Review: Alien: Covenant (2017)
For me, the ultimate undoing of Alien: Covenant is that like too many blockbusters of relative prestige, it renders itself formless and indistinct in its quest to please everyone.
While I’m tempted to draw (mostly unfavorable) comparisons to the other films in the Alien universe, I’m not the type of person who typically allows expectations and faithfulness to a canon influence my reaction to a film. The infamous ineptitude of the characters in Prometheus may persist here, and there may or may not be plot holes or and that kind of thing, but frankly, I could care less if the overall narrative and/or formal elements of a film work for me.
Unfortunately, Covenant doesn’t have nearly enough aesthetic power or visceral carnage to supersede its lack of investment in its own alleged ideas, story, or characters. And to be clear, I say alleged because for my money, this is a film mostly about nothing despite the occasional indication that it’s something more than an obligatory gap-filler and money maker.
The film opens with a disarmingly quiet moment as the android David talks with his creator about their respective origins and the creation of art, a scene whose implications and provocations are subsequently ignored for the rest of the film, save for the ravings and philosophizing in David, once he reemerges in the middle of the film. Until then, the action focuses on a colonization vessel, whose crew suffers casualties after prematurely awakening from cryo-sleep after a space storm ravages their systems. The personalities and motives of the crew members are briefly detailed, but even their relative uniqueness comes across as tropic and perfunctory.
There’s slight comic relief in Danny McBride’s character and the general banter of the crew, and there’s the impossible-to-root-against, obvious heroin of the group in Katherine Waterston, whose grief after the spontaneous death of her husband (distractingly portrayed by James Franco in a video recording) dampens her enthusiasm when the crew decides to take a detour from their distant destination to investigate a man-made transmission and possible superior candidate for the terraforming mission.
Obviously, the signal beckons them to the planet from Prometheus, and obviously, investigating the scrambled John Denver song transmission (which like Franco’s brief cameo is more of an immersion-breaker than anything) is a bad idea, but this is only recognizable as an outsider and audience to a well-established diegesis where traits like curiosity and selflessness are dangerous. Waterston’s reluctance is the only opposition to what seems, within the world of the film, a reasonable and well-intentioned endeavor, and her attitude so clearly stems from selfish bias. When the crew arrives and two members are infected by microscopic parasites, it’s out of innocuous recklessness and not the kind of overt disregard for the unknown that might imply themes of the folly of humankind’s audacity or something. More or less, the film suggests that these people (and people in general) cannot avoid their fate because of an inherent need to discover and rescue, a concept I might have enjoyed had it not become so thoroughly muddled.
It’s the return of David that sabotages and misdirects the film. The best moments of the film come when the parasites fully grow and explode their way out of the human hosts, creating a gory panic in which confusion and terror lead to a fiery ship explosion and more deaths. The sense of vulnerability concludes as the sole-survivor of Prometheus comes to their rescue and leads them to a massive stony temple of sorts where he has been living. The arrival of guests brings out the socialite in him, and the way that he quotes poetry, expresses passion for art, and teaches the crew’s android Walter to play a wooden recorder was a constant source of unintentional chuckles for me.
David comes across as a pretentious connoisseur of all things high culture, with an air of snobbism that clashes with Walter’s deeper-voiced, intentionally impersonal nature. Although these differences are striking and the two are both played by Michael Fassbender, the overt comparing and contrasting has nothing to do with anything that came before it, nor does it reinforce the mad scientist experimentation or anti-human rantings that defines David as the film’s villain.
The film provokes without the guts or creativity to support the provocation, just as the establishment of the crew members as somewhat distinct people — characters — is completely derailed by this point as they begin to function indistinguishably from one another, being picked off one by one as they do nothing but try to survive.
Why is it that David is revealed to be a machine that, for all of his “sophistication” and personality, is hellbent on furthering the evolution of xenomorphs/other creatures and putting an end to what he sees as an obsolete species? If Ridley Scott and the films writers were not content to construct a narrative and ideas around unknown horrors and base-level survival instinct, they shouldn’t have relied on a single poorly-constructed character to elevate their film. It’s a distraction, a case of telling and not showing via a comically sinister character that brings the excitement to a screeching halt and then tries to mold the narrative into something that the rest of the film resists. His words imply a disdain for humanity itself and his actions suggest a Frankenstein-esque admonishment of playing God, or even of the act of creativity itself given that the film offers no positive counterpoint to his insidious experimentation on lifeforms.
After a disappointingly weightless clash between the two near-identical androids, David assumes the personality of Walter and returns to the colonization vessel. After a decently perilous skirmish, Waterston’s character manages to kill the xenomorph on-board the ship and realizes the dastardly android switcheroo just as she’s forced back into cryosleep. The cheeky robot cues classical music and introduces a pair of alien embryos into the freezer of “next generation colonists”, in a falsely triumphant and frustrating conclusion.
For half of the film, none of these ideas were present, even in the introductory scene, which does not convey the same degree of cynicism and incomprehensible villainy that David embodies, but rather the sort of existential musings that were fully embraced in Prometheus. Perhaps with Alien: Covenant, the pressures of making a horror-action-sci-fi spectacle with a brain in a climate where genuine thoughtfulness is scoffed and ridiculed forced a compromise. Trying to balance thrills and smarts shouldn’t be a process of separation, but this is a movie that seems to exist in two parts, each harboring resentment towards its disparate counterpart.
I had planned to talk about the film’s visuals, but really, one viewing wasn’t enough to give me any noteworthy insight, especially when I was so taken aback by the narrative. Basically, there’s no way to make a bad looking film with the signature Alien iconography and special effects wizardry, but aside from a continuation of Prometheus’s gorgeously barren landscapes, I didn’t find anything very interesting to look at. It would have been serviceable to the narrative if the narrative hadn’t been so muddled. Alien: Covenant is almost exciting at times, but it’s too full of directionless negativity, empty characterization, and uninventiveness to function as anything beyond a means of keeping the series alive, technically.
