Alien: Covenant

2012's Prometheus was an attempt to revitalize the ailing Alien franchise by not only answering some questions that fans had been asking since the first movie, but also by bringing back the original film's director, Ridley Scott.  However, like in a lot of instances of a great filmmaker returning to a story they left behind a long time ago (see Steven Spielberg returning to Indiana Jones back in 2008), the end result highly divided fans.  Yes, Prometheus was skillfully made and beautiful to look at, but the plot made no sense the more you thought about it, the characters were largely dumb as rocks and unlikable, and there was an embarrassingly bad showing by Guy Pearce hidden by some of the most unconvincing "old age" make up in recent memory.  It was at least an ambitious summer movie, but one that was highly uneven.

Alien: Covenant is an attempt to give the fans what they wanted the first time around, and if this movie is any indication, they essentially wanted the first movie all over again.  There are so many nods and throw backs to 1979's Alien that pop up throughout that it comes across as if Scott is trying to remind us of the greatness of the original, instead of enhancing his vision with this new story.  And again, the movie is skillful in its visuals for the most part.  A few of the CG special effects concerning the titular intergalactic monsters are surprisingly not as convincing as the "man in suit" effects used in the earlier movies, but it still looks good overall.  There's also much less leaden exposition dialogue to wade through this time around, though it does pop up later in the film.  But here's the thing - I never found myself drawn in.  I didn't care about the characters on the ship, I wasn't on the edge of my seat during the more suspenseful moments, and the whole thing kind of comes across as an uninspired monster movie with a big budget.  Scott clearly has a vision here that is leading up to something, but unless you're a diehard fan who has been eating this stuff up for the nearly 40 years these films have been around, I don't know how much this entry will speak to you.

Let's start with the characters, and how the movie fumbles their introduction.  As the film opens, a spaceship is making its way to an uncharted world with some 2,000 colonists on board, all in hyper sleep during the long journey.  The only one awake is the android Walter, who is played by Michael Fassbender.  He played the android, David, in the last film and was easily the standout performance in Prometheus.  He's the standout once again this time, playing a more advanced and less emotional model of the character he played before.  There is a crisis on the ship, and he is forced to wake up the crew, who are also in hyper sleep with the traveling colonists.  This leads to a chaotic action sequence that serves as our introduction to the main characters, and it just doesn't work out.  Instead of getting to know these people and their relationship with each other, we simply see them running around and screaming for their lives.  The movie never really tells us much about them after that.  Oh, we get little hints here and there, but nobody amounts to anything interesting, not even Daniels (Katherine Waterston), who eventually becomes the main character, and is obviously supposed to remind us of Sigourney Weaver's Ripley from the original series.  However, she gets so little screen time before the third act, she essentially exists in the background for the majority of the movie.

Daniels happens to be married to the ship's Captain, Branson (played by an uncredited James Franco), who perishes in the disaster on the ship.  A new Captain is named when Oram (Billy Crudup) takes charge.  The early moments hint that Oram is unsure of his ability to lead the crew, and that Daniels is finding it hard to perform her duties after the loss of her husband, but these are quickly pushed aside after being introduced, and are never really brought up again.  It's around this time that the ship receives a strange and distorted message coming from a nearby planet that appears to be habitable.  Oram does not want to risk putting the crew back into hyper sleep to finish the seven years that remains in their journey, and thinks this nearby world could be a better option for them to explore and possibly colonize.  Daniels is against the idea, but is voted down.  A small portion of the crew is sent to explore the planet, which is currently experiencing a violent storm, making communication with the main ship difficult during their time on the surface.

From this point on, Alien: Covenant switches back and forth between two tones that never really connect.  In some scenes, the movie wants to be thoughtful, with drawn out scenes concerning two characters (who I will not reveal for the sake of spoilers) ponder life and play music, and even ends on an awkward kiss.  And in other scenes, we get those ever-nasty aliens in all of their forms, as they generally tear apart the human actors in gruesome sequences that seem right out of an 80s slasher film.  There is even a scene that seems ripped right out of a Friday the 13th movie, where two crew members are killed by an alien while they are making love in a shower.  This mix of high-minded Sci-Fi and cheap thrills is a tricky combo to pull off, and the movie never succeeds.  It feels like the filmmakers are fighting for control over what kind of a movie they were trying to make, or perhaps there was some studio interference demanding more blood and gore.

I can understand this approach, as I think Scott is trying to recapture what drew people to the first movie.  Its sense of tension, claustrophobia and genuine suspense were a constant throughout the 1979 film.  But here, a lot of that tension is lessened by the fact that it keeps on stopping to show us where the monsters came from, and how they came to be.  The one true thing in horror is that the less we know about a monster, the scarier it is.  Yes, it's good to give the audience some information, but overexplaining can be deadly.  And that's exactly what the screenplay does.  It explains, it explores the mythos, and it gives us some answers that fans have long been asking, but honestly I wonder if they will think it was more fun to wonder than it is to know.  This is a common problem with movies that try to explore the story behind an original successful film, and this movie doesn't do enough to avoid the traps.

Alien: Covenant is far from the worst film in the series, but its threadbare plot and forgettable characters do little to make this anything memorable.  I'm sure there's still an audience for these movies, but I've been feeling kind of left out after 1986's Aliens.  I know that Ridley Scott is planning more movies that delve deeper into the history, but I'm kind of hoping that pretty soon the fans will wise up, and start asking "why"?

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