Alien: Covenant represents everything that is wrong with nostalgia based moviemaking. Let’s use a transcendent, genre subverting franchise to tell the SAME story but with zero surprises because the audience knows what is coming. Hey, you know what else? Let’s carry ourselves with insane hubris and importance because I KNOW this movie is awesome because Ridley Scott is directing! Right? Right? RIGHT? Um, absolutely positively, 100% wrong, you idiots!
Alien: Covenant picks up sometime after Prometheus left off. Covenant is the name of a ship of colonists on their way to settle a new world. After a space event jars the crew from hypersleep, the team realizes there is a nearby, inhabitable planet they can settle on instead. A crew consisting of captain Oram (Billy Crudup), his wife Karine (Carmen Ejogo), skeptical 2nd in command Daniels (Katherine Waterston), grunt Lope (Demain Bichir), medic Faris (Amy Seimetz), and synthetic android Walter (Michael Fassbender) among others land to investigate the planets inhabitants while pilot Tennessee (Danny McBride) hovers above the planet. However, a certain xenomorph might be ready to be awakened and combat the unsuspecting settlers.
The first Alien opened in 1979, injecting space into the horror genre. Ridley Scott, the same director of that film and Covenant, has born witness to all the tropes of the horror genre, but he and his writers have clearly learned none of the lessons from the decades of horror movies to come about. I kept thinking myself about Freddy Kruger and Michael Myers when watching Alien: Covenant, because as those series answered more questions about their monsters, the less frightening they became. The first alien was so frightening because there was this world where a creature impregnates you by raping your face, bursts a life form from your chest, and transforms into a terrifying grotesque human assassin (No need for a spoiler alert; Alien is 38 years old people). Covenant unnecessarily connects dots left over from previous films so no doubt is left behind, leaving me and the audience cold and shrugging indifferently. Horror movies also have characters make inexplicable choices to keep the story chugging along. Most of the characters that die in this movie say different versions of “Let’s split up!.” This happened so often I said to myself “Is Ridley Scott mocking the audience here by casting really good actors to just die stupidly? Am I missing something?” Nope, I wasn’t: the deaths are just dumb. The choices these characters also immediately undercut the minimal character development done on everyone (except maybe Fassbender, who’s pretty good). Example: Daniels, clearly the Sigourney Weaver of this movie, is presented as this tough but smart skeptic, questioning the Captain’s choices. But when Fassbender’s robot proves to be compromised, Daniels immediately trusts him. Why you ask? Because there is a twist that is so obvious I couldn’t believe Ridley Scott thought we would be shocked, like a crappy horror movie.
Also as we know, none of this would matter if the movie was tense and the creature’s murders were well staged. Ridley Scott used to excel at this, but Covenant makes me think he’s losing his touch (not his cinematography though, that was awesome to look at). The first Alien succeeded on shock, tension building via withholding long views of the creature until the end, and a subversion of genre expectations in the third act. Covenant forgot all of those lessons. Hell, even the flawed Prometheus gave us the scariest scene of a C section that a movie will ever do (also one of the biggest scares of the millennium). Zero deaths were shocking here (two were mildly interesting) due to people walking into obvious traps or Covenant’s “twist” of just injection gorier births, which make you gag a little but aren’t scary, just offputting. There are two tense scenes, one involving a Fassbender confrontation, and the attempted escape with an alien in pursuit. The rest of the scenes rely on CGI attacks and quick cutting, which instantly disorient the viewer and left me confused at who was where, who was being attacked, and how people were getting killed. This movie is so not tense that after the final battle is completed, I kept waiting for another skirmish to occur and was incredulous when the credits started rolling. What is most disappointing about Alien: Covenant is its faux importance that’s really just retreading familiar territory. Say what you want about Alien 3, Alien: Resurrection, and Prometheus at least those movies dared to try something different and address different ideas in clever ways. Alien: Covenant thinks its peddling high minded ideas about creation, evolution, female empowerment, religion, and the big picture, but what it’s actually doing is repackaging ideas better explored in other Alien movies and selling it to us likes it’s awesome. I got news for you: shit wrapped in a pretty box is still shit.
I do get some joy at ripping apart a really bad movie, it can be cathartic in a way. Alien: Covenant gives me no such joy. The first two films of the franchise were seminal in my formation as a critic and movie watcher, and rank very high on my personal list. Alien: Covenant will rank very high for me too, on movies I will actively seek to never watch again.