Alien Covenant (2016) - Review
Originally published October, 2018The film Alien from 1979 by Ridley Scott is one of my all-time favorite horror movies. It's an example of how you can take something familiar, or even cliché, and make it interesting and new again, so long as you approach it the right way. Alien was, essentially, a slasher movie set in space. However, key differences make it so much more and so much better, such as: the strong imagery and art design; the claustrophobic nature of the sets; the fact that the characters were not a bunch of idiots or your typical group of sex-crazed camp counselors; the dialogue and writing had some real effort put into it; the monster was truly something alien and unpredictable. Like all big franchises that go on for too long, the Alien series has changed a lot over the years and lost a lot of its luster. Though Ridley Scott has been put back in the director's seat for the past two movies in the Alien/Prometheus franchise, Alien Covenant is the latest example of how the series' creator seems to have forgotten some of those key elements that made his original film so special along the way.
Prometheus was the first hint that Scott and his fellow filmmakers may no longer understand what made the first movie so great. I found Prometheus to be intriguing, but a nearly-intolerable affair due to the fact that it was basically doing the exact opposite of what Alien did so well 30+ years prior. The strongest element to Prometheus was the art design, which has always been a strong suit of Scott's, but everything else colored my expectations in a somewhat negative light. Thus, when Alien Covenant was announced with Scott behind the wheel again, I was skeptical that it was going to be a return to form like everyone hoped.
This new Ripley character is unimpressed
Pros
Art design and special effects are impressive as ever
Michael Fassbender is, once again, the most interesting character(s) and gives a great performance, despite having a bad script to work with
Cons
All the characters are extremely dumb for their job, with no standard protocol to indicate there is anything to save them from their idiocy
Metaphorical tone is all over the place; trying to talk about creation and destruction with god complexes, but also still a cliché horror movie with needlessly grandiose overtones
Lots of holes in the logic and the plot
So-called origin story of the xenomorph is not interesting or even really coherent
Aimless plot/script with pointless or awkward scenes that should have been cut
Plot & Thoughts
Man... where to start with this movie? A deep-space human colonization vessel called "Covenant" is casually traveling towards its destination when it gets caught in a solar storm. This causes a disaster on the ship and kills off James Franco's character before he has a chance to do or say anything in the movie. As the crew struggles to repair their ship and figure out what to do next, they pick up a mysterious message from a nearby planet. Rather than do the smart thing and continue on to their original destination—a planet they know a great deal more about—the new captain in command, desperate to solve all of his problems right away, decides to investigate the signal in hopes that it might be a suitable planet for the colony. So he takes a small team of a dozen expendable meat bags and their android Walter (Michael Fassbender) to the surface while the remainder of the skeleton crew stays aboard the colony vessel in orbit.
What follows is a series of events that proves Newton's law that, for every dumb action from one idiot character, an equally dumb action from another will soon follow. These jackasses think even less than the geniuses from Prometheus and just start strolling the surface of the planet with no air or filtration gear whatsoever. If you're a deep-space exploration team, even if the computer tells you the atmosphere is similar to Earth's, that doesn't mean you should just take a stroll through the garden without a mask on, eating things that look like wheat, and poking little plant pods with your face next to it. However, that's what they do and what do ya know?
Nothing smarter than poking something with your face next to it
A couple of them manage to inhale some spores from a plant they touch, which apparently holds the seed for a neomorph, destined to burst out of their body in some fashion or another. The surviving team members then meet David, the android from Prometheus (also played by Fassbender), who leads them to his sanctuary and says a bunch of prophetic nonsense for the next couple hours. Around this point in the film, there's a flashback to something that he did between the previous movie and this one, which didn't really make sense. David's intentions quickly become more malicious than helpful, and the neomorphs that survived the original encounter are still out there, lurking about.
Unlike the hard exoskeleton of the typical xenomorph, the neos are fleshy and white with only one mouth. They are nonetheless, efficient at killing people as soon as they're born, perhaps even more than the typical xeno. Much like in Alien Resurrection, someone has to make a claim that the "newer" alien design is somehow better than the previous model. While the xenos have acid blood and are still better looking than their fleshy white counterparts, they still require a facehugger to procreate. These other guys, however, can just impregnate a host without the host knowing it, through the air it breathes—seems like a much better evolutionary tactic to me.
Regardless, this is all just splitting hairs about a minor detail that fans would notice. It mostly just raises the question of "What is the point?" If there is already an alien creature that is just as destructive in its gestation within its host, seeing a xenomorph in this movie doesn't come across as special or anything more than fan service to try to tie this movie into the franchise that is, clearly, far too long in the teeth of its second mouth.
Again, this is really a minor complaint in comparison to everything else wrong with Alien Covenant. I could complain about how the environmental designs and world aren't as interesting as previous installments. I could complain that the slow pace of the beginning that was meant to evoke the experience of the original Alien only managed to bore. I could also complain that the ambitions of the villain and the origin of the xenomorph are not really clear or interesting. However, these crappy flaws of the film could still remain and Alien Covenant would have been, at least, mediocre if they fixed one major thing.
There is one simple factor of all these movies that separates the good ones, and even the mediocre ones, from the bad in the franchise: interesting characters. The first 2 Alien movies had characters that were either likeable or memorable in a way that pulled you in and made you invested in their survival. Even though there were plenty of marines killed in Aliens, the movie still focused on a few in particular to make them stand out and interesting. The third film, meanwhile, decided to make everyone bald and forgettable to the point that even Ripley faded into the background in some ways. At least, in Alien Resurrection there were a bunch of oddballs and a revitalized Ripley to keep the action interesting in a movie that was relatively bad. Ever since then, in the Alien vs Predator movies and Prometheus, we've been saddled with a bunch of lame, boring, archetypal, stupid characters.
Alien Covanent is no different. I couldn't tell you anyone's name, other than the androids played by Fassbender, or Tennessee (Danny McBride) simply because his name is a state and he wears a cowboy hat. The protagonist is yet another attempt at creating a new Ripley character, but she lacks Sigourney Weaver's charisma and character depth that isn't forced upon the audience through obvious plot devices. Poorly written dialogue is mainly responsible for making these characters forgettable, but it's also due to the fact that we have so many characters to kill with no real attempts to establish them as anyone worth caring about. The slow-burn opening is an opportunity to make some characters stand out and interesting, but it's mostly just a bunch of scenes of them a moping over dead crew members the audience never knew. You might hope for them to build the characters a bit more once we get to the planet, but by then, it's all in a rush to get to the plot of the movie. Spoiler alert: there is no plot.
Seriously, what is the point of this movie? The origin of the xenomorph and what happened in this universe since the events of Prometheus are the only answers I can come up with, both of which are unclear. David, the android from Prometheus, speaks in prophetic poems and doesn't really say anything meaningful other than indicate how he wants to play God. Unlike last time, I cannot really understand or sympathize with his character, so I don't really get what happened to him in the past or what his goals are now. That's not to say that Fassbender doesn't do a good job. Fassbender, like in Prometheus, is the main saving grace of this movie. However, I would argue that what he does in this movie is less defined or meaningful than last time. It's no fault of Fassbender that he has to do stupid scenes where he's fingering flutes with himself. He does the best he can with what he has, but they don't give him much of anything good. Even the various action sequences involving one or both of his android characters are more comical than exciting.
Fass-Flute, everyone!
TL;DR (Conclusion)
Alien Covenant is a clean and polished mess of a movie. It all looks really nice with high-budget special effects, colorful sets, and dramatic lighting. It has Michael Fassbender to out-act everyone else on set. It even has music that is meant to allude to the first Alien movie. However, this is all mostly window dressing to a murky and broken window. The characters are as boring and forgettable as the action sequences, and the plot doesn't pick up until half-way into the movie, which doesn't really amount to anything anyway. I don't know what the point of this movie was or where it's supposed to go from here, and I suspect the filmmakers didn't know either.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and check us out on Facebook!
Fan of death metal? Check out my band on Bandcamp and Soundcloud. If you like what you hear and want to hear more, head to HoundsofInnsmouth.com for more info!