Sunday 11 June 2017

Movie Review - Alien: Covenant

A black-and-white poster of a mass of people being surrounded/tortured by the aliens, not unlike the Renaissance depictions of Hell, with one alien at the center highlighted by a shaft of light from the upper-left.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. 

15 comments:

  1. IDK... personally, I just couldn't find the film very good, in large part because of both the tonal shift and what felt like a huge set of plot-holes being shot into the lore.

    - Timeline issues from Pilot being on LV-426 long enough to fossilize when it took 2,000 years for the Pilot suits in Prometheus to start fossilizing - AKA, the fact that the Pilot on LV-426 should logically be much older than the ones on Prometheus. I mean, Covenent takes place a mere 16-18 years before Alien - how'd the Engineers get a Pyramid full of Xeno eggs on LV-426 if they were wiped out and the Alien made such a comparatively short time ago? (and yeah, Ridley Scott revealed that the egg chamber in the original film was actually an Engineer temple the Derelict was docked on top of, rather than a stray ship crashing).
    - The presence of the Xenomorph mural on a 2,000-year-old Engineer ship in Prometheus means that the Xenomorph species should have existed millennia before David’s creation, much less the events of Covenant.
    - The destruction of the Engineer’s homeworld in Covenant’s YouTube-released side-material would leave the Engineers without the resources to ever weaponize the Xenomorph to the extent that was shown on the Derelict in LV-426, and that’s provided any Engineers were even left alive.
    - The huge disjointing thematic changes from “unknown terror” to “discovery of our purpose” to “man-made legacy of terror”, the latter of which goes against the themes of both Alien and Prometheus and in turn reduces it to just another “Frankenstine’s Monster” story.
    - In tandem with the above point, the Alien being just a creation of David based on human DNA and the black goo means it's not even an Alien anymore, destroying the very thing that made it an alien and therefore scary to begin with.

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    1. I agree that this movie raised a lot more questions than answers in terms of continuity. Until a new movie comes along, we'll probably be left with speculations to come. However, there are some possible logical explanations for the inconsistencies.

      -It's likely that LV-426 and Covenant's xenomorph are similar but not the same. This is supported by the difference in the infant stages of each xenomorph, where LV-426 took a larval form and Covenant was born fully developed. This could also mean that the Engineers made or were aware of xenomorphs long before David made his version, which is consistent with evidence from Prometheus and Alien. This would also provide a great closing arc for David in the future, as in his pride and obsession to create something new his creation winds up being an imitation of his creators-by-proxy and serve his downfall.

      -The Engineers are a space-faring race and they have been shown to have outposts on two planets so far, so it is possible that they have settlements on other planets as well. I wouldn't discount them as extinct yet, even if that was their homeworld that was destroyed.

      -The black goo itself is largely unexplained so far. We do know however, that the Engineers were skilled in genetic manipulation. So it is possible the black goo itself is derived from the DNA of xenomorphs and that through genetic experimentation, it can be returned to it's former state.

      Of course these are just theories and until proven otherwise, the movie is sorely lacking in explanation. Hopefully the next installment can actually answer questions insteads of asking more.

      Honestly, the movie had a lot riding on it. It tried to be both a sequel to Prometheus and an Alien movie. It didn't necessarily fail, but it didn't do spectacularly on both ends. I wished more was shown of Elizabeth and David's interaction in the ship and subsequently upon arrival. Instead we're just told that Shaw is dead. Honestly, Shaw was a better protagonist than Covenant's heroine, and she deserved a better sendoff than dying off-screen or a 2 min Youtube videp. I hear they're taking the BvS route and putting important scenes in the extended edition, but why do important plot points have to be cut and reintroduced later? They could've cut down that first accident on space thing and put some important scene in.

      As for as an Alien movie, it did better in that front. It may not scare the audience as much, but you have to remember part of what made the original Alien so scary was it's novelty at the time. By now it's nothing we haven't seen before. This is also why I was glad to see David being focused as the main villain, and Michael Fassbender stole the show with him. The movie portrayed the Alien's savagery and animalistic behavior splendidly imo. My only complaint is that it was undermined by the neomorphs, which were better in a lot of fronts than the Alien despite the latter supposedly being the perfect one (better method of reproduction, quicker gestation and maturity, better agility, higher killcount, etc). They could've shown more of how the Alien was better than it's predecessors.

      Overall though, the movie did fine enough imo, and despite it's flaws had good points in them. I particularly like the "twist" of David being "Walter" in that the movie didn't try to hide it. Anyone paying attention could easily identify David with his face not healing and all that. A solid entrance to the Alien franhise after so long. Looking forward to the next one.


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    2. Reply to Smith:

      In the film’s defense, though, as a movie that’s treated more as a sequel to Prometheus than anything, I thought it was actually a good movie. If nothing else, the internal plotline that runs through the movie, as well as Michael Fassbender’s double duty as Walter and David is amazingly done. Also, while watching the movie I didn’t actually even consider any of the plot holes you mentioned – timelines with the LV-426 ship are flexible enough to be handwaved (oh, maybe LV-426’s atmosphere contributed to decay, or stuff like that, and the movie only really shows the origin of the xenomorphs, not those particular xenomorphs) and I honestly didn’t even remember the mural on the Prometheus ship. Though if the Engineers made the black goo from the xenomorphs, and David simply tried to ‘ape’ the process to call his own… I dunno. I personally didn’t find these two points being really that distracting from the storyline that ran from Prometheus to Alien: Covenant. (If nothing else, the one plot hole I kinda felt was egregious was that the Engineer-birthed xeno-lookalike at the final scene in Prometheus is apparently not a Xenomorph precursor?)

      I didn’t watch any sort of Youtube stuff, but from the movie itself all we got was David unleashing the Prometheus canister goo parasites on the Engineers, genociding at least a city and all, but there’s still a long, long gap between “David drops bombs on top of the city” to “entirely deserted planet”. Again, maybe the sequel to Covenant will feature this mysterious Engineer figure that landed on LV-426, and explain just how that thing came to happen, but the focus of this movie was more on David trying to play god and create his own species, not to explain Alien the movie.

      I think I have to disagree with the Frankenstein’s Monster comparison, because I thought David creating the neo/xenomorphs was a logical extension from the whole ‘why did god/weird-chalk-faced-aliens made us’ themes in Prometheus to David’s own search for purpose in both that movie and this one, where David’s scenes with Weyland in the prologue and his scenes with Walter in the movie itself showed that what David yearned to do, more than anything, was to create. But at the same time, Walter noting that David misattributes poets’ works is kind of a note that for all of David’s talk of being, well, the ‘god’ to these xenomorphs that prove superior to David’s own ‘gods’ (humans), all he’s doing is just altering something pre-existing, RE: the black goo.

      And it’s not just human DNA, surely? David did go on a long spiel about how he started with the black goo, then the engineers, then the weird mosquito things, and kept doing selective breeding. Human DNA is involved, for sure, but it’s still more alien than anything else. Though I definitely agree that the loss of the whole ‘unknown, mysterious terror’ bit is unfortunate the whole point of the Alien prequel movies is kind of to explain the origins of the aliens.

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    3. Reply to Holein:

      I dunno, I honestly felt that the movie fit relatively well in continuity – with the xenomorph mural on the Engineer ship on Prometheus being the only real glaring error (and that felt more like an easter egg more than anything, TBH). Absolutely agreed that the LV-426 xenomorph and the Covenant’s xenomorph are different sub-specieses, with the design seen in Covenant resembling the xenomorphs seen in recent PS3/PS4 games like Alien: Isolation or AVP. I’ve seen a more in-depth analysis comparing the two, about ridges and stuff like that.

      I also actually like the idea of the Engineers already being aware of the xenomorphs before David made his version, and David has been unknowingly copying the engineer’s works or reverse-reverse-engineering the black goo back to the xenomorphs it’s derived from. Keep in mind that David is one hell of an unreliable narrator with huge ego problems, so for all his talk of ‘innovation’ he might just unknowingly, as you said, reverting the black goo back to its original state or something.

      Also agreed that the Engineers are probably not extinct, though David fucking up their homeworld does give the showmakers an easy clean state because the Engineers aren’t this hanging sword over their heads that is just waiting to be explained anymore – we can just brush it off as being ‘extinct until proven otherwise/until the showmakers think they’re ready to tell an Engineer-centric story’. To be honest, if they didn’t apparently change the script to be more Alien-centric instead of a straight-up pure Prometheus sequel, I feel that the hypothetical Prometheus II would’ve been less about the origin of xenomorphs but about the Engineers and humanity in general.

      It’s unfortunate that the black goo parasites in both Prometheus and Covenant seemed just so much more amazing and effective than the xenomorphs themselves, yeah? I’ve studied real-life parasites as part of my career, and one of the most important parts of a parasite’s life cycle is how it inoculates the host. The xenomorphs’ method is relatively cumbersome, using the Facehuggers that all hedge on an unfortunate host stumbling across one of the many, many eggs. Whereas the black goo versions have been able to inoculate their hosts with microscopic fungal spores entering through the eardrum (Covenant) or a single drop mixed with water (Prometheus). I don’t necessarily think that adult-to-adult the neomorphs were scarier or more effective than the xenomorphs, but by method of inoculation they were certainly far more effective. And as for the killcount, the neormorphs attacked a bunch of unprepared people who had no idea that the planet was even inhabited, whereas the xenomorphs were fighting against people who were at least trigger-happy against scary, faceless space demons. Also the neomorphs had like a dozen of people to pick from, whereas when the xenos entered the scene, there was barely a half-dozen people left. Though, again, making their effectiveness as uber-predators more evident should have really been done better, or maybe have the neomorphs’ method of inoculation less insanely awesome as ‘cloud of dust you can’t even see’.

      Agreed that Shaw’s off-screen death was a bit annoying, and honestly that’s my biggest complaint against the movie. The heck’s with all these Youtube scenes? It’s absolutely silly, really, to show important scenes in Youtube clips. I watched nothing before this movie other than the very first trailer, and you really don’t have to catch up to all the viral marketing or extended editions of the movie to get the full, final product. (BvS, in particular, is improved so, so much by the extended cut. Still can’t forgive the stupid Martha scene, or ‘Lois throws the spear into the pool five seconds before everyone needs it, but the first two acts are improved dramatically that it went from a messy movie on par with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen into an actually decent movie that suffers from a weak third act).

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    4. - Holein1

      The problem is that every single one of those logical explanations… is shot down by Ridley Scott outside the film. These twists are such a problem to me because Ridley Scott himself is proclaiming they’re face-value true despite lore inconsistencies.

      - That’s not what Ridley Scott thinks, though; as far as he’s concerned, David made the actual Xenomorph then and there in Covenant, and that’s the viewpoint he’s pushing to be canon, regardless of whether or not it fits with the lore.

      - That’s also not what Ridley Scott thinks; he revealed that it was indeed the Engineer’s core homeworld that was destroyed and serves as the ruined setting of Covenant. Scott even declared Prometheus was a mistake to make, implying he killed them off so as to not have to return to them.

      - Same as above; that’s not the path Ridley Scott wants to follow. He even confirmed in an interview that anyone who thinks the Engineers had a hand in making the Xenomorphs is “dead wrong” - despite the fact that even 20th Century Fox seems to *prefer* the idea of the Engineers helping make them.

      Personally, I just can’t find it much of a sequel to either story, since it cuts branches off of both in major ways. And as an Alien movie, it didn’t pan out well for me either, because the novelty of the Alien was the fact it was an *ALIEN* - that it was something inhuman that you couldn’t really connect with - but in Covenant, it’s portrayed as a Frankenstein’s Monster stand-in; just another in a long line of human-mutant creatures. Fassbender’s good acting could only salvage so much for me, because we shouldn’t have to rely on that expectation to carry the film - one good thing about the film does’t lessen everything else it did wrong.

      In the end, it just didn’t feel like it did the other films justice, and that Ridley Scott is brushing aside the lore inconstancies and declaring it’s events canon at face-value doesn’t help.

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    5. But I have no idea what Ridley Scott is saying, which is why the movie didn’t seem that problematic to me in that in that what little inconsistencies my head can come up with (the Engineer-Xeno-thing at the end of Prometheus, the timeline not lining up perfectly with the events of the first Alien movie) because one or another explanation in these discussion kind of satisfied me.

      And to be perfectly frank, I don’t really care what Ridley Scott says. Figuring out a series’ canon shouldn’t require you to dredge up random interviews with a director. Of course he’s going to say every part of his movies are canon, but on the other hand Sigourney Weaver said Ripley is super-duper-dead-never-coming-back-to-life at the end of Alien 3… and the studio changed her mind and boom, Ripley’s back for the dire fourth movie. Ditto for the many, many times that other directors say things that are contradictory with how future sequels moved. Like, yeah, Scott might say that the Engineers making the xenomorphs is a big no-no, but maybe two, three years down the line someone will end up showing him a script that delivers a similar plot twist, and he decides to adopt it as canon.

      I also did think that the planet that Covenant took place on was the Engineers’ homeworld, and I think David all but blatantly said it in the movie proper. I think Holein and I were talking about how if in, say, the potential Covenant sequel we’re going to have an Engineer character show up, it could be justified as him being spared from David’s genocide by hiding out in a colony or something.

      And, again, I kind of think that comparing the xenomorph – even if we take the Covenant movie at entirely face value and that David 100% created the xenomorph via gene splicing the black goop – to Frankenstein’s Monster is a gross oversimplification. Yes, it does contain human DNA, and yes, it is somewhat indirectly related to a human’s creation using some human parts to create the xenomorph, but that doesn’t preclude all the mysteries surrounding just what the fuck the black goo is, and all the monologue about how David had to bred through multiple generations of parasite variations to get the xenomorph that he’s happy with. Who knows how little ‘human’ is left in the xenomorph’s DNA? Just because he experimented with the alien black goo and the plant/animal life in the Engineers’ planet and introduced some human elements to it doesn’t make, say, the neomorphs suddenly terrestrial. It’s not a human mutant, it’s still an alien who’s slightly mutated with the introduction of human DNA.

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    6. - Blackjack

      That therein would be the issue, than; I do know what Ridley Scott is saying, because he’s said so in direct interviews about the matter, in which every single sensical explanation you listed getting debunked by the guy - which amounts to a *lot* of inconsistencies (the biggest ones I already listed - and those were the ones off the top of my head; I didn’t even try to go deeper).

      And considering that, as director, Scott's basically treated with a “what he says goes” stance by Fox, it means that what he thinks is how the series’ cannon is going to flow regardless of if it makes sense. Hell, it’s not even “random interviews” - it’s his open word to every single outlet that’s asked about it. Also, sad as it is to say, Fox pulled the plug on the new Alien movie - and if you’re talking about Alien Resurrection than Weaver technically wasn’t lying, since that wasn’t the Ellen Ripley character but a clone who’s personality didn’t even fully match the original. Honestly, I’d hope to god that someone getting a new script to change things is what’ll happen, but that’s a hypothetical at the moment - it’s like saying we should wait until Fairy Tail ends to rip apart the dumb shit it does each chapter.

      In turn, that idea about the Engineer character feels like it’s shot down the moment you consider the whole “Alien Temple on LV-426” aspect - a lone Engineer doesn’t seem like he’d be able to effectively establish placement and control of the Xenos as a weapon to that degree and than be dead long enough to fossilize within the brief 18-year timespan left between Covenant and the original Alien film.

      And likewise, I use the comparison to Frankenstein’s monster because your statement perfectly reflects what was done to the Alien, in my opinion; it *was* grossly oversimplified, in scope and premise. It doesn’t just contain human DNA - it’s primary genetic core *is* Human DNA, due to David finding the human genetic structure remarkably adaptable to the alien life of the Engineer homworld (which in turn is likely due to humans being sourced from the Engineers that originated on said planet). He used Shaw’s DNA as the starting basis and than just added more into it - it’s literally a human-mutant as a result, which was supposed to explain why the original Alien from the first film had a humanoid skull visible under it’s transparent head-shell (even though that should instead have been from it absorbing human traits from the host rather than being primarily human-based itself).

      Furthermore, Ridley Scott actually debunked all the mysteries of both the goo and the Engineers’ creating us in an interview since, by his admission, he has no intents on going back to Prometheus - and it’s basically that the goo is an invasive-terraforming agent meant to restructure organisms through random mutation; if they live, they evolve into something greater, and if they die they were “unworthy.” In turn, they wanted humanity dead because they considered them a failed experiment in creating new life and decided to start over when humankind became too warlike and self-destructive - and originally Scott even planed to have it be that Jesus Christ was an Engineer emissary that, when crucified, made the Engineers dismiss them - and that said event would have been the catalyst for the Engineers developing a “more perfect creature” (the Xenomorph) until he decided that David making the Alien would be “more interesting”.

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  2. - Blackjack

    But honestly, that just makes it feel like it failed worse to me, because Covenant didn’t portray itself as a sequel to Prometheus - every threadline in that film (the Engineers, the questions of how we were made, Shaw’s journey) was arbitrarily cut out so harshly that the previous film may as well have not been made. I also can’t be forgiving of it just because Michael Fassbender’s a good actor - that’s like saying I should forgive Fairy Tail’s BS just because I liked Hades; one good thing can’t excuse everything else it gets wrong to me.

    Likewise, the flexibility of things in the film is rendered moot by Ridley Scott himself, who has repeatedly claimed in multiple interviews that (A) David made the Xenomorph and anyone who thinks the Engineers were involved is “dead wrong”, and (B) the Engineers are dead and gone and Prometheus was “a mistake” to have made. Also, LV-426 didn’t really have much of an atmosphere, actually, and the internal atmosphere of the ship seemed to match that of the one in Prometheus - there’s nothing to support accelerated decay, and even than that would contribute more to… well, decay, not fossilization. It’s distracting because it’s the core of the story, and it goes directly against everything in the prior films because Ridley Scott himself is simply disregarding them.

    Also, there wasn’t that long a gap between the events - Prometheus was in 2091, and Covenant is in 2104; that’s 13 years total and there’s supposed to be two more films squeezed in before the events of Alien in 2122. Furthermore, Ridley Scott explained LV-426 already in side-notes on Prometheus - he claims the egg chamber was actually part of a pyramid the derelict ship had docked atop of, which means both the ship, structure and the eggs inside should logically predate David, since this would all have to have been done before Ridley Scott had the species destroyed… and yet that’s not the path he’s going with.

    Likewise, I have to disagree with calling it a logical extension to Prometheus, since to me it felt like the tones couldn’t be more different - Prometheus was about discovery of origins, reasons for existence and whether or not we can or should choose our Gods and beliefs even when our makers literally scorn our existence. Covenant by contrast takes all that away - David doesn’t question his purpose at all; none of that kind of questioning is done. The morality of it is argued, but as you yourself just pointed out, it’s just about an egotist android wanting to make a monster at the end of the day, and he justifies it by using verbose claims to mask it with - which I’ve seen as far back as Frankenstein.

    And yes, it was human DNA - Davis specified that Shaw’s DNA was the basis of the Xeno, which he added other things to. It’s fundamentally a human mutant, for all intents and purposes - a view that, again, Ridley Scott is pushing to be canon.

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    1. -Smith

      Ahh, I didn't know this, I'll have to look it up. If this is true, this changes everything. I honestly thought that those explanations could fit well, but if Ridley's already saying otherwise, then i honestly have no idea where he's going. I was aware that Ridley wasn't proud of Prometheus, but to actually alter a story so much because of one bad movie? Could cynicism from the director be playing a part. Whatever the case, that's too much imo. Not to mention ruining the continuity to Alien, a movie that is one of his legacies. This does make me a bit more skeptic towards the future of Aliens.

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    2. Again, though, I have no idea what Ridley Scott is saying, and even if he renders everything moot… I don’t care about interviews that happen outside the movie? Like, back before/when Prometheus came out I bet he talked about how he’s going to explore all this stuff, how he’s proud about his newest movie and all that and it’s not until critical backlash that caused him to run back to what’s basically a comfort zone with using the more generic ‘space travelers fight aliens!’ plot while trying to intermarry the David subplot from Prometheus. So yeah, Ridley Scott can say whatever he wants, because, shit, he can say whatever he wants and at the drop of a hat change his mind for the next movie(s).

      Though honestly, this got me curious and I really want to see just what the original plans for the now-scrapped Prometheus II would be. Maybe the original plan was for Prometheus II to feature the actual event of Shaw and David reaching Engineer-Homeworld and discovering all the 'oh shit, god does hate us, let's hate god back and drop the parasites on them!' themes from Prometheus, ending with Shaw's death, David's route to egoistic insanity and whatnot, and then for the events of Covenant to take place? I dunno.

      I do agree that as a sequel to Prometheus in the traditional sense it’s as bad as Aliens 3 to Aliens (beyond David, relatively a lot of the Prometheus elements are fucked over) but in a thematic way, Covenant worked relatively well as a more philosophical bit to Prometheus.

      I have to admit that the specifics of David's monologue about the xeno's origins isn't something I'll swear by, because it's been a week or so since I actually watched the movie. I did distinctly remember him talking about how he did genetic selection with stuff like forcing the black goo to pass through mosquitoes and stuff, but also equally that he experimented with Shaw's DNA in some way or form, but the specifics do elude me.

      I dunno. I guess I enjoyed it largely in part because I didn't mind the fact that David created the xenomorphs? That seemed to be the biggest point of contention, and I personally kind of don't care either way if it was the engineers or David who created it -- and I totally get why you end up being so disappointed that it's a human creation that did it.

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    3. - Holein1

      That’s actually the biggest tragedy; your explanations not only would fit well, but they’re actually pretty much what 20th Century Fox *wants* to do. The unofficial novelization of Covenant DOES do everything you said - it specifies that the cut-sectioned egg in David’s lab was taken from an Engineer vault and describes his Protomorph and Neyomorphs as attempts to replicate the original Xenomorph, and that his success was only obtained when when he realized that Engineer DNA was the key to it - but that since he wiped all the Engineers out, he had to substitute Shaw’s DNA as the basis, resulting in a Protomorph that, while close, didn’t fully match the original. The issue comes from Scott’s visions in that he seemingly wants to ignore all the canon for his own ideas - and I’m worried that if he doesn’t get a script-writer that can balance the vision with the lore, he’ll keep breaking things and what was done in Covenant’s novelization to explain things will just end up retconned.

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    4. - Blackjack

      But again, Scott’s interviews aren’t just scattered clippings - they’re his open opinion on how he wants the Alien series to go. And by all accounts, it seems like Fox is treating his word as law on the matter - what’s said in his interviews is being regarded by them as canon as far as the films go. Including the fact that his reasons for abandoning Prometheus actually didn’t have that much to do with the criticisms - it was because he felt people wanted more of the Xenomorph as opposed to any issue with what concepts he was exploring. And that in turn is also kind of a big issue - the fact that Scott’s changing his views at the drop of a hat is why there were so many canonicity issues caused by Covenant in the first place. Same with the philosophical parts - because honestly speaking… it doesn’t feel like there was any of that in Covenant; it basically boils down to David wanting to create life to prove that he (an artificial creation himself) can. I just really didn’t see any philosophizing on on that part as opposed to debating the morality of the experiments and what one sacrifices to perform them, let alone any thematic ties to higher powers of creation.

      This kinda got cemented by how Scott pretty casually revealed both the purpose of the goo and the reason the Engineers wanted to drop it on humanity. For the first, it’s that the goo’s basically an invasive-terraforming - while it kills easily, it’s primarily meant to reform organic matter, with death being a result of whether or not the lifeform in question can survive the mutations. If they survive, they’re “renewed” as a new creation, and if not than they were “unworthy” of continued existence, further playing into the Engineer’s seeming God-complex mixed with scientific pragmatism on recycling rather than outright glassing things. in turn, the Engineers wanted to use it on humankind because we were a “failed experiment” - they were seeding life in a lot of places to try and create a “perfect organism” using their own DNA as a basis (again, referencing their God-Complex in thinking themselves the only being worthy to use genetic material from as the starting point), and using the data from these tests to perfect their ultimate organism. However, humans became warlike, aggressive and self-destructive, causing the Engineers to see them as aberrant and lesser in how a human might regard a caveman - or in Alien’s terms, a defective android - and they decided to bomb the black goo on Earth to end the “experiment”, either with humankind being destroyed or recycled into something else.

      In earlier drafts, the “failure” of humankind due to their immense cultural diversification and internal conflicts would have been what prompted the Engineers to decide that a creature with a conventional consciousness was too prone to “emotional weakness”, which would have directly lead to them retooling their ultimate organism to be a creature devoid of morality and focused purely on survival and ruthless cunning, culminating in the creation of the Xenomorph - but the creature proved *too* adaptive and escaped control too easily, leading them to purge them and either abandon or seal away the facilities they were stored in, one of which was the LV-426 installation… again, until Ridley Scott arbitrarily decided David being their sole true maker was “more interesting.” Covenant’s (unofficial) novelization seems to keep the above stuff and has David discovering an intact Xenomorph Egg in the Engineer’s vaults, becoming enamored with it’s genetic design and trying to recreate and evolve it further, but Scott seems determined to have his way regardless of lore. I’m hoping that whoever writes the next script will treat the novelization’s additions as canon, but I’m nervous. At the same time though, I will admit that my experiences with Hiro “deus-ex” Mashima may have just jaded me toward the idea of creators who force whatever vision they have into their stories without regarding what came before.

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    5. My point re: Scott isn’t really about their format, but really about the fact that no movie, no work of fiction, needs to have random supplementary commentary from the author (or deleted scenes/extended cuts, silly DC movies) to have it stand by itself. If Christopher Nolan decides to tell us just what is the definite ending of Inception somewhere (and who knows, maybe he did) it doesn’t mean that anyone who watches Inception is obligated to track down when Nolan said such a thing and then accept it as canon. Likewise, when I exited the theater for Alien: Covenant, I shouldn’t be expected to track down Ridley Scott’s interviews and opinions and then take it as conclusion. Yes, the ‘Word of God’, as TVTropes puts it, is something that pervades how open many authors and fiction writers are about their work thanks to interviews being the norm instead of the exception, but at the same time my review is more about the movie that I watched, and without any strong opinions on the David thing, I enjoyed the movie.

      As you have pointed out, however, all the talk about Scott basically flip-flopping and insisting that ‘it all makes sense, jeez!’ does paint him as someone who’s not at all concerned with continuity, but with whatever movie he’s making… which could be troublesome for the franchise moving forward as a series. Like you said, it feels absolutely shitty for him to ignore all the movies that came before (or after, but you know what I mean) just because he decides that he wants to do his own thing simply because it’s “more interesting”. Personally I still think this movie in itself holds up relatively fine on its own, but the continuity problems we’ve all dissected – especially if the author openly doesn’t give a shit about explaining them beyond ‘more interesting’ is definitely not a good portent for the theoretical Covenant Sequel tying it to the Sigourney Weaver series.

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    6. That's kind of a moot point, in my opinion - he's still the one who's considered "in charge" ATM, just like the manga author is still the higher authority over what the writers of an anime adaptation do or don't change in his work. Unless/until someone else with a higher authority over the license, like Fox itself, says otherwise, what Scott says in his interviews is effectively as canon as anything Kubo says in interviews about Bleach. Making claims about who's obligated to believe what feels irrelevant to me - it's like a headcanon vs canon argument at that point; whatever reasons you come up with, the guy at the top is the one who's view is "right" even if it's not the better or sensical one.

      But in turn, even the above can be kinda considered moot, since Ridley Scott's insistence on everything in Covenant being taken at face-value only highlights and compounds what I disliked about the film, rather than being the source point - all the issues I listed that I had with the film, still would exist even without all the stuff Scott said in his interviews. Fassbender's performance still would have been the only really good one, the Alien still would have been just a human-mutant rather than the original unknown organism that made it scary, etc. Honestly speaking, what Covenant got right was the horror atmosphere, and in any other series I'd consider it a passable film. Heck, that might actually be one of the worse things about it - as a stand-alone film, it'd be watchable enough to enjoy as mindless horror. It's when remembering that it's part of an overreaching series though (two, if Prometheus is counted) that it felt like a failure in those terms - even if the film is watchable on a stand-alone basis, it doesn't feel like it does the other films enough justice and actually undercuts them, much like how an elseworld story can be good, decent or just "meh" on it's own rights but would harm it's base series if it was jammed into the canon. Personally, it's not what I'd call a great movie, but I'd at least get people liking the overall atmosphere of it - but it still would have been better off if it weren't being shoehorned into the Aliens series with so many plot-holes being opened up; it's a framework that on it;s own could at least be enjoyed if not for their using the Alien series for it.

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    7. Agree to disagree on the canon/headcanon thing? To me, what's canon in a work is all the presented work, full stop. Not counting whatever views that the author may have expressed elsewhere. That's not to say that your interpretation that 'the author's POV is absolute' is wrong either -- there's merits in our differing points of view about what's canon and what's not, and that's fair.

      With the movie being bad because it doesn't function well as an episode in a series, though, I totally get it because of the inconsistent themes and continuity problems -- which I do admit isn't something that bothered me a lot for the sole reason that it's been more than a decade since I last watched any of the older Alien stuff, so I was just thinking of the older movies in great strokes. (Have rewatched the original Alien recently in-between our discussion, though)

      Which, in hindsight, is probably what Ridley Scott had in mind. He's just making a movie that sort-of had tie-ins to the older movies without making sure that it lines up perfectly. In a world where we have huge adaptations of epic novel series like Harry Potter or Game of Thrones with perfect internal continuity, or the juggernaut that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we and the more modern directors have a far, far higher expectation of the amount of continuity that a movie in a part of a series should take. Which Ridley Scott seems to... not really care about, considering the continuity problems you stated. Maybe that's because he's from an older generation of show makers who's confused at why he's being peppered with all these questions about how his new movie ties in with the movie he made 30 years ago. I dunno. Maybe the series would've benefited a lot more if Prometheus and Covenant had been a stand-alone reboot?

      I dunno. I enjoyed the movie as it is, mostly due to the sci-fi horror elements, the Alien being cool on the big screen once more regardless of the origins (which is something that bothers you, I know, but at that time and honestly even now isn't something that bugs me *that* much) and Fassbender's performance. But as you said, when you take Covenant as a part of a series -- which I admittedly didn't do that much rewatching of -- it kind of starts to fray continuity and theme wise.

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