Alien: Covenant

If you’re hoping to hear that this film is better than Prometheus, I think you might be slightly disappointed.

A sequel to a prequel but a prequel to the original, Alien: Covenant takes place ten years after Prometheus and roughly two decades before the chest-bursting events in Alien. Much like the set-up for most of the Alien films, Alien: Covenant starts off with a new crew being lured to an isolated planet via a scrambled transmission, beckoning them to investigate its source. Being a colonization effort from Earth, the crew of the Covenant is stocked with scientists, workers and everyday people, and when an unexpected and unavoidable cosmic event triggers an early wake-up call for the crew, many are lost in the aftermath including the original captain of the ship and husband to protagonist Daniels Branson (Katherine Waterston). With over seven years to go until they reach their new home, the crew intercepts a strange transmission coming from a much closer planet with livable conditions that trump their original destination. So, with a sort of reluctant hope, the crew of the Covenant decides to make a stop at this new, mysterious planet, and as a group lands on its surface, a terrible storm knocks out communication between them and the Covenant orbiting in space. As I’m sure you can gather at this point, the titular aliens eventually show up, lots of death and dismemberment ensues, and we get a few answers as to what in the actual hell is going on.

Keyword few.

So yeah, I don’t know what to expect from this franchise anymore. There have been so many films that have been released in this series up to this point that it’s a wonder how any of them fit together logically, thematically or otherwise, and with each new sequel seeming to switch between genres, directors and time periods like nobody’s business, it’s getting to a point that it’s hard to figure out exactly what’s going on at any given time, or how any of this makes sense in the grand scheme of the franchise. Unfortunately, Alien: Covenant is no exception.

Coming off the heels of the lukewarm reception to Prometheus, a film that took me quite a while to warm up to, Covenant had a lot to prove when it came to giving audiences answers to all the questions raised in that film as well as the 1979 original. I won’t say that everything gets an answer like many had hoped, but there’s enough of the overarching mythology of the series front and center in this story that allows this film to have a slight edge over Prometheus’ head-spinning revelations and eyebrow raising questions. The plot is essentially the same as most of the Alien films before it whereas a space fairing crew is whittled down to almost nothing as savage alien beings rip them to shreds, but Covenant does us one better by delving into the ideas of what these alien species are, why they exist, and who made them.

Michael Fassbender, reprising his role from Prometheus as an advanced android named David, pulls double-duty as yet another android named Walter, who has been assigned to travel with the Covenant throughout their journey. It’s between these two characters that director Ridley Scott pulls away most from what we expected in this film, almost paying more attention to the lofty themes of playing God and the androids’ plight of becoming “real” people than anything else. It’s here that shades of Prometheus break through what would have otherwise been a straight up Alien film, where the most discussed topic would be how to kill these damn aliens and escape alive, and while I always appreciate a good cerebral workout with my sci-fi flicks, Scott gets a little too pretentious with it all and yet again raises more question while barely giving enough answers to satiate the masses.

Throw in a bunch of characters that are pretty hit or miss, and you have a film with an identity crisis that can’t settle on one story beat, through-line or theme for more than a few scenes at a time. When it comes to the actual alien aspect of it all, Scott makes the same missteps the story does by having his characters make stupid decisions that eventually lead to some pretty awesome (and gory) scenes that will make fans of the franchise actually enjoy themselves for a time, but the path getting to these scenes is just so sloppy and forced that I couldn’t stop myself from wondering why he can’t just focus on the task at hand, give us a few answers to our burning nerd-questions and just let the aliens destroy everyone on-screen until the credits roll. It worked for the first three films in the series, so why not now? Furthermore, I think this franchise has gotten too far away from where it started and is way too ambitious for its own good, but I’ll be damned if Scott can’t hit us with a handful of great looking shots and cringe-worthy deaths. The alien(s) are fast and brutal and even though none of what they do matches up with what has come before, they’re still a scary beast worth rooting for, especially with the dumb cannon fodder they eviscerate for most of the film doing nothing to really help themselves.

I don’t want to say that this franchise has run its course only because the world Ridley Scott has developed and lured us into over all these years is still really fun to explore and ponder over, but someone needs to get this guy a better script and reign him in when his eyes get too big for his stomach. This isn’t really the worst sequel that could have been released given the people involved, but it’s a film that’s just as frustrating and spotty as Prometheus was, with the only added benefit of being much more closely aligned with the original Alien, story and theme-wise. I’d like to maybe see a new creative team take a crack at this franchise if only to see if it really is Scott and his crew that are slowly burying this inherently great franchise or if it truly is the overall idea of it all that’s letting everyone down. Not terrible, but not worth a trip to the theater if you’re skeptical about seeing it in the first place.