Directed by Ridley Scott
Starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride and Demian Bichir
I've mentioned before - probably too many times - that I live 40 miles away from the nearest movie theater that doesn't resemble a room that's been flooded Poseidon Adventure style. It really is amazing when you stop and think about it. I don't live in a major metropolis by any means, but it IS a town of something like 12,000 people. But enough about that boring story that I've told on repeat. The bottom line that you need to know is that I have to be pretty interested in something to make that boring-ass drive through the cornfields of Iowa, and Alien: Covenant fit that bill. A new Alien movie, the first TRUE-BLUE one in two decades, AND it has Ridley Scott coming back? Count me in.
What I didn't fully realize going in was that it would be SO connected to Scott's previous film, Prometheus. Now, I saw that film. I remember kinda-sorta liking it, but there was nothing about it that ever made me want to see it again. Kind of like 99.9% of films that hit cinemas these days. That movie was set in the Alien film universe, but it didn't concern the xenomorphs at all, instead hitching it story to that of the Engineers. Remember that one weird-looking thing inside the ship in the very first 1979 movie? Well, that movie (and Pepperidge Farm) remembered. The coolest part of that movie was undoubtedly David, the android created by a scientist whose mission was to find out what created humanity. Michael Fassbender was awesome as David, and he returns here as your star characters in a dual role that we'll get to in due time. In that regard, the movie has a lot going for it from the jump. Unfortunately, though, this flick has its fair share of problems. Some are story, some are execution, and while this flick is probably the third best movie in the Alien franchise, it's by such a large margin that it actually does make me very wistful for the state of movies in general. I suppose that's enough pre-bitching. On with the show.
11 years after the events of Prometheus, the starship Covenant is traveling through the vastness with everyone onboard in stasis. Within short order, it's pulled out due to something technical on the ship that I can't be bothered to look up on Wikipedia blowing up, prompting the ship's overlord Walter - a newer-model android who identically resembles David - to wake the rest of the crew. This is one of the movie's biggest problems, and it hits us right away. The original Alien gave us a LONG slow-burn as we got to know each and every space trucker. It wasn't until roughly 45 minutes in that the shit started to hit the fan. In this one, they're in mortal danger right away, so where's the suspense?
As to be expected in a movie with this plot, it throws a LOT of characters at us. Janet Daniels is your main one, given a sympathetic background due to the fact that her husband - the Captain of the ship - was just roasted alive. She's played by Katherine Waterston, but seriously, she bears such a strong resemblance to another famous actress that from this point on in the life of the Lick Ness Monster she will be known as Budget Jennifer Lawrence. It's uncanny, I tell ya. There's also the usual batch of medical technicians, soldiers and pilots, the most memorable of whom being Billy Crudup as the new acting Captain of the ship whose personal faith is kind of a play on the theme of creation. But you don't read my reviews for analysis like that. There's also Danny McBride playing way against type as the chief pilot of the ship, but the real star of the show is Fassbender. Even though he's done nothing other than attend to the human's whims, we know that he's here to be the chief character. Time for the ship to search out that strange planet in the distance for help and not wait until the hurricane-like storm that's raging overhead passes, which is always a fantastic idea in a movie like this.
If you can't tell, this is a movie with a lot of logic holes. See, the people of the Covenant (who, by the way, are protecting some 100,000 human embryos) are desperate for help and will do anything to get it, including raiding an unexplored planet without the aid of helmets or conducting some sort of scan first. Because if there's one thing Star Trek taught me, it's that those life forms, life forms, precious little life forms are scannable. Well, onto the planet they go, where they find absolutely no animal life forms, although the plant life is strangely human-cultivated. This is followed by one of the crew members picking up a parasitic bug via his nose (and thanks to the helmet that he should have been wearing) that wastes little time murdering the f**k out of him. And it's glorious.
And this is where the true purpose of the movie kicks in. See, this planet is where David now lives. Caution alert, 'cus here be spoilers. It seems that after the events of Prometheus, he went as mad as an Android can go, releasing the strange pathogen on the waiting Engineers and causing their extinction. He also began conducting experiments of his own, creating the familiar eggs and face huggers that we've been dying to see. There is also the expected scenes exploring the differences between the early-and-late model cyborgs as Walter - designed to make less decisions and effectively be more "human" - has difficulty relating to his quasi-brother David. Again, Fassbender is to be be commended for just how committed he was to this role, and these scenes are without a doubt the best thing in this movie. What else do you need to know? Oh yeah, David eventually leads one of the crew members to a waiting face hugger, where it attacks him and the remaining hour of the film is the game of Alien-Human cat-and-mouse we all know and love.
First, the good. For what it's worth, the performances are all pretty good. Fassbender, McBride and Crudup are all way cool characters, and I can't help but think that had we gotten a plot setup mechanism that was different than an explosion and more time to get to know these guys the movie would have been much better for it. The set design on board the planet was also pretty cool, and there was this great scene right after the colonists reach the surface where there is just nothing. Like, literally nothing, eerie silence. The audience that I was with actually picked up on it at the same time the characters did, and it's always something when something written in a script like that is actually executed that well. And all of the stuff between the dual androids played by Fassbender is must-watch material.
Unfortunately, there's a lot that didn't work here. In addition to the aforementioned plot holes...man, this script just created massive bombs as far as series continuity goes. So, David created the xenomorphs. Right. So...what about the massive Alien Queen that laid all of the eggs in Aliens? And the big game between the Predators and the Aliens that had been going on since ancient times? Does this mean that the AvP movies are non-canon now? I can't say that this is necessarily a BAD thing, but I'm never a fan of a movie franchise that effectively tells us that a bunch of stuff that we've already watched effectively didn't happen. I call this the Wasting My Time Principle, and I have every intention of patenting that, bitches. And then there's Budget Jennifer Lawrence. As the movie goes on, we unfortunately spend a LOT of time with her, hearing about the cottage that she and her deceased husband were supposed to build while sad syrupy music plays on the soundtrack. Maybe I'm just an ass, but I couldn't have possibly cared less about any of this stuff.
And that, my friends, really is the difference between modern movies and the great stuff of yesteryear, according to this reporter. Thus, Alien: Covenant gets a ** out of ****.
And now for some thoughts on the Alien and Predator franchises as a whole. Back in the day, we used to spend time with characters first building up tension and emotional investment. I don't know where producers got the idea that audiences no longer want this, because nothing could be further from the truth. We DO want more from movies than just explosions. We CAN think, you morons! This was so apparent in the first movies in both of these series, movies that were on-paper popcorn flicks but managed to become so much more than that by just doing a good, simple three-act structure.
Over time, I definitely think the Predator films stayed MUCH more consistent, although that is a bit easier when you only have three true movies in the series since the AvP films kind of occupy a bizarre otherworld fantasy at this point. Still, all three of them were about a small group of people that we slowly got to know facing off with an unstoppable wrecking ball in the Predator. The Alien flicks, on the other hand, just went way off the beaten path at every turn by trying something radically different each time, getting further and further away from what made it special in the first place and eventually winding up with the movie that I just reviewed - a solid-enough 2017 action flick but one that was pretty much cookie-cutter in every way a film can be and retcons a lot of what happened previously. So the message is this: keep it simple, stupid, and you can never go wrong. Both of these franchises did just that with the awesome creatures that both got their titles from at one point, and both have definitely made their mark on science fiction and horror history. Here's to hopefully getting some great stuff out of them in the future, because I'm always game for giving both franchises another shot.
I'm done with this Megareview? I'm finally done?
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