Alien: Covenant

The Horrifying Hybrid
or
I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir.
The what?
The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir.
Whose side are you on, son?

Ridley Scott is a really frustrating director (for me, one should reiterate). He is a master of the image. Think of a movie of his and some image will pop into your mind that is so beyond the norm of what has gone before that it takes your breath away. Below are a bunch of screen-captures of various Scott movies.* None of them have movie-star's faces in them, they're scattered throughout Scott's filmography (and thus, were achieved either photo-chemically or by CGI and, amazingly, it doesn't make a difference), but if you've seen these films, you can identify which of Scott's films they are from, just from the indelibility of the image. 

Take a look:

Beautiful. Amazingly composed, with a painterly color pallette, and exquisite in its detail. Artistic.

It's just too bad some of them are really bad movies. Gorgeous, sure. But bad.

And you're never sure what you're going to get with a Ridley Scott movie; it might be beautiful to look at, but also completely lunk-headed, insufferable, or botched, whether by studio interference (Blade Runner and Legend) or by Scott's way of over- or under-thinking his movies, so that he forgets what they're actually about in the process. It's why Ridley Scott is a well-regarded director, but he's not in the pantheon of innovators or "great" directors. He may make great looking art, but is not considered an artist pushing the art-form forward, sort of a Thomas Kincade of directors.

So, here's Alien: Covenant, Scott's second sequel to his 1979 Alien, his sequel (of a sorts) to 2012's Prometheus, and a return to form of what the series is—not speculative fiction as Prometheus lurched towards, but back to horror, as in the original.**  

After a brief scene between the android David (Michael Fassbender again) and his manufacturer's CEO Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce again) where they discuss "the big question" (where do we come from?), we jump forward in time (past Prometheus, time-wise, by ten years, to 2104) to the good ship Covenant, a colony spaceship tasked with establishing an outpost on a distant planet that has been surveyed from Earth, Origae-6. The ship is tended by its onboard computer, "Mother" and a lone android, Walter (Michael Fassbender...again), who oversees the automated systems*** keeping the cryo-sleeping crew and colonists, as well as a couple thousand embryo's to, I don't know, "seed" the planet (first thing they need to build on this planet is an orphanage!).

The crew of The Covenant: don't get too attached to any of them...

The ship is damaged in an ion storm (caused, presumably, by the meteor shower that damaged the Avalon from Passengers, six months earlier)**** which wakes up the crew before their appointed time. The captain of the vessel, Branson (an unbilled and only briefly seen James Franco) is killed in the resuscitation, leaving the ill-prepared First Mate Oram (Billy Crudup) as captain, and Branson's widow, terraforming expert Daniels (Katherine Waterston) grieving and alone. After making repairs to the ship, the pilot Tennessee (Danny McBride*****) receives a weird ghostly transmission in his helmet communicator that interferes with him getting back to the ship. Analysis of the signal shows it coming from a relatively nearby planet with Earth-like conditions. In a weird moment of "the-only-reason-to-do-this-is-to-keep-the-movie-going," the usually careful captain decides to check it out, rather than continue on the prescribed mission to the original destination.

Once in orbit, a landing party descends to the surface and they find an idyllic, if dramatic landscape of flora, but no fauna. Daniels remarks that there is no sound—no birds, no animals, nothing. To any rational person that would make one think that maybe, because they're the only life detectable on the planet, they should maybe get those thrusters warmed up and get out of there, but, no.

Recently, I heard some wag say that it doesn't matter what the first thing you say is important, but it will get really interesting if the second thing you say is  "...and then people began to die." Well, after some exploration of the planet and tromping around as humans do so delicately, that's exactly what happens—people begin to die. And they die in spectacular fashion, hatching those critters that we've come to expect. And then, because it needs to, their lander blows up.

So, after everybody's trapped on the surface with a couple rampaging beasties skittering through the high grass and their communication cut off from the main ship, they're rescued by a familiar face—it's the android David, who's been living on the planet for ten years after the crashing of the ship from Prometheus carrying him and Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) in their quest to find the planet of the Engineers, whose little weapons experiment facility they found in the previous movie. David takes them to his hideout, while they figure out how to contact the Covenant and get out of there.

Really, that's all you need to know if you want a spoiler-free review, but, any viewing of the previous Alien films tells you exactly what will probably happen. It's familiar killing grounds in Alien: Covenant, it's just the way that they occur that makes them unique. Then, there's the added wrinkle that we have two androids in the series, David and Walter (Fassbenders, both) who are interacting with each other: David, with his Lawrence of Arabia fetish and genteel British accent and perverse curiosity, and Walter, whose accent is very American and is a bit of a neophyte...for an android, that is.

So, expect a lot of the expected in Alien: Covenant. That Scott abandoned the "Paradise Lost" project (albeit mentioning events briefly in flashback) and went back to "formula" is a bit of a disappointment. That he has made a hybrid film, borrowing liberally from the James Cameron episode and from his own Blade Runner (even to the admiration, even preference, that he showed for the synthetics rather than the humans involved) is also a bit of a downer, calling back elements from those films rather than offering something more challenging to the audience. One wishes there were some hope for the series going on (Scott is saying that he'll make two, no, three more sequels before we get to the original's time-line), but, really, there's no place for the series to go except to endlessly re-generate the same scenario in a nihilistic fashion.

That leaves me rather bugged.


* They are (in order): Alien (1979), The Counselor (2013), Legend (1985), Black Rain (1989), The Duellists (1977), Gladiator (2000), Blade Runner (1982), Thelma & Louise (1991), White Squall (1996), The Duellists, Prometheus (2012), 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), Gladiator, The Martian (2015), Blade Runner, The Duellists, Black Rain, Thelma & Louise, Legend, Gladiator.

** Scott originally wanted this to be a direct sequel to Prometheus, entitled "Alien: Paradise Lost", but when Prometheus proved divisive among the populace, he chucked that notion, handling the plot components in flash-backs (and internet-only sneak-peeks), and went with something a bit more like the original. Why Scott came back to Alien is a question in itself. The man's 80 years old now and perhaps he tired of working on things like The Counselor and Exodus: Gods and Kings that flop at the box-office and went the George Lucas route of going with "what works."

*** There would appear to be gravity and life-support on a ship where everybody human is in cryo-sleep, presumably to protect the very resources that are being squandered on one non-breathing android. Why?

**** And that wouldn't be as far-fetched a coincidence as some of the ones in the Alien series where the tag-line should be "In space, everybody runs into each other..."

***** I have to confess: while one shouldn't walk into movies with prior expectations, I was really looking forward to a scene where Danny McBride gets offed by one of the xenomorphs—I rarely have seen McBride in anything where I found him with an ounce of talent or charm, he's one of those few actors I actively don't like. But, here, he's terrific, taking an under-written part and bringing a lot of good choices and subtle nuances to the role. I'm now a fan.