Alien: Covenant

Release Date: May 19th, 2017
Running Time: 122 minutes
Directed by: Ridley Scott
Written by: John Logan & Dante Harper (Screenplay), Jack Paglen & Michael Green (Story)
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demián Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Amy Seimetz, Callie Hernandez

SPOILER ALERT—DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN PROMETHEUS OR ALIEN: COVENANT AND DO NOT WANT TO KNOW ABOUT SOME KEY DETAILS OF EITHER FILM

Among plentiful shortcomings, the best thing about Alien: Covenant—the second Alien prequel movie—is its continuation of the haunting mythology surrounding the Xenomorph origin story. The worst thing is that it abandons Noomi Rapace as protagonist. This is extremely disappointing since she was so good in the previous installment Prometheus (2012) which went all out to set up her character Elizabeth Shaw as the new Alien heroine à la Sigourney Weaver's Ripley in the originals.

The ramifications of Shaw's ousting run deep; her exclusion rings of narrative uncertainty and Covenant's script feels rewritten to justify her absence. John Logan and Dante Harper wrote the screenplay from a story by Jack Paglen and Michael Green—none of whom were involved in Prometheus (written by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof). Yet Ridley Scott returns to direct his third Alien film (following 1979's original and Prometheus)—and also as producer—so clearly he has some say on story. Narrative ambiguity is important, but the way it's been done with these two films indicates a tentative creative vision more than a calculated sense of mystery.

The first 45 minutes of Covenant are essentially a rehashing of other Alien film ingredients, with the standard pitfalls of trite monster flick fare. It's the kind of movie that revels in the violent deaths of its dumb, overconfident characters…yeah, go down that dark tunnel alone while vicious aliens are running amok, that makes sense! Complications could be mitigated if the characters just communicated a little more clearly, but just to ensure their deaths, I suppose, their telecommunications system is damaged. Superficially, it's marginally entertaining for the usual horror-genre chills and thrills, but it's less impactful since we've seen it all before.

A third of the way into the movie the Android David (Michael Fassbender) enters the picture and describes past events; 10 years ago he and Shaw arrived in the Engineers’ ship which was stocked with the virus—it accidentally released into the atmosphere of the Engineers’ home planet, instantly killing all residents. Shaw died in the subsequent crash-landing and the virus spread to populate the planet with the aliens. But David tells a different story when Walter (also Fassbender)—a newer android model physically identical to David—confronts him after finding the remains of Shaw's dissected corpse. Shaw didn't die in the crash as David initially claimed; he tested out the alien facehugging, impregnating, and chestbursting on her. David intentionally released the toxin to kill the locals, then experimented with the virus in an attempt to genetically engineer the "perfect" lifeform. So, it turns out he's a psychopathic android determined to multiply the alien race and expedite human extinction—reducing much of the story to a robot-gone-haywire cliché.

It's an insult to Noomi Rapace's bravura performance in Prometheus to have Shaw die this way; her strength, intelligence, and intense will to survive are rendered meaningless by her demise. Imagine if you went to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi only to find out that Daisy Ridley's character Rey has died offscreen—WTF! And it's all the more perplexing considering that in July 2016, while Covenant was filming, Scott stated that Rapace would be in the film and was shooting several weeks' worth of footage. This came after Scott had flip-flopped multiple times regarding Rapace's return, which begs questions about Covenant's pre-production. Was the script not finished when filming began? Were there conflicts about Rapace's pay or schedule? Whatever the reasons for her departure, it seems the screenwriters decided to take the story in a direction that hadn't been foreseen during the writing/production of Prometheus—otherwise why build up Shaw to be the new protagonist only to feebly kill her off between movies?

What became of Rapace's weeks of shooting is the 3-minute film Alien: Covenant / Prologue: The Crossing, a promotional short released a month before Covenant. It features Shaw reattaching David's head and body, en route to the Engineers' homeworld on the ship they escape in at the end of Prometheus. David's line from Covenant plays in voiceover narration: "I never experienced such compassion from any human". This complicates Covenant's philosophical thesis, given Shaw's horrific fate. Perhaps David, in his twisted logic, thought he was honouring Shaw by crossbreeding her genetic code with the aliens' to accelerate their evolution. Some of David's laboratory diagrams show what look to be facehugger limbs modeled on her fingers, and it's implied that he'll ultimately design the Xenomorph queen from Shaw's reproductive organs. It's a bonechilling thought, and a tragic legacy for such an impressive character. Since Shaw repairs David only to have him experiment on and kill her, the message seems to be that her showing kindness is what results in her torturous death. And it makes for an attempt to recreate Ripley yet again, this time with Katherine Waterston as Daniels who, while competent, isn't as pronounced of a force as Weaver or Rapace in this kind of role.

Covenant neglects to adequately address the biological puzzles in Prometheus, while presenting more of its own. A deleted scene reveals an extremely curious albeit convoluted bit of info; the pathogen is a concoction of synthetic nano-particles—a highly evolved form of "ancient" artificial intelligence. This scene requires extensive unpacking, which is probably why it was deleted. But it all feels as if the filmmakers want to keep audiences in perpetual speculation about what's really going on because they themselves aren't sure. When some crewmembers get infected by inhaling airborne spores, aliens grow inside them and emerge within minutes. How does this fit with the alien morphology? David explains: "The pathogen took so many forms, and was extremely mutable". He goes on to say the virus "was designed to infect all nonbotanical lifeforms" and will "either kill them outright or use them as incubators to spawn a hybrid form". This is a thoroughly frail detail that feels blatantly contrived to rationalize the discrepancies in the pathogen's effects as we've seen in this film and Prometheus.

Since the expository storytelling comes by way of David who can't be trusted, the truth of everything is debatable. Indeed, Covenant is a compendium of inexplicable components. David displays a lot of emotions for an android who's supposedly incapable of such; he screams in anguish when an alien is killed, smiles proudly when a chestburster emerges from its victim, and sheds tears when reminiscing about Shaw. Also, within thirty seconds David kills Walter and undresses him, removes his own clothes and puts Walter's on, then cuts off his own hand and scars his face so that he'll pass as Walter—pretty unbelievable. And earlier in the film David's hair is long and disheveled but his face appears to be hairless. The parameters within which these androids function is never made clear.

However, despite the formulaic traits, obscurities, and the flimsiness of killing off Shaw, Covenant does have some thought-provoking details. The original title was "Alien: Paradise Lost", borrowed from Milton's epic poem (1667) about humankind's fall from grace. A dark tale of gods and monsters, Covenant echoes aspects of the Greek myth of Icarus, Frankenstein, and other historic works of art. References include Richard Wagner's opera "Das Rheingold" (1876), particularly its second act "The Entry of the Gods into Valhalla". Wagner's music was appropriated by the Nazis, and it's inclusion here enhances Covenant as an allegory for eugenics and genocide. There's also mention of Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias" (1818), a central theme of which is the decline of empires due to their leaders' hubris. Percy's wife was Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein (also 1818) which bears the subtitle The Modern Prometheus.

But are the Engineers really extinct via their own creation? Blade Runner (1982)—which Ridley Scott also directed—offers a philosophical twist to the Frankenstein tale when the synthetic human proves to be more "humane" than the biological human by sparing his life. Covenant also presents new layers to the classic theme: the Prometheus planet served as a "mad scientist" laboratory for the Engineers, who created humans who created android David who genetically advanced Xenomorphs. And this was all done by way of the mysterious pathogen. Mixed in there is some kind of warning about technology, genetic modification, the interrelatedness of species and the impact that their respective evolutionary trajectories have on one another.

On a compelling side note, links have emerged between Blade Runner and Alien. The Prometheus Blu-ray contains an outtake showing a computer log entry by Peter Weyland—the head of Alien's Weyland-Yutani Corporation—in which he writes of his deceased former mentor who ran a synthetics corporation that destroyed him. Weyland states he wishes this mentor would've stayed away from "those genetic abominations" and instead stuck to "simple robotics" as he himself did. Eldon Tyrell of Blade Runner's Tyrell Corporation isn't named explicitly, but given the Ridley Scott association it's obviously describing Tyrell and establishes that Alien and Blade Runner exist in the same universe. Tyrell's field was genetic engineering and Weyland's was robotics, but both wanted to play god, in creating life. It's a cool connection given the thematic similarities of each work.

The prequel films explore a bizarre paradigm wherein either biologically or mechanically engineered species seek to destroy their makers. Lifeforms create lifeforms that create lifeforms that destroy lifeforms. It's a profound revelation to have an artifical being like David tinker with the alien genome to make its life cycle be what it comes to be; the multistage development of an alien from egg to facehugger to chestburster to full-grown Xenomorph parallels David's own evolutionary path—from Engineers to pathogen to humans to androids. Such mindbending qualities save Covenant from completely sinking amidst its endless questions and overused horror cinema tropes.

The ending is particularly macabre when Daniels, locked in her cryochamber, realizes David is masquerading as Walter seconds before she goes into hypersleep. Then David regurgitates two preserved alien embryos he'd swallowed, secures them in cold storage next to the human embryos, and records a message on the Covenant's computer attributing the crew deaths to the ship malfunctioning. A disturbing cliffhanger to end on, and it raises more questions—why doesn't David just kill Daniels now that she knows he's corrupted? What does he expect to happen when she wakes up?

In the end, Covenant is uneven in narrative durability, establishing some highly intriguing concepts that are eventually mired in the story's own far-reaching ambitions. More so than resonating intellectually, the Alien series' popularity has been largely due to stoking audiences' visceral responses, fear mechanisms, and survival instincts. But Prometheus introduced a deeper philosophical thread that Covenant both continues yet simultaneously undermines by undoing the investment in Shaw as heroine. Too much hinges on David being evil; the well-trodden concept of artificial intelligence wanting to destroy humans. But David acknowledges Shaw's goodness in saving his life, so why should he want to kill her, the entire human race, and all the Engineers? It doesn't add up, and reeks of doom and gloom for no apparent reason other than to think the darker the better. Maybe the point is that there is no rational explanation for violent, mass-murdering behaviour.

In 2014, Ridley Scott said the saga would continue in a more cerebral vein and there would be no Xenomorphs in Covenant: "the beast is done—cooked". But, for whatever reasons—whether from studio pressure and/or moneymaking concerns—Covenant ends up relying a bit too much on what we've already seen in other Alien movies. And it made far less profit than Prometheus, perhaps signaling that audiences are tired of the familiar alien antics. In any case, with all of Alien: Covenant's plot holes and enigmatic elements, the filmmakers have a messy route ahead of them in connecting the prequels to the original film in any convincing way. I'll be watching, but I have doubts that it will be satisfying in the end.
Rating (out of 5): ★★★
• Nik Dobrinsky / Boy Drinks Ink
July 2nd, 2017