My Complex Relationship with Alien Ick
With the DVD and streaming release of Alien: Covenant earlier this month, it seems like a decent time to reflect on what Ridley Scott has both achieved and failed to achieve with his forays into the sci-fi/horror franchise that he created. Or at any rate, this is my last opportunity to do so without falling into total irrelevance. So…quickly now!
It’s always a relief when I find myself disagreeing with my favorite film critics — a nice affirmation that I am still more or less in control of my own brain and tastes. Of course, this does not happen terribly often; my favorite critics are likely my favorites because they approach films with an attitude similar to my own (or, conversely, my attitude has been formed by theirs). But such a disagreement happened recently.
Having been fascinated with Alien and the mythos surrounding it ever since I first saw the film, as soon as I found out about the impending arrival of Alien: Covenant, I had its release date pegged as a destination on the calendar. But as a result of a lack of discipline, I couldn’t resist reading my favorite critics’ takes on it before seeing it myself (ain’t no purist here). In doing so, I made the disappointing discovery that mah main man Steven Greydanus was not a fan. But on the other hand, another one of mah boys, Matt Zoller Seitz, was. Determined to make up my own mind, I eventually found a free evening to march into a theater and see it, Hollywood’s history of sucky sequels be damned.
I emerged from that theater two hours later somewhat dazzled. The film had surprised me in all the ways that its predecessor, Prometheus, had let me down. Though far from perfect, it accomplishes something that Prometheus had shot for and totally missed. With this film, Ridley Scott successfully (more or less anyway) teases out the deeper, darker undertones that Alien only hinted at, and that Prometheus thoroughly mismanaged. And as a Christian film geek, I find myself paradoxically grateful for his grim contribution.
Let me explain —
In my not-so-humble opinion, John Hurt’s horrendous fate in the original Alien is one of the most transfixing, visceral and altogether effective pieces of horror film history. Nothing in the subsequent films of the franchise manages anything as frightening, and overall the first film is entirely without rival among its sequels. But it is one very particular type of film, and Covenant is something very different. The first film is, structurally speaking, a fairly traditional “haunted house” movie: though of course the antagonist isn’t a ghost, the story is largely fueled by the claustrophobic panic of being locked up in a very specific place with a very specific monster. Terror is its modus operandi.
However, the film also carries a subtle undercurrent of much more profound dread; it’s a different sort of fear, broader in its scope. The immediate threat is the xenomorph (nerd points if you already knew its proper name) running amok on the ship, but even after we’ve escaped the beastie, the audience is left with troubling questions in the back of their minds. How did such a creature come to exist? Who was the space jockey and what happened to him (or it)? If our first encounter with alien life were like this, what would that imply about the rest of the universe?
In both Prometheus and Covenant, Scott goes after these questions, in an attempt to plumb the depths of that dread. The funny thing, though, is that in doing so, Scott is actually bringing the franchise back around to its roots — to a sort of horror only hinted at in the original film, but much more fully realized in the mind of the man who first imagined the “alien” (cough cough xenomorph cough) itself. As some readers may guess, I’m speaking of HR Giger, the late Swiss artist whose work was first the inspiration for Alien and eventually made up a large chunk of its visual design.
The slimy, steely world that Giger created in his paintings (and transferred to the set of Alien) contains disturbing philosophical statements about biological life, sex, nature and perhaps even reality itself. In the context of the original Alien, these statements serve as implicit answers to those questions at the end of the film, veiled within the film’s imagery and production design. With his return to the franchise decades later after the original, Scott is now seeking to flesh out these answers more explicitly. He does so in his own way, and perhaps without quite sharing Giger’s level of nihilism, but the director’s meditations are nonetheless of a piece with those of his former art director. Prometheus handled these questions clumsily, and somewhat disingenuously — that film was injected with a tiresome lip service to “faith” that could never be taken seriously and only undermined the punch of what Scott was trying to say. Covenant, by contrast, drops such niceties and goes for the throat with a very clear message:
Eat or be eaten. And most likely you’ll be eaten.

If that sounds crass, well, I suppose it is, but what lends special power to Giger and Scott’s dual vision is the weird beauty with which this idea is presented. In Alien, a key character gives a memorable speech in which he exalts the xenomorph and its savagery, calling it “the perfect predator,” the pinnacle of evolution. Covenant takes this idea and goes hog wild with it, constantly pairing violence and destruction with elegance and artistry. It’s a movie full of the typical horror movie splatter, and yet also of sweeping mythic vistas and painterly compositions (one shot, I was excited to see, explicitly references a favorite painting of mine). At a point, one of the monsters is compared to a wild stallion, and the analogy is eerily convincing. And the film’s main antagonist explicitly identifies himself as an artist.
For me as a Christian, who sees beauty as one of the transcendentals, one of the characteristics of reality that points to the benevolence of God and the fundamental goodness of creation, this “co-opting” of beauty by bloodlust is both deeply fascinating and deeply disturbing. For if beauty can be made to fall on the side of the demon, the killer, the predator, then what am I to make of the supposedly innocent beauty I see elsewhere? Conversely, what am I to make of the ugly or the mundane? What am I to make of the nature of reality itself, of creation?
My aforementioned main man, Catholic film critic Steven Greydanus, takes major issue with this aspect of the film (if you didn’t click that link above and read his review, you really should. How ‘bout now?). As he puts it:
In my review of Prometheus I observed that, where Alien was predicated on “a freak encounter with monstrous evil,” now alien horror is “the secret truth of human existence … alien horror as worldview.” Alien: Covenant doubles down on this too. It asks high-flown questions about life, the universe and everything, but concludes that it’s basically alien ick all the way down.
I wouldn’t contest many of the points that Greydanus makes about Covenant in his rather scathing review. It’s true: the story is rife with absurdities, the violence and gore is excessive, and the philosophy is extremely bleak. But I find myself responding to all this in a very different way; I find I agree much more with Matt Zoller Seitz’s take on it:
As in all of the “Alien” films, characters do tremendously stupid things with such regularity that you pretty much have to stop judging the movie by real-world logic. Instead you have to judge it by the standards of a fever dream or nightmare, a Freudian-Jungian narrative in which the thing you fear most is what happens to you…
…“Covenant” only looks like a hard sci-fi film about technology and rational thought. In its heart it’s more of a dark fairy tale about destruction and creation, death and birth, parents and children (biological and figurative), and sexual violation and monogamous love.
In many respects, this film is indeed a fever dream, one that is especially affecting to the Christian artist (or art-lover, if there’s a difference). Alien: Covenant presents the central human impulse of creativity — which is also a central characteristic of God — and turns it inside out, asking if this impulse can really be considered good. In the act of creation (whether technological, artistic or even sexual), are we bringing more life and goodness and beauty into the world? Or are we instead simply imposing ourselves upon reality, twisting it so that it is “made in our image,” assimilating it into ourselves? At bottom, is creation just another form of…consumption? Of eating before you yourself are eaten?
It’s a troubling question, but…wait… As a Christian, as a Catholic, as a believer in a loving and personal God who constantly redeems the world through his selflessness and endless creativity, and who seeks to emulate those qualities…don’t I already know the answer to such questions? So what good does it do to dwell on all that violence and darkness, to even ask oneself such questions? Why waste two hours of my life on a film like this?
It is true that dwelling on darkness won’t do me any favors. And make no mistake, all the Alien movies are problematic in this regard. I cannot uncritically recommend Covenant — it is an upsetting film, and depending on your preferences and constitution, possibly needlessly so. Let the viewer beware, and know himself well. For myself, I find my admiration for this movie and for the whole franchise to be both compelling and troubling.
On the one hand my faith, like a muscle, seems to grow with resistance. I frequently struggle with questions similar to those posed by this film, so I immediately find a certain resonance in it, and in others like it. There is a bizarre but healthy sort of fraternity to be found, I think, among those who doubt — I see Ridley Scott asking these big scary questions, I think perhaps genuinely asking them, and I see myself asking them, and in a backwards way it gives me hope for the both of us. And yet at the same time, of course, these questions and others like them can tempt a man to despair, to the nihilism and hedonism that is hiding underneath so much of today’s culture.
As a Christian who is seeking to honestly live his faith and to honestly engage the world with it, I have always felt a sort of calling, if you will, to meet our culture’s challenges to that faith as head-on as I can. But there is also a part of me that is, of course, seduced by those challenges, half-convinced or at least intrigued by them, even as I hang onto my faith. And so when Ridley Scott and HR Giger present their deep dark thoughts to me with as much panache and flair as they do, both parts of me find it difficult to resist.
Unlike Greydanus, as a man of faith I think there is something worth considering in Scott’s proposal that it might be “alien ick all the way down.” But there’s also prudence in not devoting too much thought to it. On many levels I appreciate Alien: Covenant and the whole franchise it springs from. Nonetheless, it behooves me to remember the words of (of all people) Friedrich Nietzsche: “And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

