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.

Top 10 Unanswered Prometheus Questions: C.C.C Issue #62

Top Ten Unanswered Prometheus Questions

Prometheus was not exactly the Alien prequel that fans were expecting, and it ended up dividing audiences. Some people loved it, some people hated it, but across the board, everyone agreed it gave us a lot more questions than it did answers—so many, in fact, the studio actually used it as a selling point for the blu ray. “Questions will be answered”, it said on the cover. 

While I appreciated a lot of the mystery within the film, I also hoped many answers would come in a sequel. The sequel comes out next week in the form of Alien: Covenant…except, from the couple trailers I’ve seen, it doesn’t appear to be gearing up to answer many of the big Prometheus questions.

I don’t know if Alien: Covenant will satisfy my curiosity or not, but in the meantime, here are the top ten questions Prometheus posed and didn’t resolve, most of which I really want to have addressed, either in Covenant or another sequel down the line.  

Spoilers ahead for Prometheus, by the way. 

10. Was Vickers an android?

This question doesn’t even matter anymore, since she got flattened by the falling Engineer ship, but I still wonder about it. It’s never confirmed in the movie whether Vickers, the skeptical Weyland representative, was a synthetic product of Peter Weyland’s or a biological product. In the third act we find out Weyland is her father, but hey, that doesn’t mean Vickers is his naturally-born kid. Back at the beginning of the movie he says the android David is like the son he never had, and then it immediately cuts to a shot of Vickers, who looks pissed.  Maybe he made Vickers, too, but she’s more advanced than David? 

 

It’s a question that’s been raised and debated by many fans, but I have no doubt now that she was an android. I won’t get in to all the extensive reasoning and evidence I have to support it, but perhaps the most-crucial piece of info comes from director Ridley Scott himself, who was asked if there would be an android in the movie, way back when they were still filming in Iceland in 2011, and Mr. Scott answered with this: “There may be two.” 

Now look, Ridley Scott says a lot of stuff, so maybe he was just messing with us. But if you watch Vickers carefully, there’s plenty of things that seem to indicate she very well could have been an android, from the way she dresses to the way she interacts with David. This is actually my favourite unanswered question from Prometheus. It doesn’t really matter because it doesn’t greatly affect the story, but it’s a fun guessing game to play, and is logical if look at it from either way. Writer Damon Lindelof said she wasn’t, but I don’t believe him. I’m okay with not having a firm answer. This is one mystery I’m content to have left as a mystery.  

9. What is the Deacon? 

Unlike the whole Vickers thing, this one I’m not okay having left unexplained, and it seems like that’s the way it’ll remain forever. At the very end of Prometheus, an alien bursts from the dead Engineer’s body. It was nicknamed the “Deacon” by director Ridley Scott, and has also unofficially become known as the “Protomorph” because it very clearly is not the same type of creature (Xenomorph) as seen in the original Alien films. So what is this Deacon thing? 

What we do know is it had a much more complicated life cycle than the original xenomorph. It started as black goo being ingested by Holloway, who then impregnated Shaw with an alien fetus, which grew into a giant facehugger-type thing (called the Trilobite) and then impregnated an Engineer, which spawned the Deacon. The creature’s story was continued in the comic series Prometheus: Fire and Stone, but as for the film world, it makes one screech at the end of Prometheus before it cuts to black, and that’s it. 

When I watched Prometheus for the first time and saw this thing at the end, I thought it was the perfect way to end the movie on a disturbing, sequel-setting-up note. But now I watch it and just feel like the writers forgot they were supposed to be making an Alien movie so they added this as a last-minute tag just to remind viewers “don’t worry there are aliens out there!”. It seems we won’t be going back to LV-223 in Alien: Covenant, and there are no intentions to return there anytime soon in any other sequels, so therefore we’ll probably never see the Deacon again.

8. Why did David infect Holloway? 

What really sets the events of Prometheus in motion is when David takes a drop of the mysterious black goo from one of the urns in the temple and puts it in Dr. Holloway’s drink, thus infecting him and making all the other bad stuff happen. But why did David do this? There actually is a bit of an explanation. 

We find out later that Peter Weyland is on board the ship and still alive, and David must take orders from him, so we can infer it was Weyland who instructed David to infect Holloway, presumably to see what effects the goo would have on him. But this isn’t confirmed, and there are still additional questions left from David’s act, such as the issue of Holloway having intercourse with Shaw. Did David know they would have sex that night for sure? Did he know that Shaw would become pregnant with an alien squid baby? If so, what was the point of that? 

My theory is it’s just like in Aliens, how Burke wanted to smuggle xenomorphs back to earth by trying to get Ripley and Newt impregnated and then put them in cryo sleep. David says to Shaw they can’t remove her fetus and the best course of action is for her to go back into cryo sleep. Sounds to me like Weyland at least wanted a specimen to take home, if he couldn’t find eternal life from the Engineers, but I’m completely speculating here, and a flaw to this theory is Weyland doesn’t seem to care when Shaw removes the fetus.   

Back to David infecting Holloway, it’s not properly explained what the motives were regarding this act. Was David instructed by Weyland? Did either of them know what would happen? Was it an experiment? I’m not really sure, but again, like the question about Vickers, it doesn’t really matter anymore. 

7. Why was no one briefed on the mission?

This question is more to do with poor writing than something purposefully posed by the script. I don’t know how I never noticed this the first couple times watching the movie, but seriously, how stupid is it that some of the scientists don’t even know why they are on this expedition? Vickers says her company paid a trillion dollars for this mission. You don’t just drop that much money on an exploratory mission and then not tell your whole team what it’s even about! 

Here’s what we learn by the end: Peter Weyland wants to find the Engineers so he can possibly find the secret to living forever from them, and Dr. Shaw and Dr. Holloway want to meet the Engineers so they can learn why they made humankind. But some of the crew don’t even know that they’re looking for an alien race at all. 

After everyone wakes up from cryo sleep, they have a little meeting, and a digital Weyland comes out to tell them a bit about what’s going on, then instead of explaining everything, hands it off to Dr. Shaw and Dr. Holloway, who educate the others about their theory on the Engineers making humans and whatnot. How was this not discussed at all until this point? The geologist character doesn’t believe their theory, which is fair enough, but he just goes along with it like, yeah, whatever, I’m here to study rocks, that’s all. The two guys who help fly the ship make bets on what their mission is all about, too.

You could assume Weyland was trying to be secretive for undisclosed reasons, but to me it feels like the screenwriters wanted an easy way of explaining everything, so they just made it so the mission parameters weren’t disclosed yet, that way the characters could explain it to those who didn’t know and, by default, explain it to the audience. It felt lazy and illogical. Even Shaw and Holloway question Vickers about a secret agenda they don’t know about, which leads me to my next question…  

6. Why did Peter Weyland pretend to be dead? 

This is once again an example of terrible screenwriting. First, let me give some back story. In the original script for Prometheus (titled Alien: Engineers), Peter Weyland was barely in it; he never even left earth. But in the rewrite by Damon Lindelof (who is frequently blamed for some of the dumber aspects of the final film, and rightfully so), Weyland became a much more important character. Ridley Scott cast Guy Pearce in the role, and makeup effects were applied to make him look old (when in reality he was only in his 40’s). But in the end, young Peter Weyland was cut from the movie entirely, so what we’re left with is old Peter Weyland played by an actor less than half his actual age who is so heavily covered in makeup he looks plastic. It was a poor decision, I think, but isn’t so terrible-looking that it takes me out of the movie. 

With that explained, let’s get to the question at hand. As I mentioned before, in an early scene the crew are welcomed by a hologram of Peter Weyland, who says if they are watching this, it means he’s dead. This is completely negated when, in act three, it’s revealed that surprise! Weyland was alive and onboard the whole time!

This reveal falls completely flat for a couple reasons. First of all, no one reacts. No one even seems to care. I mean, yes, people are dying and turning into weird mutated beings and there are piles of dead Engineers and killer worm monsters, fair enough, but still, you think they might be a little more surprised to find out the head of the company who allowed them to go on this expedition in the first place was secretly there? And another issue: why did his presence have to remain secret? There’s no clear reason I can see, except Damon Lindelof wanting to have a big twist/reveal moment, and this was all he could come up with. As far as I’m concerned, the question of Weyland concealing his presence has no answer, it’s nothing more than a plot hole. 

5. What is the black goo?

 

Unlike some of the other questions on this list, there’s a pretty clear answer, as found through varying sources, but here’s a brief explanation from the Alien wikia page:

“Chemical A0-3959X.91 – 15, also known as Agent A0-3959X.91 – 15 and referred to colloquially as the ‘black goo’ or ‘black liquid’, is an extremely potent and virulent mutagenic pathogen, composed of millions of small micro-organisms, that was manufactured by the Engineers as a biological weapon, presumably for military purposes.” 

That pretty much answers my question. Except it doesn’t. 

The rules regarding the goo are not concrete and easy to follow like the life cycle of the xenomorph. The urns (A.K.A vases, A.K.A ampules (why does everything have to have so many different names?)) start to leak the goo because of a change in atmosphere and the goo gets on some worms in the soil, which turns the worms into albino snake-like creatures called Hammerpedes. But then, when scientist Millburn is hit in the face with the acid blood of the Hammerpede as well as the black goo, he mutates into a savage zombie-like monster. And then, when Dr. Holloway ingests the goo, he just mutates and gets sick. And poor Dr. Shaw gets impregnated with the Trilobite from him. 

So basically the one rule is there are no rules? 

Fans have analyzed this movie to death, so there are some possible explanations for how it works, exactly, but the whole point of my question really is, if this black goo was some kind of mutagen, then why were the Engineers using it as a weapon? When the black goo “got out” and “turned on them”, as Captain Janeck says, what happened, exactly? Did the black goo kill them? Did they mutate from it? The black goo is perhaps the best example of the way Prometheus created more questions than answers. 

4. What is all the stuff in the temple?

This is a multi-part question that all has to do with the room that became the central focus of the movie’s marketing campaign: a dark chamber with the giant metallic head of a humanoid in the center. Two of the characters in the movie ask what the deal is with the giant head. It can be inferred to function as some kind of statue meant for worshipping, but whose head it is (a particular Engineer, another deity, or a generic representation of their race) and its exact purpose isn’t explained. 

On the floor around the head are many of the ampules, which I already covered, but why are there ampules both in this seemingly ceremonial chamber as well as the cargo hold of the ship, located in a different part of the temple? In addition to the strange giant head, there are murals on the wall, which provoke more queries. In one mural is what looks like the xenomorph. This is the only glimpse we get of an actual xenomorph in the whole movie. Or is it a xenomorph? Some fans have speculated the creature on the wall looks more like the Deacon that appears at the end rather than a traditional xenomorph, which is definitely in the realm of possibility. But does that mean the Deacon has existed in the past, before the whole infecting Holloway and impregnating Shaw fiasco? Why is there an Alien on the wall? Do they worship it? Revile it? How long ago did they make it? 

In front of the mural is a green crystal. What does it do? What purpose does it serve? Dr. Holloway makes a point of going over to it, inspecting it, and then he says “This is just another tomb.” 

I’m sorry, what? You got that from looking at an Alien painting and a green rock? 

Another briefly shown mural on the ceiling depicts an Engineer looking down and holding what could be an Alien or another Engineer or something else entirely. And then, just to mess with us, the ceiling mural changes when David touches the black goo. Why did this happen? This one room is nothing but a giant riddle, and the worst part? I bet Alien: Covenant will not have any answers about anything in it.   

3. What happened in the opening scene?

In the opening scene, an Engineer approaches a waterfall with a ceremonial cup that has some black goo in it, he drinks the goo as a U.F.O hovering overhead takes off, then the Engineer’s body breaks down on a molecular level and he falls into the water, where his DNA restructures. 

What the hell? 

There’s no clear explanation given for what exactly is happening here, but let me try to offer some interpretation. For a long time I just assumed this planet was earth and this was the cockamamie explanation for how humans evolved, but there’s nothing to actually indicate that this is earth. It could be any planet at any point in time. But that still doesn’t really help explain why human DNA is the same as Engineer DNA (among many other things). It seems like this act of drinking the black goo in the cup is a ceremonial thing, but it’s not really clear whether the Engineer knew he was going to melt down from drinking it and thus was sacrificing himself (the more common notion) or if he was perhaps betrayed somehow and this was an accident. What the hovering U.F.O has to do with anything, I don’t know. 

I have a feeling we might get some vague information from Alien: Covenant that could be used to fill in the blanks on what’s happening here, but I doubt we’ll ever get a proper explanation. It was a very mysterious and intriguing way to start Prometheus, but to never come back around to it with any kind of explanation was rather frustrating. The biggest questions about this scene, for me, are to do with what’s in the cup and who is flying the U.F.O. Is the stuff in the cup a variation on the same black goo found on LV-223? Is the U.F.O. an earlier model of the ship we see the Engineer’s flying later? Or is it another species entirely? 

Maybe an even better question is, does any of it matter? 

2. What was the Engineers’ overall plan? 

This is the question Dr. Shaw and the severed head of David are left with at the end of the film. “First they created us,” Shaw says, “then they tried to kill us. I want to know why.” 

Yeah, so do I, Shaw. So do I.

Shaw and David know that 2000 years ago the Engineers on LV-223 planned to exterminate earth using the black goo, and somehow, the goo got out of control. Most of them all died, someway, but a few locked themselves in one of their ships and went into cryo sleep (presumably waiting for the goo to go away?), and then all the events of Prometheus played out. What Shaw and David don’t know is why the Engineers wanted to destroy earth after they apparently created us in their own image, so Shaw’s plan is to find where the Engineer’s come from and get some information.

This journey for answers is what I presumed the Prometheus sequel would show us, and I think that was going to be the plan originally, but alas, it seems Alien: Covenant is telling a very different story. So when will we get the Engineers’ full plan disclosed to us? Probably not in Covenant. This leads me to the biggest question still left at the end of Prometheus…  

1. Where did the Alien come from?

Oh, right. The whole point of the movie Prometheus existing, or so I thought, was to answer this question. And yet, it didn’t even come close. 

So…what happened, Ridley Scott? You were supposed to tell us the origins of the creature from Alien in a single movie, and now it has expanded to how many movies? 

Actual article headline: “Ridley Scott has six more Alien sequels in mind”

Now here's an updated headline: "Ridley Scott teases two Alien: Covenant sequels, not four"

So I guess he doesn't know, either? I’m highly skeptical all of these movies will be made. 

We had Prometheus, which I enjoyed as a stand-alone sci-fi adventure, but it was a far cry from the simplicity and pure horror of the original Alien, and now instead of following up Prometheus with a similarly-styled film, the sequel is going back to more of an original Alien feel, which I think is great. But, now it’s an Alien movie again, instead of an Engineer movie. So clearly we aren’t getting a firm answer on where the Alien came from, because it seems like it’ll already exist at the start of Covenant and, as far as I can tell, it already existed at the start of Prometheus, too. Therefore we have to wait until the next movie to find out where it came from? Or will it be the next movie? By then I’m not sure I’ll even care anymore. 

What I liked the most about Prometheus was how much mystery it maintained while also exploring something I had barely given any thought to: who that guy in the chair was in the original Alien. I loved learning about who the Engineers were and a bit of what they were doing with the black goo and mutation and creation of life and whatnot, but now in Covenant, it doesn’t seem like we’ll get much more of that. Obviously the black goo has something to do with where the xenomorph came from, but what, exactly? Instead of further exploring it, the sequel now just seems like a distraction from the main question. 

Let me make it clear that yes, I am very excited for Alien: Covenant. I just wish Ridley Scott was following up more closely on what he established in Prometheus. He himself even said he didn’t think the xenomorph was scary anymore and that’s why Prometheus became the movie that it did, but now I see a sequel with Alien right in the title and the xenomorph in all the trailers and I wonder, does he even know what story he’s trying to tell anymore? At what point will we see the Engineer ship full of xenomorph eggs crash-land on LV-426, or will we see it at all? Hopefully, by the time this overindulgent and overelaborate story of prequels is over, we finally have an answer to where the Alien originated, otherwise, what was the point of any of this?