accent, so he’s less ‘evil English villain’ and a Ripley replacement who’s just suffered an emotional loss. The rest are disposable. They arrive on the planet, discover the crashed ship from Prometheus, and things quickly go bad. After a rescue by the only sentient inhabitant, the android David, the usual storyline kicks in, whittling down the crew with a variety of gruesome deaths until the last creature is blown out of an airlock. We are then treated to a stunningly poor ‘twist’ (which I’ll get to below).
Before Prometheus, the Alien franchise had somewhat run itself into the ground. The original film sets up both the mystery of the creature’s origin, and the slowly building terror of the creature itself, that tapped so successfully into our most basic primeval and sexual nightmares. Aliens took that set up and ran with it, creating an action movie. Alien 3 was a Gothic horror that became more of an introspective character piece for Ripley. Alien: Resurrection, whilst not perfect, was more about abomination and hubris.
What none of those sequels did, was expand on the mystery of the crashed derelict, the ‘space jockey’ (as the skeletal pilot became known) and the creature’s origins. They concentrated on the horror of the creature, forgetting the origin mystery and losing something in the process. It was an angle I, as a viewer and fan, always wanted to return to.
Ridley Scott bravely made the decision to do that. Where did they come from? What was the skeletal creature in the chair? What kind of culture created the twisted, nightmarish technology of the derelict?
Prometheus was an often beautiful yet stumbling and failed attempt to address some of those questions. It wasn’t just an ‘Alien’ movie, it had the body-shock horror, but it was wrapped in a deeper mystery. The general ideas within Prometheus were good. Ridley Scott’s direction and visuals were, as always, superb. Where it fell over was in the mind-numbingly stupid characters and contrived situations used to progress the story. There’s much to love in Prometheus, that is ruined by those characters and poor plot mechanics (rather than the overall story). Prometheus admirably tried to go in a new direction, which I appreciated.
Covenant is both an improvement in some ways, and, perhaps even more disappointingly, a dreadful step back. Ridley has made the mistake of listening to the crowds who merely want more of the same; creatures running around in the dark killing people. Yes, perhaps that is the core of the Alien movies, but at their best, they rise above that and mess with our expectations. The creatures and their threat are the framework around which other themes are built.
Alien had a deep sense of mystery and sub-conscious terror at how the creature propagates itself, Aliens was about action and the emotional mother/daughter bond, Alien 3 was about the psychological toll events had taken on Ripley, and the hellish nightmare of the beast. Prometheus, despite its flaws, dealt with personal faith and the origins of mankind. All of those films shared the running theme of a struggle to stop soulless human greed that cares nothing for individuals.
Covenant feels as though it wants to be a mere ‘monster’ movie that has to dismissively deal with the burden of the previous story. The best moment of Prometheus, for me, was the conclusion, when Elizabeth Shaw departs in one of those utterly alien vessels, whose design was spawned from the dark, twisted genius of H.R. Giger. She departs to find those ‘Engineers’ who triggered the birth of humanity and also planned to destroy it, to ask the big question: “Why?”
For all its flaws, Prometheus had returned to a deeper sense of a mystery, questions to be answered, terrible-yet-beautiful worlds yet to be seen. Covenant, in a brief flashback, quickly kills off the ‘Engineers’ on the planet to which Shaw arrives with the android David, and then, bit-by-bit, reveals that David has lost his marbles and turned into a mad recluse who wants to create ‘the perfect killing machine’. So you guessed it, Covenant reveals that we humans have ultimately created our own nightmare. David is our creation, who in turn created the Alien from the bio-mechanical technology created by the ‘Engineers’ that were in fact our own creators… Yes, it does become that convoluted. Oh, and he also killed and dissected Elizabeth Shaw in the process for no apparent reason.
In one swift movement, Covenant destroys the point of Prometheus and what it set up. It dismisses those larger questions, renders the establishment of the Shaw character pointless and removes any interesting mystery about the Alien’s origin. Yes, it was us… The most typical and rather boring plot solution you could imagine.
Covenant ends up being the inverse of Prometheus. It corrects many of the mistakes, establishing some of its main characters efficiently and well, it is (somewhat) less reliant on idiocy and contrived situations, and characters are sensibly motivated (if you exclude the stereotypical ‘lonely genius turned evil madman’ that is David).
On the flip side, Covenant seems content to be a monster movie, killing off its characters one by one without any greater questions or mysteries. Not only that, but it falls into the old horror movie traps that the original Alien movies avoided. Characters slip and fall when shooting, so that monsters don’t get killed too quickly, terrified characters close doors too soon, so that other characters can’t escape, people wander off alone to be killed, people conveniently hurt themselves so they can’t run…
Besides dismissing everything that Prometheus (and even Alien) set up, perhaps the two worst moments in Covenant are right at its conclusion. Firstly, Ridley once again goes for the ‘blow it out the airlock’ solution. This has become so tiresome, that I need say no more. Secondly, it has the most choreographed, eyeball-rolling ‘twist’. It is a twist that we, the audience, are clearly supposed to be in-on, but the lead character conveniently doesn’t think about it, until it’s too late.
The David android, and the identical Walter android fight as the human characters try to escape. Just as the final deciding blow is given, the camera cuts away. Yet again, you guessed it. Oh my, when we see Walter again, could it really be David in his uniform? Surely not! This conveniently never occurs to our Ripley replacement until it is too late, as she drifts into hyper-sleep. David is now free to carry on his evil-genius plan to destroy humanity with the Alien.
It may seem as though I hated Covenant, but I didn’t. The action is well staged and pulse-pounding. Ridley Scott can always be relied on to create stunning visuals and fantastic direction. Despite the clichés, up until the waste of Prometheus and the predictable turn of the David character, the build up is fun.
Having said that, the Alien is still poorly used when it is introduced. Alien worked because of the threat of a single deadly predator. Aliens works because they become a threat en masse, rather than individuals. Covenant undermines both of those situations by having two aliens (in addition to some earlier slimy creatures). If the ‘alien’ threat had been concluded with the first ‘proper’ creature, it would have been sufficient. Instead, we get a second that suffers from being too quickly established and killed, so we can have the usual ‘out of the airlock’ final scare/action sequence. It was also a big mistake to go all-CG for the aliens. They just don’t have that ‘reality’, or move correctly. It’s scarier to think that a movie made in 1979, by the same director, had more effective special effects.
Strangely, Ridley Scott even seems to be trying to emulate what James Cameron did in Aliens on occasion, which is all the more face-palm inducing since James Cameron was emulating Ridley’s own Alien with Aliens (just watch the Dropship sequence!)
There’s so much potential wasted… Much of Covenant is good, but like Prometheus it ultimately shoots itself in the foot (or, more correctly, crushes its foot in a powered door). In fact, the most interesting and mysterious scene was actually used as a ‘prequel short’, to bridge the gap between Prometheus and Covenant, and only (fully) seen as part of the promotion! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeMVrnYNwus)
Oddly, it’s a marginally superior film to Prometheus but with far less to make you want to revisit it, whilst also making Prometheus feel pointless. Yet another wasted opportunity.
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