What Prometheus and Covenant don’t understand about prequels
Alien: Covenant is enjoyable as a piece of gothic space horror. To be honest, I liked it. However, as a prequel to the Alien series it is way off base. The value of a prequel dwells in the gap between its story and the origin story. Covenant (and Prometheus) chose a very unsatisfying narrative gap to explore.
Prequels are seemingly conceived with an inherent flaw: we know how the story will end. But really, we know how most stories will end: the hero will get the girl (or boy), the world will be saved, if there are Nazis they will damn sure be defeated, Iron Man is not going to die. We of course ignore the fact that we know all of this — we suspend our disbelief. We think that Hans Grueber might actually kill John McClane; we wonder if Pixar are really about to let Woody and the toys get incinerated. The same thing happens with prequels, only in the opposite direction: If regular movies ask us to suspend our knowledge of a happy ending so we will experience excitement and fear, prequels often ask us to suspend our knowledge of a catastrophe, so we can experience hope.
Prequels usually have downward trajectories: Rise and Dawn of Planet Apes show us how humanity lost Earth to ape overlords; The Star Wars prequels focus on how the evil Darth Vader came into the world; The X-Men prequels show us how Magneto and Xavier went from friends to enemies. Most poignantly, the TV show Bates Motel shows us how a sweet a teenager loses his mind, warping his relationship with his mother into a murderous alter ego that takes over him. The suspense originates not from how the heroes will save the day, but how they will screw it up. Prequels often invite us to have less faith in mankind, as they make failure seem inevitable.
This isn’t to say that a prequel can’t have a temporary happy ending — but those small victories are mired in irony. The best moment in Rise of Planet of the Apes, is when Caesar speaks for the first time. Caesar is held in a primate shelter where he is bullied by one of the custodians. When he speaks, it is a moment of victory — Caesar, a positive character who is mostly kind, stands up to the asshole who has been mistreating him. However, his commanding bellow of ‘No!’ is also a sign of mankind’s impending doom. This irony is crucial to prequels as it makes satisfying use of the audience’s knowledge. We know more than the characters and that allows us to unquestionably judge their actions. The present victory of a protagonist might elicit momentary cheers, simultaneously bringing the tragedy we already know of that much closer.
Prometheus and Covenant offer no moments of either irony or hope. This is partially a genre trapping. Horror movies have a similar mechanism to prequels where we are smarter than the characters — we know they are in a horror movie, they don’t. If we were them, we might’ve watched the haunted tape, ignored the creepy gas attendant or read the ancient book too; in real life, most of time, we don’t really believe something bad can happen. Which is why, in the original Alien, we secretly beg Dallas and Ash not to let Kane and the facehugger back on the ship. We know it won’t end well. The small voice we all have that says “ah, it’ll be fine” compels Dallas to try and save his colleague’s life and bring him on the ship. Ash’s ulterior motives also help things move along. This is the human flaw in all Alien movies, and in a great deal of horror movies — the horror usually could’ve been prevented if characters hadn’t underestimated the danger around them. This is the narrative pattern in the first Alien. The prequels, rather than tell a different story, depicting a different flaw, all repeat the exact same trajectory.
Prometheus and Covenant ask us to feel the tragic hope I mentioned earlier. They want us to gape in awe as these explorers fail to understand the power of the Xenomorph, as they fail to escape it in time, as they allow it to grow, inhabit, impregnate and destroy them. But all that already happened in the first Alien movies. Literally, the exact same things. The Alien prequels feel less like insightful additions that explore the human failings that led to the terrible situation in Alien (a group of innocent truckers are sacrificed for a company’s hubiristic greed). Rather, these prequels offer retreads of the theme, like the Final Destination films, where the same thing happens to different characters, and our joy is in the set pieces and slightly different ways in which the deaths occur.
Prequels are narrative answers to questions. They are tragedies that use our knowledge and suspension of disbelief to give us false hope in our heroes, sharp irony at their momentary victories, and deep sorrow at their inevitable failure. They are tragic, because victory seems like it was so close. If only Caesar managed to broker peace in Dawn of Planet of the Apes; if only Norma Bates hadn’t let Norman return from his psychiatric facility too soon, in Bates Motel’s excellent 4th season. The Alien prequels don’t have such moments, because their characters don’t stand a chance. They are horror film cannon fodder, rather than heroes fighting against their fate. David is the only character who is more developed than that, and hence the most interesting one. But he is also the villain. Watching a valiant hero struggle against his fate is tragic; watching a string of bad events happen unabated is a bummer.
