According to Ridley Scott, the reason Prometheus wasn’t as beloved as it might have been was its lack of the classic Alien xenomorph. Fans want the alien they know and love, he was surprised to learn. And why not? It is rather shocking, is it not? That people who love a movie monster, when asked, will say that’s what they want more of? Yes. Quite alarming. More alarming still, that Scott would listen to a bunch of yokels on the internet and give them what they say they want.
No one wants what they say they want. They only think they want what they say they want. It’s up to the artists of the world to give them what they didn’t know they wanted. Once they get it, of course, they will insist that now that’s what they want, and we’re back to the beginning of this paragraph. Which is as it should be.
Ridley Scott, in a perplexing but all too familiar move, decided to give the fans what they said they wanted and thus filled Alien: Covenant with the familiar aliens of Alien movies past.
So what we get is something like a sequel to Prometheus grafted together with an Alien retread. The characters are just as dumb as those in Prometheus, but they die more horribly and more often. Also, CGI versions of the xenomorph run around in a way one might describe as the opposite of scary. Remember in Alien when we think Ripley has escaped? The Nostromo is blown up, she’s chilling in the escape pod, and you suddenly realize that the shiny duct you’ve been staring at is actually the alien’s head? Nothing in Alien: Covenant is half that scary.
Maybe it’s not supposed to be scary. Maybe it’s just supposed to be a bunch of dimwits running around giving birth to beasts. In that case, bravo!
The two lucky dimwits.
Here’s where we get into all the spoilery bits, so reader beware:
Just shy of five years ago this little movie site began with a write-up of Prometheus in which I lamented how it was full of interesting ideas, all of them squandered. Covenant offers fewer ideas, but squanders them just as effectively.
Doesn’t anyone in these movies find it at least a tiny bit mind-blowing that humans were created by humanoid blue “Engineers” still alive and well on a distant planet? In Prometheus, within five minutes of arriving our dopey heroes discover a massive, terraformed military installation with wild, life-sized, 3D videos of Engineers, and then a dead one, its head perfectly preserved. You might think this is the most amazing verification of a completely mad theory in the history of science, but no. It is, rather, a reason for the scientist whose mad theory it it to get drunk and bitter and bitch about a wasted trip—the Engineer is dead! It was all for naught! And one is left thinking, cheer up, dude, you just proved that humanity was created by distant beings on another world which you have personally discovered in the course of a single afternoon’s exploration. Maybe give it another day before you turn suicidal?
Meanwhile, we get the plot point of David the robot going robo-loco and infecting that same sad scientist with the icky black goo of doom. A great plot point—unless half the team had already become infected and were busy exploding and/or being eaten by vagina-snakes.
In Covenant, nobody gives a damn about alien life, to the point where I honestly have no idea what the state of alien contact is in this series of movies. Are non-deadly aliens the norm? Have we discovered life on other planets? These people show up on the mystery planet to find it lush with trees and wheat. And nobody blinks. Just another one of those Earth-like tree worlds, I guess.
Yes, weird that it’s Earth-wheat. Even weirder? That there’s wheat at all!
The worst minute or so of Covenant is when they take what might have been a truly fascinating jumping-off point for a sequel and kill it in one fell swoop. It’s the flashback to David’s arrival on the Engineers’ home planet. He shows up in their ship, docks, and sends thousands of black goo cannisters to greet them. They all die.
Humans were created by a race of ancient, space-faring beings, and when this movie brings us to their homeworld, it kills them in a single, minute-long scene.
Why does David have it in for them? The creators of his creators? Wouldn’t he be fascinated? He despises humans—and hey, who wouldn’t, given the caliber he’s forced to hang out with—but humans are just bugs in a petri dish. The real deal are the Engineers, yet he doesn’t even want to chat with them? Doesn’t want to learn from them and become the superman he imagines himself to be? Both of these movies are desperate to give enormous weight to the notion of the human creation wanting only to destroy those who made him, but neither offers any plausible motivation. It’s assumed that so long as a robot quotes Lawrence of Arabia and Shelley, he must be deep and troubled, and when he’s so troubled he confuses Shelley for Byron, human extinction via creative bio-beast manipulation is the logical next step.
Kill them all!
In any case, we’re left to watch a movie on a dead planet, humanity’s creators wiped out in the back-story, and what’s there to watch but aliens killing people in ways all too familiar?
I know it’s boring to say CGI sucks, but when it comes to monsters, there’s nothing left to be said. The alien-puppet that bursts out of John Hurt is obviously a puppet—and it looks fantastic. It’s profoundly weird and alarming. When it runs across the table in a way only a puppet would ever run, you remember it. It sticks in your head. It’s wrong, that movement. And wrong is scary.
In Covenant, we get the same scene, only this time a perfect little CGI mini-xenomorph is birthed. It moves like all CGI monsters move, with a perfection so perfect it’s fake.
An old friend drops by
To its credit, Covenant recognizes its half-assery. At the end, there’s a fight between robots. David and his less-imaginative double, Walter, duke it out. The fight ends with a slight nod toward ambiguity, but in a way assuring viewers it’s David who won, and he’s now pretending to be Walter. Which feels like the movie saying, “We’re not going to even bother trying to fool you here, it’s just too goddamned obvious a ploy,” which it is, so they don’t, we know it’s David, and none of the characters figure it out until—oh my god! It’s too late!
David sneaks two xenomorph embryos aboard, stores them with the human ones, and off they go on their mission of colonization. So no wonder Scott’s down for sequels. The next movie can start with a ship full of colonizers heading to the same planet the long-lost ship Covenant was headed to, only to discover upon arrival something terribly wrong—where is everyone? What are these strange egg-like pods? Oh my god look out! There’s aliens everywhere! Thank god we brought along some Marines…
I think this review misses the point of the work of art that Ridley Scott is creating for us in the long run. This film, the entire trilogy in fact, is obviously a satire on current times.
Scott is painting a picture of a future where the current political climate of emotion and indignation at the intellectual elite has tainted science to such a degree that NASA deems it more important that astronauts are shot into space joined by their partners, instead of just sending the best people for the job. Every important decision that needs to be taken by humans after their awakening is based on their feelings, not on the um, scientific facts at hand. This is evident in the scene between Waterston and Crudup, where all rational facts of the mission she throws at him won’t change his mind because ‘’nobody wants to go back to cryosleep for seven more years’’ and everybody is sad because of deep-fried-Franco. Crudup is the only religious character on board, mind you. It’s this ‘Christian compassion’ or focus on feelings that directly leads to his own death and that of practically his entire crew. Do you think he represents Conservatives, maybe?
Humans have become so stupid that they even couldn’t stand the intellectual, rational superiority of their AI. Thus, they have degraded ‘David’ down to ‘Walter’. The former could make informed decisions, even creative ones, based on the situation. The latter is made to be docile, to follow. Look at him during the crew meetings, just standing there blankly while Crudup is making horrifically stupid decisions, influenced by the whining of his blue collar crew.
And yeah a sense of wonder at the universe is nowhere to be found. Intricately built Alien worlds that have frozen corpses Pompeii-style? Meh, who cares? Humans are where it’s at. Americans, specifically. Make America great again and all that. Look they have wheat here, now THAT is impressive. It’s like Monsanto.
Now, let’s wait and see how Scott will cap this trilogy off. He will surely double down on the satire and the next part will then deal with the Covenant landing on a new planet, with David releasing the sleeping humans AND the superior breed of Xenomorphs he put into incubation. Maybe he experimented even further with crossbreeding. All these diverse beings will have to form a society together, building log cabins and the like. Race wars ensue. David will be the despotic ruler, obviously, because he was created by idiots whom he copied. He might even turn a shade of orange.
Alien: America.
Not that I’ve actually seen this movie but it sounds like you have found meaning in it. I would suspect, based on prior experience with Ridley Scott, that the meaning is utterly or primarily of your own creation. In which case: good work. I wholly approve.
Aliens building log cabins. I like it. But seriously… I see that what you’re actually getting at is that these movies are leading up to the “humans” and the “aliens” becoming one and starting a new society on a far away planet, growing and evolving until…
We find out they’re really us! It’s actually Earth! And then what happens is everything that ALREADY HAPPENED! Time is one great big loop, repeating over and over again! We’re the aliens and the aliens are us!
Man. That shit is deep.
Wow. You really missed the premise of the film, and the whole rationale of the Trump phenomenon. But you really embraced the hate for humans and hate for Americans. Well done.
I am pretty certain David’s creators weren’t wearing MAGA caps. No doubt their forebears would have been among the main conspirators trying to have Trump assassinated. (And they were probably shareholders in CNN.)
While no one likes that a billionaire game show host ended up being the figurehead of a movement, you should try to inform yourself what is the basis of that movement, outside of the absurdly bigoted/racist talking points of its detractors, who can’t stop stuttering “literally Nazi!” and “KKK!” long enough to recognize their own violent intolerance.
If you hate Conservatives, then you must also hate notions of patience, family, received wisdoms and consistent morality, and protecting the interests of one’s own community first as opposed to embracing the grandiose and deceptive ideals of globalists.
You might also recall that some of the most evil experiments on mankind were not undertaken by Americans, but Germans, Japanese, Aztecs, Romans, etc., all the way back to the ancient Egyptians.
I don’t see the Alien as Trump’s spawn. Rather, it is the bastard brainchild of the totalitarian tech psychopaths who want to convince us that humanity is the problem and needs to be replaced with their products and prototypes (while they sit safely in some off-world Club Med). These titans are all liberals/progressives.
Just sayin.
If Ridley has the good grace to extend his epic saga beyond just these three movies, I can see your hypothesis totally happening. He’s seriously been mentioning ”six more” in interviews. It seems he’s either reached a transcendent level or genius or he’s gone, well, you know…..senile.
Alien Covenant is surely Scott’s darkest film. The long sequences of David in his cloistered chambers, slowly revealing the extent of his morally debauched experiments, playing his pan flute by candlelight while demonstrating that “idle hands are the Devil’s workshop”, with the massive genocidal necropolis he created just outside door, are simply seething with a suffocating evil.
The film reeks with a hate for humanity. It is never explained in any of the Alien movies how it is that what is essentially a giant bloodthirsty preying mantis (with “molecular acid” for blood) is somehow “the perfect lifeform”, far superior to humans or their creators. But we’ll just have to trust David and his superior reasoning skills on this.
Oh wait. Those reasoning skills were programmed by humans. So David is not really the embodiment of rational science, but scientific bigotry. David has the universe’s largest superiority complex, which should come as no surprise given the long history of the corruption of scientific ideals in the service of people who think themselves our betters, and who no doubt were at the keyboard during David’s design.
So wiping out entire civilizations is not really a moral question if it advances the notions of perfection residing in the superior, most righteous minds of those who think they have the biggest brains. Marx, Lenin, Mao (and Bezos, Musk, and Soros) would all approve (as do Weylandt, Tyrell, and Wallace, of course).
While Crudup’s character is portrayed as waffling and weak, his fragile morality is literally the only thing standing between the designs of David and his creators and the survival of mankind- and in this episode it proves inadequate to the task.
As in with all the Alien installments, the only thing that seemingly can hold back the Alien is the practical and momentary cleverness of scrappy women. But aside from bowing to the misguided conceits of SJW ideology, this solution also fails as an longer-term intellectual challenge to the grandiose designs of neo-Marxists and the Illuminati.
And so we can be certain that in the sequels there will be still more one-on-one dogfights between yet more Aliens and scrappy women, rather than a dismantlement of the corrupt intellectual and moral edifice that gave rise to David and the Alien in the first place.
This is by design, since I firmly believe Scott is a hired gun in the service of the Illuminati, who is teasing their message into the common consciousness. By the time he is finished with his 6th+ Alien sequel, the brainwashing may by then be fully complete…
I also wanted to share my thoughts on one of the confusing plot points of the film. We are led to believe by David that the ship he and Dr. Shaw were traveling in to the Engineer homeworld crashed on arrival, and that Dr. Shaw died in the crash (supposedly explaining the wrecked ship that the Covenant crew are drawn to).
We later learn this is a lie, and that she lived only to become the subject of David’s evil biology experiments.
And then we see the flashback sequence where David, in an Engineer ship, unleashes the canisters with the deadly black bioweapon on the Engineer populace, affecting their genocide. We are somewhat led to think this happened upon his and Shaw’s arrival to the planet, but obviously this can’t be the case if their shipped crashed on arrival. So David’s genocidal act must have taken place later, and probably with no Shaw in sight.
We know from David that he has been on the planet for 10 years when the Covenant crew find him. I think this 10 year period will be the subject of the next Alien installment, where we will learn that he and Shaw arrived to the planet safely, were perhaps taking in by the Engineers, and during which time David plotted his crimes.
It will also become clear that the ship Dr. Shaw died in was leaving the planet, not arriving. In the hologram log record she was singing “take me home country roads”, suggesting she was heading back to Earth. And she seemed happy. And she was piloting the craft, not David. Which leads me to believe she was heading back on her own, perhaps with the full blessing of the Engineers, and David somehow sabotaged her ship causing it to crash, and took her body (perhaps still alive) back to his cave lab to conduct his experiments.
He later commandeered an Engineer ship to launch the bio-weapon, satisfied that he had killed the one human on the planet along with the entire civilization of her creators. And some years later the Covenant crew find him, having now had several years to develop his “perfect species” in the graveyard of the species that gave rise to David himself.
It will be fascinating to learn of the encounters/discussions between Shaw, the Engineers, and David, and learn more about the Engineer culture. I expect we will know soon enough.
But of one thing we can be certain is a fatal flaw in the Engineer culture: self worship. In Covenant we see all kinds of giant images of Engineer faces (even an equivalent Mt. Rushmore), along with what appears to be a sacrificial altar (a large table cross-sectioned with deep grooves for blood-letting, and on which David is slammed into by Walter during their battle, breaking the alter- symbolism obvious). This flaw is ultimately the source of their demise, echoing the Biblical admonitions about self-worship and a breaking of the Covenant…
Whelp. I haven’t actually bothered to watch Covenant yet, so I will qualify this response right off that bat—but—I would like to volunteer you, FuriousYT, to write the next Alien sequel/prequel/unequal. Because, as near as I can tell, nobody writing these things has an idea anywhere remotely as layered—correctly or incorrectly—as you.
While I can’t even recall what Supreme Being wrote about this film and MAGA, I know him well enough to know it was likely an attempt to insert some meaning—correctly or incorrectly—into the typical studio nonsense designed to do nothing more than sell tickets. Coherent thought NOT required by this series, at least since Cameron had a bunch of fun making Aliens. It’s like you’re both trying to take your own view of the world, squeeze it through some Borges or Nietzsche or whatever else you find handy, and apply it to Jason vs. Freddy.
Which, of course, is a perfectly good (and amusing) use of both your time. Not criticizing your criticism by any means, just asserting that it’s most like completely subjective.
So yeah. While it would be fascinating to see David and Dr. Shaw devolve into madness, that won’t happen because it won’t sell tickets and that’s all these movies are meant to do these days. We KNOW how that story ends, we’ve already seen the climax (or we would have, if I’d watched it), and that’s not a blockbuster. Instead, we’ll get some dogs-breakfast that borrows incoherently from whatever other films have done well recently and overlays some not-even-remotely baked philosophical jibber-jabber so people can worry about whether or not they really understand what’s, in the end, meaningless garbage.
But that was fun to read and fun to write. So thanks.
I have now watched this film.
I wouldn’t put any money on it, but I think this was worse than Prometheus, which while bogglingly incoherent, was at least sort of creative and pretty to watch. This was just boring. Prometheus was, yes, infuriatingly inane, but fury is at least an emotion. Covenant is like watching microwave instructions acted out.
I’m pretty certain someone should nuke this franchise from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Yep. Worse than Prometheus. Utterly nukeable. I told you so.