Starting to Feel Just a Little Alienated
Alien: Covenant / directed by Ridley Scott
So many things feel off in Alien: Covenant that it’s hard to know where to begin; so we may as well begin at the beginning. After a brief opening in which an android named David (Michael Fassbender) and his creator (Guy Pearce) chat about creation in an abstractly white and modern room, we see a spacecraft making its way across the starry vastness. The vessel is named Covenant, and its sole conscious operator is Walter (Michael Fassbender, again! What what?!) — an android cousin of David (ah!). The ship carries a crew and two thousand people bound for a planet they intend to colonize, but they’re all in suspended animation on account of the years-long duration of the trip. Within minutes, though, catastrophe strikes, as some sort of cosmic event (neutrino surge?) whips into the ship, tearing a flim-flam solar sail clearly not designed for such rough stellar business. The emergency awakens the crew, though the captain doesn't make it — in the first of many don’t-quite-make-sense moments, his sleeping pod turns into a cremation chamber, and he burns alive.
For a few minutes after this, the film sustains a plausible jagged edge, as the unnerved crew deals with this death, makes repairs, and shows little regard for their new captain, Oram (Billy Crudup). Then, out of nowhere, they receive a fuzzy transmission from an uninhabited and previously unknown nearby planet — and the message turns out to be a garbled version of John Denver’s Country Roads (the second of our doesn't-quite-make-sense moments)!
Pretty much needless to say, going to the mysterious planet with its fuzzy country soundtrack turns out to be a very bad idea, and from this decision point onward, the film feels irredeemably plagued by the clumsiness of its plot mechanics and the limitations of its script. Increasingly poor decisions are made by people who we never really get to know, which means that it’s hard to be invested in the terror that befalls them — which means, in turn, that it doesn't really feel like terror at all.
There is also an increasingly disheartening sense of the previous Alien films, particularly Alien and Aliens, being revisited without anything fresh or innovative coming out of it. These first two movies had an amazing horror premise, based on a predatory creature that exists in a couple of creepily distinct life stages: one, a little proto-beastie that emerges from an egg and implants a second entity in an unwilling host; the second, a monster that gestates and explodes out of the host’s body and quickly grows into an armored, multi-mouthed killing machine. These are ghoulish, powerful ideas that go to some of our most primal fears. And in Alien, in particular, they were contained within a movie that drew these fears out, let them get under our skin and disorient us, as with increasing actual horror we came to realize the nature of the creature.
In Alien: Covenant, well, not so much. The nature of the creatures’ origins is manifold - sometimes they enter people as evil little microbes, sometimes the old-fashioned way - and these cycles happen so fast that there’s really no time for tension to mount. There are also links back to this film's direct precursor, Prometheus, which being a muddle itself results in all manner of second-order muddle and near-incoherence in Covenant. The set-up of scenes meant to scare us feels ham-handed, like in a third-rate slasher flick. And when we learn that the ultimate incarnation of evil may actually be one of the androids taking his synthetic sensibilities and amoral predilections to their logical conclusion, the whole movie collapses with a whimper: it wants to be apocalyptic, but it comes off as just kind of dumb.
