Alien: Covenant Review (Super Heavy Spoilers!)

Beautiful and Confusing. Possible tagline?

I struggle with how to present my thoughts on any media that I review. I understand it is a skill that will only get better with practice and repetition, but I often feel like I hit the canvas with large splotches of emotion and not many detailed lines of definition.  My challenge is to take those reactions and provide form and structure to them. When I am presented with something like Alien: Covenant, that task is made geometrically more difficult.

I can start by saying this: it is a better film than Prometheus. I have spent more money and time in a theater being frustrated and disappointed by other attempts at rebuilding franchises that I also enjoy other than this one. That is a backhanded compliment for sure but I need to state that before going further.

Now a little world building of my own.

I love Alien. I love Aliens. Hell, I am in the minority here, but I love Alien3 (This one). I grew up watching Aliens on a shitty VHS loop and it got better every time. There is just something about the combination of space, a dark industrialized future, and body horror that just just puts a smile on my face.

See the smile? I was star stuck (I got to meet Jonesy!)

So when the Prometheus trailer came out in early 2012, I had a lot of hope. A prequel to Alien being helmed by Ridley Scott that was dealing more with the Engineers than the Xenomorph? Color me there.

Man, I still want to see the movie that is promised by this trailer.

I remember walking out of the theater after Prometheus feeling like that time when you told your co-worker Brad you would go see their Weezer Only cover band play live and they kinda sucked but you had to smile and tell them that you really liked that they all wore sweaters like that song about sweaters because you needed to say something nice because you aren't a monster, but then on the way home you listened to Pinkerton over and over again just to feel feelings again.  

I really wanted to love Prometheus. Really wanted. Really really wanted to. There are things to love about it. Cinematography-wise, tt is a beautiful looking film. Ridley Scott picks the right people that know how to make space look awesome. The ship itself is so clean but functional. The Engineers themselves are very Roman statuesque and make you question the origins of beauty and perfection. The medical pod surgery scene is still truly horrific and belongs right along side the original chest bursting scene in Alien. 

But the story has plot holes, the character's motivation and decision making are muddled, and as much as Ridley Scott said that Prometheus is 'not a prequel to Alien,' it had to cram a bunch of Alien imagery and an actual Alien into it. 

Pointy head and second mouth? Must be a Prometheuslien. 

In my opinion, Prometheus wanted to have its cake and chest burst through it too, but failed on both sides. It is not enough a standalone film that it can be watched away from the original Alien and enjoy on its own merits and it is not enough of an Alien movie to really add anything of substance. Oh, this time an alien comes out of the chest of another alien? Ooooh, depth.

You can accuse me of being petty in my picking at the seams of Prometheus and I won't deny it. I will just say this before moving on: why make a film to answer a question and then not really provide an answer? 

Alien: Covenant wants so desperately to be that answer. You get the feeling while watching it that it solely exists to fix Prometheus. Like, I am surprised that Michael Fassbender, as returning android of questionable intents David, didn't turn towards the audience during this film and say, 'See? We had obviously had the answer the first time around but were saving it till now so that it would look even more clever later.'

This is borne out at the very start of the film as we get a conversation from a newly activated David and a younger Peter Weyland (a slightly less wrinkled Guy Pearce reprising his role from Prometheus) that I believe was put there to band-aid over why they had Guy Pearce in old man make up in the first film. There is a conversation about creators and creation, but that is ground that was previously covered in the last film and is also handled better later in the middle of Covenant.  

The movie then moves forward and follows the familiar beats of its predecessors. After the essential crew of USCSS Covenant are awoken early (7 plus years too early in fact) due to a ship emergency. While addressing the aftermath, they get a distinctly human signal from an undocumented planet close by. Newly promoted leader Oram (Billy Crudup, not given much to work with sadly) makes a decision to go check out the signal against the protests of Daniels (Katherine Waterson, with a short haircut that can't help by make you think of Ellen Ripley), who does not want to risk the 2000 other crew in hypersleep and the hundreds other ready to go human embryos simply on faith (as much like Elizabeth Shaw from Prometheus) that this previously unknown world will be a better fit than the one their settlement mission was heading towards. The rest of the crew is forgettable outside of cowboy hat wearing pilot Tennessee (Danny McBride, gives a surprisingly warm performance that did not have to resort to his use of over the top reactionary tendencies when facing opposition) and the ship's android Walter (Michael Fassbender pulling double duty and the MVP of the film).

The exploratory crew sent to check out the distress signal handle themselves better than the comedy of errors that was the crew of Prometheus, but not by much. I still will never understand the tendency of people that know THEY ARE ON ANOTHER PLANET THAT IS NOT EARTH but will still stick their face near any bulbous object that could emit spores or worse. 

What can I say? I'm a hugger.

They find the crashed Engineer ship that we saw at the end of Prometheus (Side question: why do those ships always crash land like someone is playing intergalactic horseshoes?). People end up inhaling things (or ear-haling?) they shouldn't. Things grow inside them that want out like they are college age kids that can't wait to get out their parents' body cavi- house. These things (when fully grown, remind of the Tooth Fairies from Hellboy: The Golden Army) start attacking the ground team and lead to their transport ship being blown up. Then David, in full-on Skywalker Cloak, literally shows up to shed light on the danger and lead them to safety.

He leads them to a dead necropolis of an Engineer city that is one of the more arresting visuals in the film. I don't understand why this large man-made (pale-marbled-looking-being made?) structure wasn't noticed by the Covenant crew before they decided to land their dropship. If the place was within walking distance of their landing site, I think it should have showed up on a scan of the surface.

Then again, this is their future nav tech.

It is learned that it has been 10 years since the events of the last film and David has been keeping busy with playing wind instruments, drawing and documenting bugs, and figuring out the true nature of the Engineers' biological (or illogical as they never affected people the same way twice in Prometheus) weapons. I do enjoy this portion of the film as it gives Fassbender time to accentuate the differences between the emotionally damaged but intellectually superior David and the more grounded, protective, and observational Walter. David views Walter as a brother and Walter views David as an outdated and out of touch model.Their interactions and interplay are worth the price of admission alone and it makes me wonder if Fassbender is going to be cursed forever in giving really solid performances in lackluster films.

This is also the portion of the film that feels like Prometheus 2: Sorry While We Clean Up The Mess. It fills in the gap between that film and Covenant, and for a brief moment it gives us a much more interesting story that is literally swept away in a swarm of CGI chaos.

But we didn't pay our hard earned money to get a philosophical and introspective look at what it would mean for creators to be faced with their 'lesser' creations, Goddam it, we have to see a Xenomorph do Xenomorph things.

Like sing and dance.

The last third of the film switches into Alien overdrive. The set piece involving the terraforming transport ship and the Xenomorph does get the adrenaline pumping. Scott can still dazzle us with his grasp of action and the characters involved acted realistically and bravely. But when the solution to your alien on a spaceship problem is pretty much the same as in both Alien and Aliens, it feels a little lacking. I guess if it ain't broke don't fix it, but I already have those films, so I was hoping for something different and didn't get it here.

Speaking of already having those other films, that is where I have some of my biggest problems with Alien: Covenant. Let me make a quick check list of things we have already had from the previous movies (not counting the xenomorphs themselves) but has to be brought back here:

• The title sequence of letters appearing line by line like in Alien
• Previously mentioned weird distress signal
• A dropship sequence with sassy female pilot
• Previously mentioned dropship destruction due to alien interference
• A computer system referred to as Mother
• People splitting up for no good reason
• Previously mentioned horseshoe crash landing of a Engineer ship
• Androids working with their own nefarious self interests
• Androids that are actually good guys but you didn't know it at first 
• A drinking bird bobbing up and down
• The hopeful score from the start of Alien
• The main theme of Prometheus
• Someone stupidly putting their face in front of open facehugger egg.
• David playing the main theme of Prometheus on a wind instrument (He must have heard the music in the first movie he was in)

Here is a list of things that are new to this film:

• A John Denver song that is not 'Leaving On a Jet Plane' that leads them to a crashed ship (too soon)
• James Franco (kind of)

          and

• Shower Sex.... that turns into Shower Terror, then Shower Murder. 

I understand that some of the things I mentioned above are callbacks and are well intentioned and don't feel out of place, but they do pull me out of the viewing experience. Again, it feels like Ridley Scott wanted to show people that his is more than his 1979 original but other than being more technically proficient as a filmmaker, (and make no mistake, this film is beautifully shot and the direction is spot on.Scott has not fallen into George Lucas bad habit territory), it brings nothing new to the table. In fact, tying the origin of the Xenomorph back to mankind to start kind of ruins the mystery and terror of the perfect organism.

Ultimately, I will place this film fourth in my ranking of the Alien films. It is not a bad film and I know the above paragraphs make it sound like I hated it. I didn't hate it. It just broke my heart. Not for what it is, but for what I hoped it would be.  

Actual image of the moment my heart broke.

Your mileage may very and maybe this film with feel better with repeated viewings. I know it is a losing proposition to constantly compare current releases with things you grew up with and love dearly (warts and all), and I try not to fall in that trap. However in this case, if Scott is trying to constantly remind us of Alien, Aliens, and Prometheus, then how can I not help myself from comparing them to this? 

Please let  me know in the comments below if you agree, disagree, or just want to fist fight me over my thoughts of this film. 

This is Paul Steadman, last living survivor of Invasion Of The Podcast's Review of Alien: Covenant, signing off.