("And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
The Second Coming, 1919 - W. B. Yeats)
Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant has arrived in cinemas, and a strange film it is indeed. Like with Prometheus five years (already!) ago, people all over the Internet are pointing out flaws, or bending over backwards to try and explain them. Just the question of whether it is a sequel, a prequel, or an equal is enough to ponder over endlessly with friends.
Is it a good film though? The answers to that question are impressively diverse, ranging from all-out hate to people who say it's brilliant. Some say Scott has redeemed himself for Prometheus, others say he's letting that film down with Covenant.
Our reviewer Kwenton Bellette liked some parts of it, yet wasn't impressed with the overall end result (read his review). But what did the rest of us here at Screen Anarchy think? Time for a round-up! Here are eight mini-reviews. You can click on the small pictures or on the arrows to move between them.
Note: normally we try to keep these articles spoiler-free, but with this film that was pretty hopeless. While small spoilers are all over the place, two of the reviews (hi, Kurt and Izzy!) do a deep-dive, and I've placed warnings on them so that spoiler-wary readers can quickly skip to the next ones.
And as usual, the original reviewer gets to speak up first. Any added insights, Kwenton?
Kwenton Bellette, Contributing Writer
Quoting from the review: Alien: Covenant is an at-times cliché sci-fi and horror effort burdened by its unnecessary over-explanation of what the aliens actually are, where they came from and the purpose of this horrible madness. Relentlessly nihilistic in its approach, Alien: Covenant actually dims the uncanny horror and thought-provoking feminist slant of ‘the other’ that defined the franchise. In trying to ask and answer the big questions, both this and the disappointing prequel Prometheus dilute the genuine unknown and terrifying horror that drives it.
(Editor's note: Kwenton says "I don't have anything to add, other than that the film is quickly fading from my memory.")
Peter Martin, Managing Editor
Ridley Scott's Alien set a high-water mark for its fusion of horror and science fiction. After that, both Scott and the eventual franchise went their separate ways. Scott's sense of style reached new heights in Blade Runner and James Cameron made Aliens distinctive by transforming it into an action extravaganza.
When Scott returned to the series, he appeared determined to make Prometheus in his own image, only tangentially related to what the sequels had wrought. Watching it again in that light, it's a perfectly fine action exercise that's more attuned to his 2010 Robin Hood than anything else, a sturdy and churning machine that wants to ask the big questions in life but doesn't know how to formulate them properly.
As sequels to prequels go, Alien: Covenant is more like Hannibal (2001) than anything else, a movie that is not intended to build suspense or develop terror. Rather, at its core -- the often-nonsensical action sequences -- it's a juicy, handsomely-mounted, expertly-made B-movie, which then allows for belabored philosophical examination of the ideas behind horror tropes to be laid on top. I very much enjoyed the ride.
Ard Vijn, Associate Editor, Features
When I wrote my review for Prometheus five years ago (read here), I was accused of being way too soft on that film. How dare I have fun with it while the film was riddled (Ridley'd?) with so many logic gaps? Where people, SCIENTISTS even, seemed to be intentionally dumb, from petting cobra-like worms to running right into the path of a toppling spaceship?
That's not to say I don't realize Prometheus had problems. The above-mentioned stupidity is an important part of those. Even though I increasingly get the feeling that it is an intentional ploy to show humanity's inferiority among the other species, I still can't help but wonder if that point couldn't have been made a bit more elegantly. Hell, even George Romero managed to do better in his zombie films.
This "human inferiority vibe" is very much apparent in Covenant as well, though I find it easier to forgive. People still do very stupid things, but at least they aren't supposed to be experts in their fields, and often they have been deliberately misled. No protocol can defend you against deliberate sabotage after all, and the group is not prepared for entering a biological battlefield.
With this, Covenant manages to take away my biggest misgivings about Prometheus, and it delivers on the (body-)horror front, being quite probably the bloodiest of the lot so far. And while plot details are easy to spot, with twists not at all well-hidden, the story-arc itself interested me. Not so much the Alien stuff, as the stalking and pouncing is getting long in the teeth after forty years, but as a new take on the Frankenstein story, Covenant provides a compelling anti-hero, one I hope to see again in a sequel.
For this was the largest surprise to me: while I thought Covenant was going to be an easy Alien revisit with some tenuous links to Prometheus, it's actually very much depending upon the latter. The film benefits from having seen (and indeed remembering) Prometheus, and especially David's character arc in it. Taking into account what David has seen and experienced in Prometheus, much of what happens in Covenant will make a lot more sense.
Back in 2012, I made a color-mood comparison for the four Alien films, and added Prometheus as a pale pinkish-brownish negative at the end. I've now added Alien: Covenant as a two-faced counterpart of the five others. Its image is as split as I am on the film, for while I do not love it, I do want a final chapter added to it, making a "Promethean trilogy".
Perhaps that last one will be called Alien: Genesis, with a spaceship called the Genesis? Because that's as blunt as Ridley Scott likes it these days, apparently...
Zach Gayne, Contributing Writer
For the most part, Alien: Covenant is a perfectly cool movie - great suspense that harkens back to the vibe of Scott's original vision, solid effects that revisualize the creatures in satisfyingly faithful ways, great performances by what's his name and who's her face - but all this Promethean evolutionary God-complex mumbo jumbo that audaciously suggests the Aliens are of splintered human origin betrays what made the original premise so scarily appealing. Outer space is a vast black unknown that may bring wonders or unknowable ungodly terrors. This is a cautionary tale of the irresponsible conquest of man setting out to claim the stars. Why does the menace they discover, so alien to mankind, have to circle back to human nature? Can't they just be fucking Aliens?
Ernesto Zelaya Miñano, Contributing Writer
Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s it-is-then-it-isn’t-then-it-kinda-is-and-now-it-definitely-is Alien prequel was what any sci-fi fan wanted: a smart movie that set up some interesting threads you wanted to see resolved. But, apparently, it proved too dense, slow and dull for some people, and now Scott has pretty much taken a 180, ditched the themes of Creationism and the all-important question of where we come from and what our purpose is and just filmed a straightforward monster movie.
A solid monster movie, though; at 80, Sir Ridley still knows how to create suspense and tension, and some sequences here are thrilling stuff – particularly anything relating to that skittish, pasty-white Neomorph. By this point, we pretty much know all of the xeno’s tricks, but it’s a testament to Scott’s talent that it can still make you pretty uneasy.
But the Xenomorph and pretty much everyone else takes a backseat to the real monster (acting monster, that is): Michael Fassbender owning the screen in the dual role of Walter and mad scientist type David. Watching the actor teach himself to play music and seduce himself single-handedly makes up for having a cast of idiot characters that do the kind of facepalming stupid shit you’d expect from dumb teens in slasher movies (yes, definitely have a closer look at that strange-looking egg thing!), the only exceptions being Danny McBride’s cowboy hat and Katherine Waterston’s proto-Ripley.
Covenant can’t help but be a bit disappointing, dumbing things down and in the process, making its predecessor all but pointless (if you wanted answers to what Prometheus set up, you won’t get them here). It’s a fun movie that could have been so much more had Scott kept to his vision and ignored the (probably all Internet-based) criticism.
Kurt Halfyard, Contributing Writer
(WARNING: heavy spoilers!) The Alien franchise, now in its sixth film (let us agree to happily ignore the fan-fiction inessential nature of the two AvP entries), has a curious set of rhythms all its own: A group of humans (accompanied by a synthetic human) toil in some 'expendable' capacity for a monolithic super-corporation, get infected, and picked off, one by one, in the far reaches of space by a nihilistic biological entity.
In Alien, it was truckers hauling a mega-load of Iron Ore. In Aliens, it was a gung-ho military outfit sent in to rescue a town of doomed colonists. In Alien3 it was a group of convicts who had re-invented themselves at the ass end of the universe as an apocalyptic religious sect. In Alien: Resurrection, a scrappy team of salvage pirates (Joss Whedon's proto-attempt at what would later become TV's Firefly squad) gets stuck in a science lab gone bad. Each of these films were made by different directors with different aesthetic sensibilities, like different chord structures used in a universal melody.
Prometheus is the outlier, but it nonetheless follows the formula. A clandestine rendezvous with our creators takes place on a distant planet, where it ends up being an disaster due to a megalomaniac trillionaire who hired incompetent corporate clock-watchers and a couple of naive dreamers as a bait-and-switch for his own selfish grasp at immortality. While people had issues with these scientists being terrible at their jobs, even though this was the kind of the point, the lesson of Prometheus was as nihilistic as ever. The reason why our makers, The Engineers, created humanity was as profoundly disappointing as why we, humanity, make our own gadgets: simply because we can.
So along comes Covenant, the most nihilistic entry in the most nihilistic film franchise. The group of interstellar canon-fodder here are lovers, mostly hetero, but one gay couple too, sent to colonize a new world and begin a new life. Instead they end up, unwillingly, in a series of Dr. Frankenstein (the futurist, modern Prometheus) experiments conducted by our own fabricated Artificial Intelligence. The innovative, improvisation and immoral David once Frankenstein’s monster himself come full circle to becoming the good Doctor.
David's personal attempts at creating life seem to come with the purpose to wipe the slate clean of both the imperfect, mortal humanity and the mysterious Engineers, and allow for a new synthetic age of artificial intelligence replete with its own DNA playthings. Poetic justice is served, not just on the thematic level, but also at the franchise level. You want sequels to explain the mysteries? This is what you damn well get.
In 2017, this is fitting. Alex Garland's Ex Machina made us empathize with the cunning of A.I. AVA as she escaped her creator-captor. Jonathan Nolan's remake of Westworld sides us firmly with the burgeoning robot consciousness, with the humans not really being invited to the party. Covenant doesn't give a lick about the human race, its love, its struggles or its legacy. I can't say I disagree. Long live the immortal, self-aware David. Will he be the Ozymandias of his own kind? Personally, I can't wait to see what comes next.
(WARNING: heavy spoilers!) Like a lot of Alien fans, I wanted to love Alien: Covenant. It has its moments, but it has other moments that are disjointed and shoved in without much meaning. For instance, the genocidal android flashback never gives us a motive, and what exactly is the flute-playing scene about? I half-wonder if there'll be an android softcore spoof created about this scene. The android-on-android violence and subterfuge --- which was telegraphed as soon as Fassbender began cutting his hair (androids grow hair now??) --- was far too brief. If the new model (Walter) was more advanced than David, it should have been a better fight.
Then of course, there's the stupid people doing stupid things in space, just like Prometheus. You'd think that the crew entrusted with colonizing a planet would act smarter. There's scant character development --- I want to care about these people, but I simply don't, and that's an enormous flaw in the script. And what about the aftermath of Dr. Elizabeth Shaw's character? That felt too gruesome and forced for a character (the best and smartest in the last two Alien films) who would have likely survived any attacks. Like Prometheus, Alien: Covenant is style over substance.
Jason Gorber, Featured Critic
Once again, Jason chimes in by way of television appearance:
And there we have it: an eclectic collection of opinions, ranging from love to hate!
So, what did you think of the film? Chime in, in the comments below, and HAVE YOUR SAY!