Regardless of its merits or worth as a film, Alien: Covenant was always going to be in the unenviable position of following up the worst movie in a franchise that notoriously hasn’t produced a single worthwhile feature in over three decades. And that’s not for lack of trying, either. Alien: Covenant is the eighth movie in the series and only the first two were ever any good in the first place.
Covenant finds itself sandwiched between the worst and the best movies in the series: forced to continue the dangling story threads of a backstory nobody ever asked for and somehow connect it to a film that always worked best as an isolated work of cosmic dread. No matter what miracle the film managed to pull off as the red-headed step-child of THE iconic sci-fi horror movie, the simple fact of its existence cheapened the very film it was trying to live up to in the first place.
So how did it manage? A lot better than you’d probably think, actually.
A decade after the Prometheus went missing, the colony ship Covenant sets course for a virgin planet on which its two-thousand passengers plan to start their new lives. But when a disastrous electrical surge damages the ship and kills its captain, the ship’s skeleton crew must band together under its newly promoted second-in-command and fix the vessel. In doing so, however, they discover a seemingly Human transmission coming from a nearby and previously undiscovered planet that appears to be an even better potential settlement than their actual, carefully vetted destination.
They change course and find a robust landscape eerily devoid of life. But their initial scouting mission on the planet’s surface leads to complete disaster. Two crew members are infected by a parasitic host that kills them and destroys their landing shuttle. On the brink of certain death, however, the remaining crew is saved by the unlikeliest of people: David, the android from the lost ship Prometheus.
But everything is not as it seems. Although tragically alone, David has not been idle during his shipwreck. And in his isolation, he may have created the most dangerous predator the universe has ever seen.
Having finally seen the latest Alien movie, I feel compelled to point out the shameless lie that Ridley Scott & Co. have been peddling in the lead-up to its theatrical debut. Despite everything that they’ve been saying in press releases, promotional materials and interviews, Alien: Covenant is not a prequel to Alien, not really. It’s actually a sequel to Prometheus.
Maybe I’m splitting hairs for even mentioning this in the first place, but it’s a distinction that is absolutely worth mentioning. Alien: Covenant, like its 2012 predecessor, is only superficially interested in the Xenomorphs themselves. They are a means to a decidedly different end. You could fill in the blank with any Frankenstein’s monster you like and the end result would be completely unchanged.
I’ve made my feelings about Prometheus laid plainly bare during the lead-up to its sequel. It’s is not a good movie on its own terms and is most definitely not a good movie in the context of the franchise it purports to be a part of. Its excellent cast is wasted on a script that somehow makes less sense as an Alien origin story than Alien vs Predator and it repurposed the iconic sci-fi monster into an awkward justification for intelligent design.
Again, this is an act that no film would want to follow. But somehow Covenant manages to salvage the wreckage of the last movie and turn it into something worth watching. It’s not Alien, not even Aliens, but it’s easily the best movie in the franchise after them.
Alien: Covenant successfully splits the difference between the “big idea” sci-fi epic that Prometheus wanted to be and the bloodbath that the original film was. Its insistence on intelligent design and mythologizing the ornamental details Alien are toned down, the terrors of the vast and infinite blackness of space are amped up, and they find some fascinating things to do with the cow-eyed automaton that served as the first movie’s nominal lead.
Ridley Scott found a satisfying balance between the two in Covenant that he never found in Prometheus. Although the Xenomorphs never needed a back story in the first place, if Scott is so bullheadedly insistent on giving them one, the dark experiments of an amoral genius built with all of man’s curiosity but none of its scruples is as good of a starting point for them that we could have hoped for. And by focusing entirely on him — rather than the Engineers or the desperate final days of Peter Weyland — we get a fascinating meditation about life and our relationship to it.
Despite its best efforts, however, the movie cannot feel like anything but a letdown. Fans of Prometheus do not get any of the big questions that movie set up answered to any satisfying degree. Fans of Alien don’t get the minimalistic monster movie that it insisted it was going to be. Even fans of Blade Runner will be reminded of when Ridley Scott did the same shtick with “disenfranchised robots both resentful of and inherently drawn towards their indifferent creators” a Hell of a lot better.
But if another Alien “prequel” had to be made, this was as good as it ever was going to be. The film is as unutterably gorgeous as any in Scott’s impressive filmography. The cast — including a surprisingly dramatic turn by Danny McBride of all people — is both excellent and incredibly well-rendered by a script that is actually firing on all cylinders this time around. Although the ending is unfortunately predictable, it offers the kind of closure that Prometheus failed on all accounts to deliver.
Alien: Covenant is a good, although not great, movie that somehow bucked this franchise’s particular tendency to come apart at the seems. Now, please, can we just forget about all of the other Prometheus sequels Scott has planned? Maybe, just this once, it’s time to leave well-enough alone.
Rating: 3/5
Buy on BluRay: As long as I don’t have to also get ‘Prometheus’ while I’m at it.
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