Alien: Covenant

If you’ve been following my work for any length of time, you won’t be surprised to discover I’m a huge fan of the film Alien. As I’ve said before, Ridley Scott’s masterpiece scared the shit out of me as a child and to this day remains one of my favorite films. The sad part is that it’s for reasons you probably wouldn’t guess.

The suspense, the horror, the gore, all of those attributes are heightened by the simple atmosphere of a small crew trapped in deep space with little or no reason to think they’re in any danger. However, the important part of that spiel was the word “trapped.”

I bring all this up for a number of reasons, but let’s move on before I start digging in.

Alien was designed from the get-go to be a single film, not a franchise. This is obvious from how Hollywood chose to shoehorn in three sequels, each getting more ridiculous than the last. While “Aliens” is a fantastic film, and another in my top 20, it lacked much of the dread and doom in the first movie. Why? Well, we’d already seen the creature. We’d seen the egg, the face-hugger, the xenomorph incubation, and the final form itself. We knew what was coming. All Cameron could do was give us a shit-ton of xenomorphs and one new creature: the mother alien.

Encapsulate all of that in an action movie with a badass female protagonist, and that pretty much is Aliens in a nutshell. As I said, I’m not dissing the movie. Quite the opposite. For what it was, it was excellent. It wasn’t meant to be a remake of the movie Alien. Nor was it intended to give the same experience. The director’s cut, with a shit-ton of deleted footage, actually makes for a much better film, increasing the characterization, the intimacy, and even the horror. I like the director’s cuts of both the original Alien and its sequel far more than the theatrical. But that’s beside the point. And I need to actually get to that point.

As seminal as those two films were to my lust for sci-fi horror, one might expect I was excited for “Prometheus” when it hit the screens. You’d be right. However, my expectations were wildly tempered. One of the facets I loved so much about Alien and Aliens was the dingy, “used” look of the ships, the colony, and the people that inhabited both. These were not plastic people dressed to the 9s and wandering around shiny, sterile, TNG environments. They were the equivalent of tool-pushers on oil rigs. Gee, I wonder why I was attracted to that.

Prometheus, by comparison, had a new ship, modern-looking tech, and ridiculously sterile environments. Shit. The film made it look as though human beings weren’t allowed to live there because they’d fuck up the piece of art that functioned as a ship. Either that, or they had a hell of a cleaning service operating 24/7. Alas, I digress. There’s going to be a lot of that in this review.

Prometheus is one of those films that received critical acclaim and loathing in equal amounts. People either enjoyed it or hated it for many of the same reasons. In a sense, it was a reboot of the franchise, showing us something that happened before Ripley and her crew ever set down at LV-426 and wandered into an ancient ship filled with another civilization’s equivalent of a bio-weapons program. But because it didn’t follow the same script, because it somewhat ret-conned the look and feel of the original Alien, and tried to give some explanation to the incident at LV-426, it landed with a thud for some folks.

The retcon complaints are very valid. When you look at how nasty, used, and old the Nostromo looked in comparison to the high-tech, glitzy ship Prometheus, it makes sense that one would experience some cognitive dissonance. While Ripley’s crew were blue-collar spacers, Prometheus was staffed with uber-intelligent scientists, a trained security team, and a crack group of pilots. Not to mention the “synthetic” David added a certain superiority to the cast.

I could actually spend an entire review ripping apart Prometheus and all that’s right and wrong with the movie, but I’m not going to do that. At least not here. Instead, I want to talk about the direct sequel to Prometheus—Alien: Covenant.

When Covenant was announced, I figured it would somehow attempt to rectify the questions asked at the end of Prometheus. Chiefly why the “engineers” had decided to destroy humanity with their bio-weapons and exactly what the engineers were trying to do in the first place. While we see Dr. Shaw and a nearly destroyed David fly off on a new adventure at the end of Prometheus, Alien: Covenant didn’t even attempt to delve into the promise made by the previous film. Instead, Covenant is more of a cautionary tale on a number of levels.

The first trailer I saw had the cheery, folksy music of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” running counterpoint to eerie tones, frantic dialogue, and the occasional glimpse of alien horror. It was creepy as shit. But I knew from the first moment that the film wasn’t going to be what I had expected. I immediately gave up all hope of having any of the questions posed in the first movie answered. That was a disappointment to say the least. However, I chose to push away those thoughts and simply enjoy the damned film when it came out.

Now, here’s the good stuff. Covenant is suspenseful, even if it is a bit predictable. I mean, there’s only so many ways the film can really end. Either all the humans are consumed by an alien menace, their ship explodes and they are all marooned upon the planet, or they escape. However, once I began watching the movie, those three possibilities dwindled quickly.

I’m not one of those people who try to guess the ending to a film, and I rather despise people who do. I do my best to enjoy the experience of a film, a book, or a piece of music rather than judge it. The judging, of course, comes afterward; otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing this. But I wanted to make that statement because I guessed the ending long before the film ever got there.

That was perhaps the most disappointing part of the film. Since I’d given up on getting actual answers about the engineers and their reasons for creating a means of committing genocide on entire species, I focused instead upon the wonderful moments between two of the characters played by the same actor. I’m not going to ruin what that is, although I’m sure if you’ve been paying attention, you know what I’m talking about.

Covenant felt much more like a vehicle to discuss the future of humanity and how our technology may ultimately lead to our ruin. In a way, all the films in the franchise since the first have very much been about that very situation. Weyland Yutani (an evil corporation extraordinaire) wanted the xenomorph for its bio-weapons division. From Aliens to Alien3, to Resurrection, that’s been the running theme. In Prometheus, we discovered our creators faced the same kinds of ethical issues and desire for ultimate power. An ultimate weapon.

No matter how well dressed Covenant might be in its survival horror clothes, jeweled with glitzy technology and a certain nobility, the film’s core truly is about US. What we create. What we use those creations for. And how dangerous our impulse to “control” can be.

While Covenant let me down in many ways, it made me chuckle when the credits finally rolled. It had a Cooley ending. Perhaps that’s why it will ultimately end up in my film collection.

As far as being a member of the Alien franchise? Meh. It’s an interesting roadside attraction. For someone who enjoyed Prometheus, it will no doubt serve the same function and maybe lead to some philosophical ruminations. For that, it’s an excellent film. To a point. But I don’t consider Prometheus or Covenant as canon to the universe. They are both so different from the first two Ripley outings that they seem to be their own stories, completely separate and on a different timeline. For that reason, I don’t consider either an Alien film.

So did I like it? Yes. Did I enjoy it? Yes. Did it meet my expectations? Not one bit. Would I see it again? As I said, I own Prometheus and I’ll no doubt own Covenant as well and not just because I’m a completionist (although yes, I own every Alien movie there is). Covenant has some great ideas that even align with my Sol and Beyond Universe and I plan to steal as many as possible. Although, to be honest, I think Covenant mainlined them from my brain. :P

In short, if it’s not worth a trip to the theatre, it’s definitely worth a rental, Prime, or Netflix. It’s worth a watch. Give it a chance and tell me what you think.

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