Alien: Covenant (2017)

The crew of a colony ship is awakened by an accident—except for their synthetic, Walter (Michael Fassbender), who was awake—and while making repairs, picks up a signal. The new, uncertain captain, who needs the approval both of the crew and of God, decides to follow the signal to its Earth-like world which might be a better fit for a colony than the one they were headed for. Once on the world—and taking amazingly few precautions for pathogens—they are attacked first by the goop from Prometheus, and then from rapidly growing monsters. They are saved, for the moment, by David (also Michael Fassbender), the only survivor from the previous film who is the only living being on the planet.

I would like to review Alien Covenant in a vacuum, but I can’t. Too much of what is on the screen is due not only to its cinematic predecessors, but to what went on behind the scenes. Besides, no one should start the Alien franchise with the sixth (or eighth, depending on what you count) entry. So, some background:

Ridley Scott’s Alien was not original in kind, borrowing heavily from several films of the ‘50s and ’60s, but no one had executed it like this before. It became a classic in both horror and space cinema, and when you put those words together, it became THE film. Its sequel, Aliens, directed by James Cameron, became a classic on its own by not repeating the original. It is perhaps the perfect sequel, switching genres to action. Alien 3, however, was doomed from the start. There’s plenty of flaws with the finished production that I could rip into and the production issues and arguments are famous, but even if it had been executed perfectly, Alien 3 could never have been great. Why? Because it was a return to Alien. It was once again SF horror. It was once again a small, isolated group of unskilled people in a confined area dealing with a monster. We’ve been there before. Alien Resurrection switched genres again, going for B-movie schlock and more or less succeeded, but by definition, there is no great schlock.

Ignoring the two Alien vs Predator films, Prometheus was next. Ridley Scott returned, but after rolling the material around a bit, he found he had little interest in vomiting up the same thing again. He was asked to essentially make Alien 3 and he rebelled and decided to make something new. Alien is a great film, but it is essentially themeless. Well, that had been early in his career. Now, Scott wanted to use the Alien universe to take a different look at the ideas he’d visited in Blade Runner: Who are we? His interest was in creator and created, parent and child, and the need we have to search out meaning in that relationship, and vitally, how it always goes wrong. Just asking the question harms you, and getting an answer only makes it worse. Notice in Prometheus, the only people who are happy and sane are the three members of the bridge crew who specifically don’t care about where they came from. Everyone else is unstable and miserable. Prometheus is brilliant, but flawed, and part of that flaw was the requisite Xenomorph material held over from Alien. It didn’t win over audiences, who didn’t like the philosophizing and not being spoon-fed answers, or fanboys, who just wanted to see the same old alien killing people thing we’d seen before. Scott’s plan had been to continue the adventure he set up in Prometheus, with Shaw and David going deeper down the rabbit hole and finding more mysteries and wonders and nightmares. But Scott said he got the message from the fans—although I wonder if it was the fans or the financiers who’s message he got. Whichever the case, he learned that what those fanboys wanted was a clear connection to the earlier film and the same chest-bursting, people hunting space horror we’d had before. So the word “Alien” was smashed onto the title and the movie he’d plan to make was replaced.

And the replacement is Alien: Covenant. To pacify the fanboys, all the tricky questions are now answered; we have answers to questions no one should have asked. Shaw was tossed aside, her story finishing off screen. And we have Xenomorphs again, doing exactly what was done eighteen years ago.

So, if you want Xenomorph action, then two things: 1—Here it is for you. And 2—What the hell is wrong with you? Damn, go watch Alien and Aliens. We’ve been there. It was done really, really well. We don’t need to do it again, ever. Sigh. Oh well.

Scott was clearly as interested in the same old alien attacks as I was. He tosses in the monster bloodshed with the same disdain for anyone looking for it as I have. “Here’s your bone. Now will you let me get back to something interesting?”

Luckily, he kept a bit of that interesting material in the film, and it involves David and Walter. Everything with Fassbender and Fassbender is marvelous and he eclipses all the other actors. I didn’t even list them or their characters above because they don’t register. Who lives and who dies just doesn’t matter. I didn’t know them, didn’t care to know them, and was happy to see them whittled away just so they’d stop taking up screentime. This is Michael Fassbender’s movie and he continues to show why he is one of our finest actors.

But with so much of the time wasted with monster attacks (the final one is particularly annoying as we know that it doesn’t matter), Scott never has a chance to dig into these brothers, their differences, and what it means to be free. It’s waved at us, tantalizing us about what might have been, but we end up with nothing that Scott hasn’t said before in Blade Runner and Prometheus. And it becomes hard to even care too much about what happens to those two. Walter is more enslaved and less concerned about being so than David. And David, well, as you should remember from Prometheus, has issues.

I’d hoped for some of the dark beauty of Prometheus and Alien, but except for a brief view of the Engineers’ city—before and after—and a marvelous use of Böcklin’s The Isle of the Dead which is sheer genus, it is visually drab. H.R. Giger is missed.

Alien: Covenant isn’t a bad picture. Measured again most space horror, it’s a very good one. Even the unnecessary Xenomorphs are reasonable—Scott ripping off himself, even without enthusiasm, is better than anyone else doing it. And Fassbender’s stuff is fantastic. But it could, and should, have been so much more. In trying to coddle fanboys, Scott ended up with a picture that isn’t completely satisfying to anyone.