Film Review: Alien Covenant

Expectations can be a dangerous thing.  Not nearly as dangerous as a vicious, acid-blooded alien; more how much or how little we enjoy the carnage they create.  Ridley Scott’s first overt return to a universe he created way back in 1979 was always going to weighted down with more expectation than the previous cargo of the Nostromo, so an objective review is tricky. 

2012’s unspoken prequel Prometheus was, for me, a partially missed opportunity; good, but often dull and frustrating.  Where Scott could have filled in the many gaps surrounding the Xenomorphs’ origins, he chose to spin a solid creator myth about humanity finding its origins at the hands of a mysterious ‘Engineer’ species.  While full of great ideas, Scott hit you over the head with them rather than weave them into the production design as he did with Alien or Blade Runner.  Meeting one’s maker etc. etc. It used X Files-like black goo rather than giving fans the facehugger action they craved.  It also suffered from a chronic lack of memorable characters, shamefully underusing a cast including Idris Elba, Noomi Rapace, Charlize Theron and Guy Pearce.  Only Fassbender’s synthetic David came away with much credit, despite ending the film with no body.

And on the other hand, fair play to Scott for making the film he wanted and fleshing out his creation with some philosophy rather than just flesh.  Having seen Alien: Covenant, it seems he knew what he was doing.  Chess pieces in place, he now makes his play for the queen.

Covenant gives franchise fans exactly what they want to see.  While this is hugely satisfying in places (origins of the aliens’ eggs revealed, black ooze explained, callbacks galore), it can also make things kind of predictable.  When Fassbender’s restored David is explaining his genetic chicanery to Billy Crudup’s weak captain Oram, you can see the eggs coming from a mile away.  You just know that an alien is going to make it back onto the ship after they escape. And oh, the identity-swap fun you can have with two identical characters.  The ending’s horrific reveal is ace, but I’m sorry to say I saw it coming.  Other callbacks are just subtle enough to be satisfying: the female lead pilots heavy machinery to defeat an alien; there’s a quarantine quandary; somebody gets acid in their face; you just can’t trust a synthetic; and the whole plot it kicked off by a distress beacon.  For an Alien fan, there is an awful lot to like.

It also suffers from the same problems as Prometheus in that, Fassbender aside, none of the cast do enough to make us like them, or invest in them enough to care when they die.  A decent, if less-stellar-than-Prometheus cast is full of space mission standards (pilot, engineer, captain, biologist) but swollen to the point where, once the killing starts, you really aren’t sure who is being offed and where they fit in.  Scott nailed this in Alien by having only 7 crew (plus cat), all staffed by decent character actors (Skerrit, Weaver, Hurt, Holm, Stanton, Kotto and Cartwright) who gave you just enough about them to give a fuck.  Likewise, James Cameron gave us hints at existing character relationships before killing most of his cast in the first 20 minutes or so, leaving memorable personalities for us to invest in (Weaver, Biehn, Henriksen, Hope, Goldstein, Paxton).  While Covenant uses a great idea to up the peril (colonists, selected as married couples rather than just selfish archetypes; when somebody dies, it’s a person’s husband rather than just ‘the doctor’), there are simply too many of them to invest in.  The great idea is squandered when there’s no emotional fallout.  Danny McBride (less annoying than usual) and Crudup try manfully but just aren’t given enough to do.

Which brings us to the franchise’s biggest non-alien selling point: the female lead.  Always flying in the face of Hollywood patriarchy, Alien films have always done well with a non-sexualised woman in the driving seat.  The Sigourney Weaver’s peerless Ellen Ripley was by turns vulnerable, tough, and deadlier than a phased plasma rifle.  Rapace’s Elizabeth Shaw had her moments but spent too much time looking troubled to be interesting.  Here, Katherine Waterston is a disappointment; quickly shifting from grieving to worrying to using a radio to swearing at an alien, she never really nails her character and I couldn’t help but wonder what somebody like Alicia Vikander, Jessica Chastain, or Marion Cotillard would have done with her.

One further gripe about Covenant is the standard of the visual effects.  Scott has always been a master visual stylist; from the endless industrial city of Blade Runner, to The Martian’s red wilderness, and Covenant is no different.  The Engineers’ home city is a Pompeii-inspired nightmare; the colony ship Covenant is different enough from the grinding functionality of the Nostromo; David’s hobby of amateur genetics is suitably horrible and rendered effectively in hideous drawings.  But the aliens themselves are a shambles.  Once a terrifying non-presence, rendered by models and practical effects, they are now products of an infinite CGI sandbox and all the worse for it.  The pale, scuttling Neomorph is well designed but poorly rendered and I almost laughed out loud when the freshly chestbursted Xenomorph stood to greet its creator.  Must do better.

All that said, Covenant is often very entertaining: it whips by at a good pace, gives good gore, provides many answers to Prometheus’ questions, and has an absolute fiend of a villain (not the one you think) whose distaste for humanity feels justified and earned.  The ending, while I saw it coming, was pleasingly horrible, leaving the survivors dangling over an awful void.  Just what horror should do; you can almost see the evil glint in Ridley Scott’s eye.  It has some acid-hewn flaws, but it’s also a fine Lovecraftian horror, taking several cues from ‘At The Mountains Of Madness’, and paving the way for more.