“Alien: Covenant" plays the hits, bitterly
The latest installment of a sci-fi franchise that is, perhaps, held in better regard than its output warrants, Alien: Covenant represents the latest and most overt attempt yet to recapture the magic of Ridley Scott’s petrifying 1979 film about a space serpent run amok aboard a stranded intergalactic freighter. That bare-bones thriller opened the gateway to one true-blue classic (James Cameron’s shoot-em-up Aliens in 1986), two movies where your mileage probably varies (David Fincher’s notoriously troubled Alien3 in 1992 and the weirdly Cormanesque Alien: Resurrection in 1997), a two-part crossover with the Predator franchise in the aughts and, most recently, a Scott-directed origin myth in 2012 called Prometheus that bowed to much general harrumphing, both over its overly philosophical plot (courtesy of Damon Lindelof – who, in his defense, is the guy you go to when you want ideas that are so big and knotty they almost can’t be untangled, so not sure what everyone was expecting there) or its lack of the series’ signature creature.
That’s a lot to go through to just throw out the stew and start from scratch, but Scott has said the original idea for his prequel series – rather than delve into the origin of the monster, he would explore the world of the alabaster “Engineers” that created both the aliens and humans – was so ill-received that this time around, he is giving us explicitly what we asked for. In other words, Alien: Covenant is the Force-Awakening of the anthology: A well-acted, well-made and incredibly familiar set of story beats. There’s a crew of a spaceship, lured mid-voyage to a planet with a mysterious distress call (here, it’s a ghostly recording of someone singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” which is a nice, creepy touch). A female hero (Katherine Waterston) with a bob. A rowdy space cowboy (Danny McBride). A bunch of famous folks to throw on some space suits and march dutifully to the meat grinder (no spoilers, suffice it to say that Jamal Lyon doesn’t make it). Some shady business with a robot (Michael Fassbender). And, finally, a confrontation with the alien itself both on land and on the ship, which is the literal definition of trying to solve the Alien vs. Aliens argument by having it both ways at once.
All that said, Covenant does have the added benefit of being directed by the original maestro, which The Force Awakens did not have. But unlike The Force Awakens, it’s nowhere near able to replicate the impact of the first time around. That’s hardly the fault of Scott himself, though. The truth of the matter is the only filmmaker to successfully tweak the Alien formula is James Cameron, whose Aliens was essentially a war movie between a squadron of jarheads and a hive of, well, aliens. Every movie besides has followed the same beats of the original and the same beats followed here, which is to say if you’ve never seen an Alien movie before you’ll probably be thrilled to bits at what Covenant churns out, but otherwise, what once cut primal terror through audiences has had its edges blunted by nostalgia. The Alien is cool. The Alien is iconic, to use current internet parlance. But the Alien hasn’t been scary for a long, long time.
That’s more or less what Scott has admitted led him to undertake Prometheus in the first place (he described the monster as “done” even after the movie came out), but a grim fable about pointless creation at the whim of a merciless god may have been asking a little too much. (I say this as someone who, generally, liked that movie.) So, Covenant is in the unfortunate position of both continuing a story nobody took to and course-correcting it back into something that everyone remembers fondly. That the script, credited to six writers, manages to expand on the themes of Prometheus throughout the nostalgia trip is Covenant’s biggest accomplishment. In fact, the movie’s most compelling scene is its first one, a flashback to a frank, chilling discussion between Prometheus’ duplicitous android David (Fassbender) and his maker (Guy Pearce, another returnee, though mercifully minus his old-man makeup) on the day of David’s creation.
That scene sets the tone for a movie that doesn’t just expand on Prometheus but retroactively improves it, though that doesn’t mean you can’t see the skid marks when the hard left occurs. For all the compelling work Scott does with his character, there’s a whole middle section that veers awkwardly into fan-service, wherein Covenant yada-yadas away both the Engineers and Noomi Rapace before pivoting to the aliens in a way that is so painstakingly explicit you halfway get the sense that he’s doing it out of spite. It certainly feels a little deflating to watch, like you’re seeing an interesting, challenging idea being swapped out in real time for the low-hanging fruit everyone asked for.
That said, if Covenant is an explicit hymn to the devotees, at least it manages to string together the right notes. Waterston lacks the maternal rage of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, but she can string together some expletives and has her knack for weaponizing the nearest piece of construction equipment. Fassbender, playing both the returning David and a newer android named Walter, gives a whammy double-performance that’s the most compelling thing in the movie; it’s no exaggeration to say David might be the best role he has ever played. Billy Crudup delivers a kind, vulnerable performance as the ship’s captain. There’s a vastly entertaining sequence where the alien attacks two people in the middle of shower sex. (For a franchise that was always implicitly about sexual violence, it’s surprising it took this long for someone to get got in flagrante.) The alien itself remains cool, though for the most part it’s a distractingly CGI creation, a reminder that this franchise was always scarier before you could tell that the monster wasn’t really there.
Scott, meanwhile, is knee-deep in familiar territory, for better and for worse. You get the sense he isn’t overly wild about doubling back, but he at least skillfully pilots you through the trip. And, if he had to be cajoled into bringing back his most famous creation, he at least gets his kicks in with a blindingly contemptuous critique of humanity in the process. Covenant’s final scene is a little too obvious to be as chilling as it wants to be, but it crackles in a way no other scene really does besides the opening: It’s a meditation of power, and the contemplation thereof, and you get the sense that Scott might be exorcising some demons towards the viewers who forced his hand as it unspools. There’s a truly vicious movie lurking inside this piece of popcorn about who is fit to create, and Scott seems to want nothing more than to feed his cast into the heart of darkness and be on his merry way. I kind of hope, next time, that he does. If there’s one thing to take away from Alien: Covenant, it’s that mercy, both to the characters and the audience, is overrated.














