Alien: Covenant

There's a part of me that believes Prometheus would've been a better movie if it had no connection to the Alien franchise. You get all of the excitement from Ridley Scott revisiting sci-fi e=horror with modern graphics and film-making techniques, minus the expectations that comes with a prequel to a famous film and nothing that happens becomes a part of the series' mythology. Likewise, you can delve into the film's themes about creating, science, and discovery. But that's not what happened, and unfortunately Alien: Covenant decided the best course to take was to continue Prometheus story, and subsequently add to the Alien mythos.

About ten years after the failed Prometheus mission, a colonization-ship named Covenant, is traveling across the galaxy to habitable planet under the watchful eye of the stoic android Walter. However, when an unexpected accident damages the ships and kills a number of crew members, the remaining crew members stumble across an apparently human distress signal from a nearby planet that looks perfect for colonization. But the planet holds dangers none of the crew could have expected...

After Prometheus I think most people were hoping would Covenant would be a return to the claustrophobic or at least existential horror that made the first two films so engaging. Nameless, skeleton like creatures that can tear you limb from limb and kill you with their blood. And for the first third of the movie it looks like we've got a quality Alien clone. Small crew on a spaceship that's unwoken unexpectedly and examines a distress call and things go haywire from there. There's potential in that.

And then the movie dives headfirst into the mythology from the first film and disappears up its own expositional butt about the origin of the xenomorphs followed by full tilt action scenes instead of the horror film we had been watching for at least 40 minutes. *Some spoilers ahead*

I'm not going to spoil exactly where xenomorphs come from or what the early twist is, but needless to say it completely abandons the tone, themes, and style of the first portion and decides to go full Prometheus. The final thirty minutes is just a collection of set pieces that are all either bigger than anything in Alien or poor recreations of Aliens. As I said, this movie could've been a lot more interesting if it wasn't an Alien film.

But you have a distinctive image in mind where you hear Ridley Scott and Alien and this movie fails to deliver that. There was some scary stuff when the crew encounters small creatures called neomorphs that hop around and attack people's faces like honey badgers on PCP, but that's abandoned so quickly that it fails to build any tension. Tension is kinda important in a sci-fi horror movie.

The other problem is that the movie has no idea what it is about. Is it about creation? Is it about the dangers of curiosity and discovery? Maybe it's about artificial intelligence? The replacement captain talks about being a man faith so much that I thought we were going to meet Jesus....is that a thing? Sadly none of this is fleshed out enough to make any impact. And don't even get me started about all of the so-called plot twists because each one of them is so badly telegraphed I almost stopped watching the movie because I knew how it would end.

And it's all a shame because the bones of a good movie are here. Ridley Scott remains a masterful film technician, the effects are great, and Katherine Waterson and Danny McBride (yes that's Kenny Powers) put in effective performances. But in the confines of this plot, none of it works.

All in all, Alien: Covenant is further proof that monsters are far more frightening and interesting the less we know about them. You can skip this one.