Alien Covenant (2017)

Alien Covenant

I must admit off the bat, I am a huge fan of Prometheus. I know it frustrated many with its flawed ambition, but I enjoyed the film for that very reason. Prometheus expanded on the slasher in space the 1979 Alien illuminated, into a philosophical quandary of where humans come from. In a world of constant world building in many franchises, this new Alien universe is the most beguiling and intriguing out of all of them. With Prometheus raising more questions than it answers, I was so excited to see how Ridley Scott would expand on the notions of human existence. Sadly to say however, Alien Covenant follows a similar pattern to Prometheus but in a much more conventional way. Retreating back to the gory slasher genre, Ridley Scott raises even more questions while only hinting towards answers we hoped would be answered following Prometheus.

Covenant focuses on a colonization mission with a crew size similar to the original Alien, harbouring a payload of over two thousand humans, to start a new life on another planet. After many complications, the crew receive a distress signal from what can only be presumed to be Elizabeth Shaw (one of the two remaining survivors of Prometheus). This forces the crew to alter their original trajectory from a planet known as Origae-6 to the origin of the transmission. The planet possesses habitable qualities and the crew take a landing party to survey the planet and find the source of the distress signal. And like Alien and Prometheus, things are not all it seems. Booby-trapped capsules release spawns that infect two of the crew members who in turn project the neo-morphs in spectacularly back breaking fashion. In the mayhem and confusion, the crew are saved by none other than David (Michael Fassbender), the synthetic from the original Prometheus mission. From there the plot expands slightly into the DNA of a true Prometheus sequel, with the characters passing through a mass Pompeii-like grave at the centre of presumably the Engineers home city. With pantheons and human like head statues, echoing the one seen in Prometheus, it is at this moment we hope the narrative might kick on and get to the meat of the Engineers home world, David’s plight and humanity’s very existence. Instead, Covenant abandons those fascinating aspects, hinting toward David’s experiments on the desolate planet and teasing his motivations for forthcoming sequels.

The strange thing about Covenant is that the most intriguing moments occur in the scenes with David and Walter, two characters brilliantly portrayed by Fassbender, who present more depth and range than all the other human characters combined. It is such a shame that David’s character is explored so little. David’s motives are much of a muchness, with best sequence occurring in the entire Alien franchise coming at the hands of David. This onslaught however is given no reason as to why it occurs at all. With such a strong performer at the crux of the entre narrative, why not focus more on that character and really flesh out the entirety of his plans.

It is such a shame that after such an ambitious reimagining of the Alien universe, Scott retreats to the safety of a conventional genre that his masterpiece kick started all those years ago, instead of pushing on and investigating the potential of the existential questions Lindelof addressed in Prometheus.