Alien: Covenant Review

Alien: Covenant (2017) Review

Alien: Covenant is a sequel to 2012’s Prometheus—a film which was a distant prequel to the original 1979 Alien. I really liked Prometheus, though it divided a lot of fans and critics, and wasn’t much of an Alien movie at all, it was more of a stand-alone sci-fi adventure concerned with the origins of humankind and the race of aliens called Engineers. 

Going into Alien: Covenant, I didn’t expect that much from it. I followed the production of Prometheus quite closely and watched every trailer, keen on figuring out the mystery surrounding it, but with Covenant, I didn’t follow much of the promotional material because the marketing team seemed intent to sell this movie at any cost, so there was no restraint on spoilers and everything they showed looked a little too familiar. Going into Prometheus even after having seen all the trailers, I still didn’t fully know what to expect, but Covenant straight-up looked like a remix of the original Alien.

For the most part, Alien: Covenant is two-thirds an Alien rehash and a third of a Prometheus continuation. In this way, it was better than I was expecting. Prometheus brought up a lot more questions than answers, and I fully expected Covenant to ignore the majority of Prometheus and forge a new story, but it actually follows up Prometheus fairly well, while also giving us a new plot line and characters. I wouldn’t say you have to see Prometheus or even the original Alien to understand Alien: Covenant, but I would definitely recommend watching Prometheus beforehand (or even re-watching it if you haven’t seen it in a while) if you want to get the most out of it. 

On that note, I found Alien: Covenant maybe a quarter surprising, unpredictable, and original. The other 75 % was utterly predictable, either because the trailers spoiled it (not that it’s the movie’s fault, but I honestly believe they showed at least one shot from every scene between the two main trailers) or because it was something that’s already been done before—and I’m not talking just things done in Alien. 

There are elements (plot points, moments of action, visual cues) from Aliens and even Alien 3 present in Covenant. Some of the rehashed stuff I was okay with…except most of it wasn’t done better or even as well as it had been done the first time. Even the music is the same. I liked the original parts of the score; some parts of the Prometheus score are re-used, which I liked, but the re-use of the Alien score was way overdone.

Here’s the story: the crew of the Covenant, a colonization ship bound for a distant habitable planet, gets into some trouble on their long journey, and receives a strange transmission, which alerts them to a different planet that’s also habitable but uncharted, so they decide to check out that planet instead, both for the source of the signal and the possibility of colonizing it (the whole investigating-a-planet-because-of-a-signal is pulled straight-out of the original Alien). 

When they show up, they make some disturbing discoveries about why nothing lives on the planet, and I won’t get into the story more than that, because though the trailers spoil a lot of the action that goes on, they don’t spoil many of the connections this movie makes to Prometheus. This is a sequel to Prometheus, just not in the way I expected. 

   

A huge issue I had with Alien: Covenant was some of the character logic, or lack thereof. There was some dumb stuff in Prometheus, but in this movie, there’s some even dumber stuff. And it goes beyond characters doing things like exploring an unknown planet without space suits or helmets, or not following quarantine protocols, or splitting up as if they’re the Mystery Gang in Scooby Doo when they don’t know anything about the indigenous wildlife. I’ll keep it vague, but there are a lot of bizarre story choices made, many of them to do with the non-human characters. There’s also a hefty amount of just plain weird stuff, which I mostly liked. Mostly. 

I’ll briefly touch on the cast. One of the actors I was most-worried about was Danny McBride, who is normally a comedic actor. He plays Tennessee, one of the pilots, and he’s really good. He was one of the few characters I actually liked. Katherine Waterston as Daniels, who is essentially the lead character, is good but not great—she is, once again, a strong Ripley-like female heroine, except she starts out all weepy and is, for most of the movie, dour and depressed, which made her less interesting to me, until she becomes more badass towards the end. Captain Oram (Billy Crudup) is a more central character than I had anticipated him to be, and he’s a dick, but everyone knows it, so he’s not really supposed to be likable I guess. Everyone else was just a potential victim for the creatures. I didn’t care about any of the other humans, really, but just like with Prometheus, Michael Fassbender is once again the best actor/character in the whole movie.     

Even more briefly, I’ll mention the creatures. There’s an unfortunate lack of practical effects, and the cgi was 50/50 for me. Some shots of the creatures looked quite good, but many of them looked too fake, and the creatures are shown way too much. It completely goes against director Ridley Scott’s method in the original Alien of hiding the creature. His reason for hiding it was because if you saw it too much, you saw it for what it was: a guy in a suit. Now, the problem is the same, but modified: you see the creature for what it is: not a guy in a suit, but a computer generated image that isn’t really there. 

Alien: Covenant was basically what I was expecting, but I actually found it more enjoyable than I anticipated, in spite of all the issues I had. There were plenty of moments that, as a huge fan of the series, got me particularly excited, but overall, it never wowed me visually in the same way as Prometheus, nor was the story or cast of characters as compelling. It reminded me of what The Force Awakens and Jurassic World did, by rehashing a bunch of stuff fans knew from the original movie and making it into a kind-of-new story. 

I’ve heard a lot of critics call it “just another Alien movie” and that is perhaps what I find most-disappointing about it. It really is just another Alien movie. For all its flaws, at least Prometheus was a bold and innovative take on the Alien movie universe. It did a decent job of blending elements of Alien into a grand, epic story, which was so distant from the simplicity of Alien that it didn’t feel like a retelling. Nothing about Alien: Covenant felt epic, nor was it as scary/suspenseful as Alien, but it did tie Prometheus and Alien together fairly well, it just weighed more to the Alien side than I would’ve liked. Ultimately, I would recommend seeing it, especially if you felt Prometheus wasn’t Alien-heavy enough.