Movie Review - Alien: Covenant

Alien: Covenant

So... Alien: Covenant. Before we start off the movie review, I think a brief history of the 'modern' Alien movies is in order. So Alien and Aliens aired in the late 70's and late 80's respectively, both highly lauded for being a tense space-horror movie and being an awesome action space marines movie respectively. And then came two horrid sequels in the 90's that basically killed the franchise, and the fate of the Alien franchise was relegated to a couple of video games, and the questionable crossovers with Predator.

And then come 2012, nearly two decades after the last proper Alien movie, and Prometheus was launched. While anyone who followed the promotional material probably knew it was going to be an Alien prequel, I sure as hell didn't, and I think I freaked out a little in the theater when I realized that Prometheus was part of the Alien franchise.

And, well, your mileage on whether Prometheus is a good movie, or, more importantly, is it better as a stand-alone spin-off movie or as a part of the Alien franchise, will vary. Because Prometheus took such a different take on the mythos, featuring none of the iconic xenomorphs and instead on a different threat -- the black goo, the giant womb starfish monster, the creepy vagina-faced worm... and it answered so little of the questions it asked. Why did the Engineers, the alien species that created us, wanted to obliterate our species? Was the weird creature that was born out of the Engineer's corpse the ancestor to the iconic xenomorphs?

And, well, there were a lot of questions that was left unanswered. And honestly, again, this approach -- both the 'take a step back from the Aliens and instead let's do some world building' themes explored in Prometheus, as well as the fact that none of the big questions was answered at the end -- is also going to affect how you see Prometheus. Was it a great mystery? Was the mystery not worth much, and the survival of our main characters what's important? Was it a huge cop-out, or is the subversion far more realistic as far as what our heroes can find out? Also, when is the sequel going to be?

2017, it turns out, was when Alien Covenant was going to come out, and it's a direct sequel to Prometheus. And it's probably as divisive a movie as it was its predecessor. Whether in terms of style, of storytelling, of the characters used, of the answers given, it takes some... ballsy steps, let me tell you that.

But let's not talk about the movie as a part of a series, or the answer that people are seeking to after Prometheus, and let's talk about just how well it stands as a solo horror/sci-fi movie. And, shit, it works very well. Of course, it still has the same problems that tends to plague the horror genre as a whole -- a lot of fucking morons among the cast members -- but that's the fault of the genre, really, though like Prometheus, the members of this particular crew is a colonization crew so they really should know better to be able to undergo proper quarantine measures, and not to freak out when someone vomits blood on you. Or that one lady soldier who apparently looked for a bathroom that's so remote on the unfamiliar necropolis that when she dies her very loud screams aren't even heard by the rest of the crew. Or the couple who was fucking in the bathroom with very, very loud music that they didn't even hear the ship-wide alarm.

The set-up for the movie is decent. The titular Covenant is a ship with an absolutely glorious solar sail thing going on, a group of scientists and engineers that are sent to colonize a planet that's selected to be humanity's new home. Just like the crew of the Prometheus, only a single android, Walter (played by the amazing Michael Fassbender, who played the android David in Prometheus) remains active to maintain the ship.

A freak solar storm incident thing wreaks havoc and causes the accidental death of the ship's original captain Jake Branson, forcing the next in line, the unpopular and unsure Oram, to step up as leader. Also, we've got our Ripley stand-in for this movie, Daniels, the widow of the dead captain. When they repair their solar sails, they discover a garbled message that one of the crew members identifies as John Denver's song, Take Me Home, Country Roads (a personal fave) which means it must've been sent by a human. The crew finds out that the message was sent from a very, very Earth-like planet that's a hop and a skip and a jump away, and they decide to investigate. They find David and Elizabeth's gigantic IUD-shaped ship crash-landed nearby...

And, well, shit, it's a pretty much a road down to hell from that point, as the planet ends up being filled with strangely Earth-like plants, like paddy fields and fungus, and of course, one by one the crewmates gets infected by a far-more-evolved version of the black goop parasites from Prometheus, leading to the unleashing of these new creatures, the Neomorphs (as people have taken to call it). The movie shows us yet another variation of the iconic chestburster by having the Neomorph equivalent burst out of people's spine and throat, plopping out into the ground in a horrifying tangle of viscera and placenta-esque jelly material. The sickly white and pale Neomorphs look unmistakably like premature babies and aborted fetuses, and there's just something so fucking wrong with how they look.

The crewmates that landed quickly gets cut down, first when two members of the crew left to guard the landing ship ends up trying to backstab and/or save each other with quarantine shields... and while every freaking person ending up slipping and pratfalling on the floor thanks to the slippery blood ends up being more hilarious than suspenseful, cutting back to the psychotic screeching of the Neomorph as it mauls one crew member and causes the ship to blow up when a stray shot hit some explosives, marooning the rest of the crew...

Yeah, between the husband (Tennesse, who would later be a very important character in the third act) of the panicky crew member screaming at the radio, helpless to do anything to help his wife, and the rest of the crew finding themselves marooned... the showdown at the fields is amazingly tense, with the two Neomorphs running around from who knows where, ripping off jaws and melting Walter's hand off.

Salvation comes for the remaining survivors in the form of a mysterious cloaked figure, none other than David, who's attached back onto his body and impressing me with Michael Fassbender's great rendition of two different robots and making them distinctly unique from each other. David tells us that Elizabeth had perished in the meantime, and brings what's left of our heroes to a very creepy necropolis. Thousands of corpses, turned into dead statues, litter the huge courtyard of a city, and it's quickly revealed that the planet they're on? It's the Engineer planet. David claims that when he and Elizabeth landed, the pathogen was accidentally unleashed and killed all organic life...

But as we later find out, David actually fucking bombed the entire Engineer race by unleashing the pathogen on them, massacring every single Engineer. Well, I guess we're never going to learn why the Engineers decided to wipe out humanity, but at the same time, well, someone wiped out the Engineers. So, uh, yeah. It's a bit of a cop-out, sure, but at the same time it also concludes the whole Engineer story arc, giving us at least a conclusion to that hanging plot line, while still keeping the mystery, which I thought was actually quite similar to how the original Prometheus ended.

Regardless, though, David reveals that he's grown to become quite the psychopath. I'll have to rewatch Prometheus -- it's been 5 years, after all -- to really see if David's already on the road to madness even then, or if this is a bit of an ass-pull, but he doesn't just genocide the Engineers, he's apparently used Elizabeth's corpse for his own studies, while at the same time crying next to her grave. I'm not quite sure whether David killed Elizabeth in a misguided attempt, or if she died of natural causes, but shit, the image of a splayed-open Elizabeth as a display piece among so many other xenomorph paraphelia is easily one of the creepier moments in the movie.

David bonds with Walter, which is pretty sweet (even if some of the dialogue, like 'I will do the fingering' is absolutely hilarious) but it's clear where Walter draws the line. He's still loyal to the humans. Which proves problematic when the adult Neomorph attacks and kills a couple of the crewmates, and jeez, that transition from the Neomorph's featureless blank face into a gaping maw of teeth? That's fucking horrifying.

David clearly wants something more from the Neomorph, trying to communicate with the creature, and is absolutely outraged when Oram blows the creepy fucker's head off... but David quickly composes himself and leads Oram to his secret laboratory, and image that anyone who's familiar with the franchise will now instantly -- Xenomorph Facehugger eggs. David talks about what he has been doing, and apparently he's been perfecting the black goo parasite from Prometheus and attempting to build the perfect creature. He's shown throughout this movie, as has Walter, that even androids yearn to create, and the thing that David creates? The traditional Xenomorph.

A Facehugger hugs and impregnates Oram, and we're treated to the traditional chest-burster scene, heralded with a music that manages to be simultaneously scary and awe-inspiring as the chest-burster doesn't scuttle away, but instead greets David's gesture with one of its own.

The dwindling crew members -- Daniels and Walter, mostly, manage to rendezvous with Tennessee, who flies down with a repurposed construction vehicle -- but not before the dual threat of David and the glorious Xenomorph, finally on a movie screen again after a decade (AVP:R was 2007, right?) and it's amazing. The Alien is almost 100% true to H.R. Giger's original concept for the creature, albeit streamlined somewhat because it's more CGI and less dude in a suit, and it marries both parts of what makes it so effective in both Alien and Aliens. Like Alien, it's stealthy, it hops out of the environment, and it stalks you like a hunter. But like in Aliens, it's also a ferocious predator that'll rip you apart in physical combat even if it doesn't ambush you.

There's a nice, stark contrast to how it's used as a mysterious boogeyman in Alien or a swarming group of enemies in Aliens. Covenant uses a singular xenomorph to highlight what an apex predator this is, but shows most of the scenes in broad daylight, and the battle as the xenomorph jumps onto the flying construction vehicle and does battle with our heroes is just amazing, suffice to say without recapping the whole scene.

As all this is going on, David goes crazy as well, kissing Daniels in the face in a huge 'no no no ew' moment before Walter comes to rescue her, and the fight between the two androids is amazing to behold -- I don't think we've ever seen two androids fight, but jeez, it's pretty amazing as they unleash the full strength of their superhuman strength upon each other.

While this first Xenomorph ends up being killed, as they return to the Covenant, apparently Lope, who seemed to have been saved from the Facehugger during an earlier conflict in David's house, ends up carrying a parasite within him (though since the Facehugger only latched on for less than a couple of seconds, it might be David had something more to do with this) and a second xenomorph pops out, kills Lope and the rest of the named crew members other than Daniels, Tennessee and 'Walter'. And while a climactic confrontation at the hangar bay of a ship might be a straight out of the Aliens playbook, it's still pretty intense as 'Walter' helps to use the ship's multiple blast doors to funnel the xenomorph into the vehicle bay, and Daniels and Tennessee try to outwit the xenomorph and blast it out into the cold, cold reaches of space. It's a pretty intense fight, that's for sure.

And then, as the crew celebrate their victory, Daniels asks Walter about that log cabin they talked about earlier in the movie... only for Walter to not respond. It turns out that during their fight on the planet, Walter did a little switcheroo with David, and has allayed the humans' suspicion by participating and cooperating in their slaughter of the second xenomorph. So yeah, David wins!

The ending is pretty chilling, too, with David just walking set to the music of Wagner's Entry of the Gods into Valhalla, itself a music played by David on the piano in the prologue, while David vomits out several xenomorph embryos and puts them next to human embryos in a chilling reversal of a scene that Walter did in his first scene.

Overall, it's a pretty intense movie, with some pretty decent plot twists, and easily as strong as an entry in the Alien franchise as Prometheus is, if not more. The slaughter of the crew members ends up being a lot more harrowing this time around, too, because due to the nature of the mission everyone is married to someone else, making so much of the deaths, even the minor characters, feel so much more personal. I thought it struck a pretty great balance between the suspense and the tension of the Alien horror genre, while still having a fairly decent philosophical and thoughtful discussion courtesy of David in the middle of the movie.

And, if nothing else, we did get the huge reveal of why the Xenomorphs were created -- it's because David wants to play god, to reach perfection and to create. It explains what happens to the Engineers, and it ends on a pretty chilling 'bad guy wins, covers everything up' tune. It might not be what some people want to see, especially those expecting a more explicit introdump about what's going on, but the Alien franchise at its core has always done a lot of its lore telling via hints and context clues, and I felt that, honestly, both Covenant and Prometheus are well-justified in doing what they did. Granted, there were some bits that I hoped was alluded a little more, like the events in the Engineer homeworld, and killing Elizabeth off felt similar to killing Bishop and Newt at the beginning of Alien 3, itself a pretty unpopular move, but at the same time David's story is honestly just so well-told that I kind of liked it anyway.

It's a movie that's kind of problematic to talk about simply because of the differing expectations of what people want. Do people want an explanation to the xenomorphs' origins? Do people want just another entry into the Alien franchise to see the titular beast wreak havoc and kill people? Do people want to follow Elizabeth and David's journey through the Engineer homeworld? Do people want more movies like Prometheus, set in the same universe and starring a different breed of parasite aliens? And, more importantly, do you like Prometheus or not will affect how much you like this movie. Honestly, it's going to be impossible to satisfy all of these groups, and while the final result felt more like steering the ship back to more Alien-friendly waters than to explore the brave new world of Prometheus, I felt that it's still a great movie in itself, and a very, very strong entry into the Alien franchise. I, personally, enjoyed Prometheus a lot. I may review it sometime down the road, but I remembered it being fresh while still staying true to its original roots. Alien: Covenant brings back and marries concepts from both the Alien movies and Prometheus, and while the ratio might upset some fans with a specific preference, I honestly thought that they did a pretty great job with this movie.