Review: ‘Alien: Covenant’ Was A Good ‘Alien’ Prequel Before It Turned Into ‘Prometheus 2’
Alien was one of the first movies I could remember as a kid that genuinely scared me. A monster on a ship with acid for blood? Nope. A facehugger that rapes your face and implants and alien in your chest only to burst out killing you? Hell no. All of this happening in a claustrophobic ship? It’s a horror film in space. I loved every moment of it.
In 2012, Ridley Scott unveiled Prometheus with middling results. I loved how it looked, I just didn’t like how nothing is really explained. From what I read about the development of the script, it was a direct Alien prequel, but then Scott said to not make it a direct prequel. He brought in new writers, and what we got was a confusing and cliche mess. It did reveal what the sky pilot was. So that backstory was cool, but it wasn’t what I wanted it to be, and it certainly left me wondering even more about everything instead of walking away confused.
Related: The Alien: Covenant Prologue Peels The Facehugger Off The Prometheus Backstory
Now we have Alien: Covenant. Was it better than Prometheus? Definitely. Was it as good as the original 2 films? Not even close. Alien was a horror film in space, and Aliens was an action movie. Both used the same protagonist, but both had completely original takes.
Premise: The crew of the colony ship Covenant, bound for a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy, discovers what they think is an uncharted paradise, but is actually a dark, dangerous world. When they uncover a threat beyond their imagination, they must attempt a harrowing escape.
What really bummed me out is that the prologue sorta ruins the rest of the film. I love how they are trying to expand the universe by going to the Engineer homeworld, but with that introduction, you can figure out each beat the movie will hit because of its inclusion. I know an Alien movie is pretty predictable, but when you’re trying to introduce more mysteries, the main mystery, you should focus on is the entire plot before the end or even middle of the movie.
One thing that really fails in this movie is that the crew of the ship is dumb. They’re always pretty dumb in these movies, but when the crew goes out onto the planet with no helmets, it’s almost as annoying as the idiot in the last film who started poking at the space snake. This is grade school stuff you don’t do. You don’t mess with snakes, and you certainly don’t mess with space snakes.
The colony ship Covenant uses the tired film plot of sending a ship full of people to seed a new planet, but something happens where the ship stops and they have to land on a random planet. They notice it’s a perfect place to stay, so they just stay there instead of the original destination. A huge financial investment to get that ship into outer space, and then the crew say “screw it” and lands there. That’s like moving to Rome, and deciding to stay in Delaware when the plane has to make a detour. I couldn’t get over that.
What the film really succeeds in is the visuals, the aliens, and the acting. The first half of the movie was a solid Alien prequel, but it fails when it slides into being a Prometheus sequel. Sure, there was Prometheus stuff in the prologue, but then it went right back to the new ship. The aliens were terrifying, as predicted. Everything felt familiar to the first film. It felt like a soft reboot until the film moved along into the second and third act.
Ridley Scott is really a master of landscapes and tone. That type of focus on what a movie looks like occasionally puts the story elements in the backseat: they look good on a macro level, but they fail at a micro level. It’s you see this beautiful ship landing, but then the people on the ship makes stupid decisions.
All of the acting is stellar, Michael Fassbender in particular. He was born to play a synthetic robot on a ship with Xenomorphs. The rest of the cast does the best they can, and it mostly works, but get bogged down by the silliness of the entire mission.
Overall, it’s nice again to see aliens kill people in space with a little more of the backstory of the Xenomorph being explored. The problem with doing that is you’re not sure whether the film is focusing more on that, which would make the point of the Covenant ship just a footnote.
Rating: 6/10
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Jeff Sorensen is an author, writer and occasional comedian living in Detroit, Michigan. You can look for more of his work on The Huffington Post, UPROXX, BGR and by just looking up his name.
Contact: jeff@socialunderground.com