Alien: Covenant

Directed By: Ridley ScottWritten By: John Logan and Dante Harper Starring: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride

I’m not entirely convinced the alien from Alien needs an origin story, much less an origin story primed to last at least three films. Necessity, however, is seldom the mother of Hollywood’s mid-year inventions. At least Ridley Scott has confirmed he isn’t content to merely regurgitate previous work with his second Alien prequel, Alien: Covenant.

The year this time is 2104, a decade after the ill-fated expedition detailed in Prometheus. A colony ship, the eponymous Covenant, bearing some 2000 colonists and 1400 embryos, is en route to the remote and promising new homeland of Origae-6. Whilst the crew are in stasis, android Walter, a more dutiful but less independent incarnation of the android David from Prometheus, overlooks proceedings (both androids are played by Michael Fassbender who impresses again with his ability to derive humanity from stoicism). Walter is the ship’s master that is, until a shockwave jolts the crew back into animation. The captain is lost, so Billy Crudup’s Christopher Oram tentatively takes the reigns—a man of faith whose religious beliefs have a habit of discrediting him in this world, or in this case, universe, of science. Oram’s number two is Katherine Waterston as Daniels, a character whose Ripley comparison is inevitable—the rational, intuitive heroine. Tennessee (a surprisingly straight and understated Danny McBride) is the chief pilot, the last of the not-quite-expendable members of the crew.

Oram calls an audible when the awakened team pick up a signal in the form of John Denver’s “Take me Home, Country Roads” from a nearby planet, suggesting there may be a closer, more habitable alternative than the original destination. This alternative was in fact the destination set upon by David and Elizabeth Shaw in the concluding moments of Prometheus, and as is swiftly realised, it’s a destination less inviting than first impressions might suggest.

This is to be the third directorial contribution of Ridley Scott to the Alien series. His first effort, the original Alien, in spite of its lingering existential musings, was decidedly simple—a nuts and bolts, interstellar monster movie, and a seminal monster movie at that, one driven by Scott’s keen visual eye and eerie atmosphere. By contrast, Prometheus, rather admirably, pursued its own course, however to results more scattershot than evocative. In his 2012 effort, Scott opted to bring Alien’s heftier themes to the forefront in a piece that never managed to reconcile its monster movie origins with its ambitions as a macabre, existential, adventure film.

Alien: Covenant is strangled somewhere between Scott’s two previous outings: a morbidly fun science fiction thriller laden with gut-churning viscera on one hand, boasting flickers of great tension to go along with its at once alluring and grimy palette, and on the other hand a set of ponderings regarding such notions as what it means to play God, what it means to be human, creationism, and the negative stigma of faith in a scientific age. So often does Scott gravitate to the existential tropes of a Philip K. Dick novel in Alien: Covenant, that one can’t help but feel the film Scott would truly like to be revisiting is Blade Runner. As if to directly call to mind Blade Runner’s source material Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Alien: Covenant even has David and Walter discuss their dreams, or lack thereof, in a sequence that has intrigue inherent in its ideas, but which is failed by a screenplay that’s unable to probe any deeper than having its characters merely articulate the questions to us,

rather than pursue the answers through action.

Scott’s delving into big philosophical ideas, to his credit, illustrates the director’s desire to instil something fresh into his well-treaded saga, but he does so at the expense of more basic storytelling elements: characters worth cheering for (John Logan and Dante Harper’s screenplay spreads itself thin between the ensemble—Daniels’ positioning in the story may call to mind Ripley, but she’s granted too little time to flex her resolve), and the emotionally alienating habit of telling rather than showing.

It’s a tricky situation for Scott, submit to the film’s familiar creature feature formula and settle as an effective but inconsequential thriller, or transcend Alien with weighty philosophy but stray from the basics which made the original work in the first place. The screenplay does begin to bridge the mutually exclusive halves of Alien: Covenant in its final stanzas as the revelations begin to unfurl, and with a less portentous tone and less stilted screenplay, Scott may have been able to better balance Alien: Covenant’s brain and heart. As it is however, one is left wishing the director had have embraced the monster in his monster movie more than he did.

Rating:

2.5/4