Review: Alien Covenant

tl;dr Not terrible, and definitely not as bad as Prometheus, with good acting and better-developed and organized themes but still with some ridiculous plot holes.

I had said I was not going to worsen my experience of the Blade Runner sequel by over-anticipating it, and I am failing spectacularly. I'm beginning an effort to see the recent Ridley Scott movies (he executive produced Blade Runner 2049) and will also be seeing all Villeneuve's movies before I see the new Blade Runner. This is my excuse for having seen Alien: Covenant.

I reviewed Prometheus quite negatively several years back and while Covenant is not as bad, nothing will ever live up to the original, through no fault of Scott's. Science fiction relies on paradigm shifts more than other genres. Paradigm shifts are a subspecies of plot twists. Plot twists are an event unexpected to plot and characters (the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones), or the revelation of information about characters or events in the past that changes the motivaitons of characters and the meaning to audience of events. A paradigm shift is a revelation about the very nature of the world that the characters are living in; e.g., we actually live inside a simulation! (the Matrix); the V aliens are not really humanoid but actually reptiles!

And therein is the problem. Soap operas and action movies can and do have multiple plot twists. But since the paradigm shift is about the whole world on the screen, it necessarily becomes the central aspect of the story. And you're trapped: either you just rely on the same shift (and wear it out) or you shift to a new one. Rely on it, and you bore your audience (the second and third Matrix movies; the utter lack of surprise that the V aliens are reptiles; the eye-rolling boredom of "Wow, aliens are bursting out of people's bodies? Who knew!") Shift to a new one and you're making a different movie. Studios and directors really don't want to change the underlying formula of a successful franchise, so more xenomorphs bursting out of chests it is! J.J. Abrams developed a neat trick for coming into mature franchises and simultaneously appealing to fans and casual viewers, but even this trick has worn out a bit. Without further ado then, the good bad and ugly of Covenant.


Positive:

- Great location and cinematography. For that matter I even liked that in Prometheus. Then again, you could film anything in South Island, New Zealand and I would probably like it.

- Scott did a better job of developing the theme that we live in a pitiless and mechanistic Darwinian universe, and that maybe the machines really are seeing accurately (in the original Alien, "Survival - unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.") The cruelest can, and probably usually do, win, despite our strivings and the trappings of our comforting values. I also like the animalistic nature of the aliens throughout the franchise, again on display. Nature doesn't produce culture, it produces survival, and culture is a by-product that helped survival (for a while.) David's creations have a predatory cleverness but there won't be any exchanging art or technology with them any time soon. I really liked the very biological touch of the dead facehugger curling up like a dying spider. There's also the theme of Weyland creates android; android creates xenomorph. Weyland wasn't very nice to begin with. They also explained why the later version of the android didn't just run over the earlier version (Walter explains that David disturbed people and so there were limitations placed on later models.)

- Fassbender is an outstanding actor and I might even have enjoyed the movie more if it was just David and Walter talking and fighting. The flute-teaching scene was very suspenseful, erotic, and in general made me uncomfortable, which I very much appreciated; by far the scene in the movie that bothered me most (yes, even including creatures bursting out of organs.) There was a criticism of Prometheus that the only character that didn't act like a robot (Fassbender's David) was, in fact, playing a robot, especially against Charlize Theron's woodenness. (Did you see her in Mad Max? She stole the show. If somehow you made Charlize Theron boring, you really screwed up.) I wonder if Scott was creating this contrast intentionally, but it's hard to defend this as intentional direction when the rest of that movie seemed like a disorganized pastiche of half-developed ideas. Here, the contrast is clearly a central feature of the themes of a much better developed story.

- In some of the lines and themes, there was more a sense of the film-maker's call back to previous movies (and his own outside the franchise)

• While Daniels is resisting David's attack, David says, "That's the spirit." I'd argue that's an intentional Roy Baty reference.
• David refers to the xenomorph as the "perfect organism", which Ash calls it in Alien. This one is particularly interesting because you wonder if somehow David influenced Ash, or if androids have a tendency to be psychopaths that arrive at the same admiration for the Darwinian killing machine.
• At first I thought Scott was plagiarizing himself in the flush-the-alien-out-the-airlock scene, but he's actually plagiarizing Cameron, who had taken over the franchise.
• It has nothing to do with Scott, but when David and Walter fight, you can't help but think of scenes from a certain other Cameron series with two terminators going mano a mano. Their relationship very much invites Data and Lore comparisons as well.

- David is a character study of a psychopath. His narcissism, manipulativeness and lack of empathy are clearly on display (an android admiring himself in a mirror?) Walter points out his flaw in misattributing a poem. David's crying is clearly sometimes for show, but he does seem to have been genuinely moved, at least abstractly, by the slaughter of the Engineers. On the other hand, Walter's innocent Kantian adherence to "duty" in contrast makes him seem safe, boring and even child-like.

- More interesting to think about in terms of where Scott could take the franchise - if David's point in creating the xenomorphs was to wipe out organic life, or at least both humans and engineers, then it makes sense that in Aliens 4, Ripley and her new android friend finally make it back to an obviously ruined Earth. If Scott continues to make movies, he's either going to have to declare other directors' work on the franchise not cannon, or do a lot of maneuvering. (Until this decade Scott had made only one of the four Alien movies. Each one had a different director; and of course this is even more complicated since xenomorphs have also been kidnapped into another franchise entirely, i.e. Predator.)

Interesting, so I guess positive: James Franco's role in the movie was near zero, other than two lines of dialogue on a video the protagonist was watching, as well as being a Pittsburgh-rare corpse. There was really a lot that was released online that was not in the movie.

Neutral, but I expected it to be bad, so I guess that means good: I was expecting to hate Danny McBride in this (boy, what a casting decision) and I had no feelings one way or the other.

Puzzling: Mr. Foreign-Accent McBurny-Face had a facehugger on him for all of 30 seconds and still managed to get a xenomorph implanted. Why do the things hang on to faces (in later-in-the-timeline-movies) for hours to days? The chest bursters popped out in a matter of minutes too. It could be that the later ones had deteriorated somewhat from David's original design. Or, it could be that Ridley Scott cares more about rapid action than continuity, because audiences tend to ignore plot problems when there's higher action density.


The Negative

- So stupid I can't even believe it: trained interstellar professionals go gallivanting off the ship into the brush on an alien planet, one they weren't even planning on landing on, and no concern for pathogens? (You could get rid of some of this with a single line in the plot without changing the visual story much at all, e.g. "remember when we got our universal vaccine shots", etc.) And very little comment about "Wow, we're setting foot in an alien ecosystem!" And very little comment about "Wait, there's wheat here, humans must have been here before us!" Fine, maybe Scott thought audiences are a little tired of every movie showing the wonder that the first settlers felt...but worst of all, when the crew goes out with THE BIOLOGIST to collect samples, a crewmember smokes and just casually tosses the cigarette butt. Seriously!?!? And then when the crew is returning with THE BIOLOGIST, two of them are obviously, suddenly, severely sick with a local pathogen, and THE BIOLOGIST is in full contact with them and doesn't think to put them in quarantine outside the ship. I mean come on. This is worse even than a bad horror movie where they say, "Hey, inhuman howling in the basement of this abandoned house, we should go down and see what it is!"

- Also really stupid: Yes Scott went out of the way to show us that Billy Crudup was a bad captain. But still, he doesn't appear to be a complete moron or an emotionally vacant nitwit. "Hey, a creature just killed one of my crewmembers and not only were you communing with it, but you were mad at me when I killed it!...okay, I'll follow you into your horror chamber and lean my face into this weird pod when you tell me to."

If Scott had made the characters behave a little more circumspectly - maybe even have viruses that could get through air filters on space suits, have David do his explication to Walter and have a facehugger drop on bad-captain from above as he was about to shoot David - this would have been a much, much better movie.

- Confession, I knew how it ended, but come on - how was it possible not to realize that it was David and not Walter when he was proudly watching the xenomorph run up and down the deck? Waiting for the reveal at the very end was quite annoying for that reason.

- Also, once they're in the dead colonial city - I guess there's barely a word uttered about the massive carved monoliths around them because they've already heard of the Engineers from the earlier mission? (Although again, a little more awe might still be on order when you walk into an alien city.)

- A neutrino burst? Come on, you can do better than that. There are only enough neutrinos to do serious damage if you're right next to a supernova, and then you have other things to worry about. If David can trigger neutrinos and supernovas, why doesn't he just go back to Earth and do that? The plot would've lost nothing if a stray shower of comet fragments damaged the ship and woke them up.

- A colony ship with a specific destination goes off-route to land on a planet emitting a strange (but ultimately human) signal. Alright; that's fair enough. But how did they miss a planet that was habitable? Yes it's a trap that David set, but the planet was habitable prior to any interference by David. Note that the ship has hyperdrive and it's the early twenty-second century, and it's interesting that we feel we can say that won't happen. (This is a reality criticism, not film criticism.)

- The bad android has an English accent and the good one has an American accent. I want to see an evil robot from Alabama or Queensland. (Gary Oldman as the villain in Fifth Element did have a Southern American accent, to that movie's credit.)