My Alien: Covenant Review (Sorry It Took So Long)

Well, this is another one of those films I’m conflicted on though not as much as others and it took me about three to four days to get this review out due to other movies I want to see, family time and partly cause I’m kinda lazy.

So as reference point for a fic and because I wanted to see it, my brother and I went to go see Alien: Covenant, the next installment in the Alien franchise after a long hiatus. How was it?

Man where do I even start with this?

Well, first off I will say the acting is not terrible. Katherine Waterston does a pretty good job as Daniels, the lead heroine even though I don’t think she’s as fleshed out as Ripley. Though that’s not a problem exclusive to her as I’ll get into later. Everybody else does a really good job with their roles including Demian Bichir as Lope, Jussie Smollett as Ricks, Callie Hernandez as Upworth and Carmen Ejogo as Karine. And in what’s probably the most shocking thing in the whole movie, Danny McBride actually gives a great performance.

I know right? The best performance in the whole movie is Michael Fassbender who plays both androids David and Walter. With Walter, he adopts this weird, kind-of southern accent while being super stoic and with David he’s an android whose gone completely cuckoo and who is essentially the main villain of the movie. I’d go as far as to call their scenes the best in the movie, especially given the effect needed to pull it off.

Now as much as I lambast Ridley Scott in my reviews, I will say the direction of the film is solid. The camerawork when it’s frenetic makes sense and it isn’t used that often. Unfortunately that’s undermined by the fact that whenever a gory/violent scene happens, he makes the gore so over the top and so CGI that it becomes almost like a parody of Alien. Either that or a marketing tactic to get noticed, feel free to pick.

One of the big problems of this movie is it’s screenplay. Not the story (the story’s actually quite decent) I mean stuff like the dialogue and certain character actions. At times, the dialogue feels really off, like for example when David teaches Walter to play the flute (a scene done in one take with impressive effects) which is a good scene….except it’s almost ruined by David literally saying “You hold. I’ll do the fingering.” The entire theatre my brother and I were at literally burst out laughing.

Another big problem is that outside of Daniels, Tennessee and Walter, nobodies given any real development or screen time to themselves. You remember that introduction scene released by Fox that’s about four minutes long and shows the crew banter and interact? Yeah that’s not in the film. And it’s not just that one scene. It feels like this film was meant to be longer and have the characters get more development but it got hacked in the editing room by Pietro Scalia or by somebody else.

I mean come on! Just include the dinner prologue scene and get everything in there. Speaking of which, I’ve saved Billy Crudup’s character Christopher Oram for later in this review because, and I’m completely serious when I say this, Oram is the single dumbest character in the whole movie and might be one of the dumbest characters I’ve seen in awhile. Let’s see where to start? How about the fact that every bad thing that happens in the movie can be traced to his ingenious decision to change course and go investigate this random signal despite some of the crew wisely pointing out that it’s a bad idea? Or how about that he legit thinks that because he’s religious (or was they never seem to clarify what religion he has) the crew and the company are out to get him and undermine his authority despite them showing no evidence of it?

Oh but wait it get’s better. You see after he get’s the captain position after the death of the original captain Branson (in a legitimately disturbing death scene) who was Daniels husband and when Daniels goes with Tennessee, his wife Faris and Walter to give him a proper space funeral and Oram witnesses this, he calls it a breach in protocol and says nearly the same thing earlier when they other crewmembers want to take time to honor Branson. Did I also mention that Branson and Oram were apparently friends because he entrusted Oram with the ship? Yeah real great way to honor your friend jackass.

And the saga of Oram’s stupidity is complete when he decided to trust David when David shows him his face-hugger collection. You know, the psycho robot who's more crazy then Daffy Duck on crystal meth?! And guess what? A face-hugger latches onto him and it’s bye-bye Oram, hello chestburster. I don’t think the company didn’t trust you cause you were a man of faith. I think they distrusted you because YOU DON’T MAKE FRIENDS AND HAVE THE SURVIVAL INSTINCT OF A LEMMING.

Now that that’s out of the way, can I please get an explanation why Ridley Scott decided to use the Alien franchise as a way to explore the dawn of man, creators vs creation and bizarre religious themes? I seriously don’t understand why. If you recall the first Alien or even Aliens, it was basically Jaws in space. Very simple, very effective. How did we go from that to being Ridley Scott’s Philosophy Class? And no I’m not saying sci-fi can’t be deep or compelling (Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival is a fantastic movie) but it just feels so out of place amidst all the horror elements of the movie and the previous films. And considering Ridley Scott is a vehement atheist, it makes even less sense why he’s suddenly so fascinated with religion.

The only scene where this works is the opening scene with Guy Pearce’s character Peter Weyland and David. It’s very quiet, very well acted and well done. It’s arguably the movies best scene. Jed Kurzel also delivers the surprisingly good score with him also managing to incorporate the original Jerry Goldsmith theme. Dariusz Wolski did a really good job with the cinematography. I normally don’t like dark, greyish colors but here it works and helps with the creepy atmosphere of the Engineer homeworld.

The effects on the other hand aren’t quite as consistently good.

Every other effect in the movie looks amazing. The Covenant, the gigantic practical sets, the facehugger eggs and facehugger puppets all look great. The on location filming in New Zealand also looks fantastic. But then we get to the actual animals. The Xenomorphs and Neomorphs look more fake and stilted than the actual man in the suit technique they used in 1979.

The Neomorph not only looks incredibly fake but it’s incredibly lame. You’d think with something that bursts out of a guy's spine that this would look like some horrific thing birthed from your nightmares….and instead it looks like a coked-out Xenomorph that acts like a psychotic little chihuahua. It’s not even in the film longer than three minutes! It honestly feels like they meant for the Xenomorph to be in the whole movie rather than the third act but they digitally added the Neomorph instead.

But I will give the movie one credit: it was hilarious. The audience my brother and I saw the movie with had the time of their lives, going so far as to riff the film in parts. When Oram, genius that he is, decides to look at the facehugger eggs, the audience was snickering the whole time. And then in the single most laughable scene in the whole movie, the chestbuster arrives and then David spreads out his arms and then the newly born Xenomorph (in some of the fakest CGI I’ve seen in a long time) mimicks David’s gesture while this shockingly pretty music plays. The entire audience lost it. It was glorious.

So to finally wrap up (again apologies for having little to no priorities), Alien: Covenant wasn’t as disappointing to me as other people probably because I lowered my expectations but still wasn’t as good as it could have been. It does have good acting, some good moments, gorgeous cinematography and effects (when they aren’t aliens) but it’s so bizarrely written, badly edited, pointlessly pretentious, has the dumbest captain in human history and laughably fake in it’s gore that it really sinks it. However, unlike the other Alien sequels, this one has enough unintentional laughs and MST3K style riff factor that it’s worth the price of admission on that alone.

2 out of 5 stars.

Nat is out! Peace!

Comments

[Batbrony]

I said this to a friend who shared an article examining Covenant's, er... "religious" themes:

I'm fairly sure Ridley Scott is somewhere between an atheist and an agnostic, not sure where, not even sure he knows. That makes his increasing insistence on trying to tackle spiritual themes in his movies (I wanna say he's really been doing this since Kingdom of Heaven, which is troubled in and of itself, although I have heard the director's cut is far better)... problematic, to say the least. I don't think he understands how important having an actual cultural grounding at least in these subjects is. It's a shame because this is a terribly talented director, but he keeps trying to tackle subjects which, by his own admission, he doesn't understand.

In turn, he has forgotten what his strengths were. I'd rather he were trying to make new classics than try to right the ship that is the Alien franchise at this point. He needs to accept that there are really only two classics in the whole franchise and that he was responsible for the original, nothing wrong with that. And for the love of Pete, Scott needs to step away from religion as a theme in his movies, at least in a manner that doesn't make his lack of knowledge for certain religious subjects so obvious. Ambiguous philosophical themes are one thing (like you might encounter in Blade Runner), but he's trying to tackle explicit themes he doesn't know much about.

Anyways, very good review, pretty consistent with what I've been hearing. The general consensus at this point seems to be that the Alien franchise just needs to end because nobody even remembers what it was at its best anymore, including its original creator.