Alien: Covenant
First screened in June 2017 / Most recently screened and reviewed in August 2024
Director: Ridley Scott. Cast: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Demián Bichir, Billy Crudup, Nathaniel Dean, Carmen Ejogo, Alexander England, Tess Haubrich, Callie Hernandez, Uli Latufeku, Danny McBride, Benjamin Rigby, Amy Seimetz, Jussie Smollett, James Franco, Guy Pearce, Lorelei King. Screenplay: John Logan and Dante Harper (based on a screen story by Jack Paglen and Michael Green).VOR:③
So much top-heavy, even klutzy franchise expansion for its own sake. Fitful craft. But the commitment to darkness and cruelty is kinda remarkable.
It's been little reported over the last seven years, but Alien: Covenant was conceived by three straight men, late-middle in median age, each cuffed by one leg to the stainless steel table around which they sat. If I call them A, B, and C, I am returning the favor of their own baseline investment in characterization.
As they brainstormed, A felt mostly inspired by Prometheus, with its arcane lore regarding giant white Engineers and malignant black goo and moving in futile circles (though running in straight lines is also a bad idea) and the humongous reams of theologically-inflected "canon" that had waited decades to emerge from the shadowy surround of Alien, despite that film being famous for impressive and fearsome streamlining. He wanted more Prometheus, A did. Much more! Even if the asshole public hadn't shown much of the appropriate awe. In space, no one can hear you mansplain, or aliensplain, but god dammit, you can die trying!
B was not sure about A, and felt mostly inspired by the classic, spindly, jaws-within-jaws Xenomorph that had given the Alien franchise its name and its longevity. B had always loved the nightmarish tactility of these creatures, all mucus and metallica. He was very much part of the asshole public who missed them in Prometheus, which didn't even bother to put "Alien" in its name. He was also enamored of store-brand, Obama-era CGI software, despite its being the sworn enemy of tactility. This posed a conundrum. So did B's obscure psychic impulse to revive the skeletal, blue-steel Xenomorph, with its iconic mode of attack, only to sideline it overwhelmingly to an albino riff on a similar species. That one lacks any physical feature on which a human eye might settle and has infinite, imprecise ways of pulverizing people in one chaotic second—for example, by punching them in the face and through the head with its mouth. Instead of acid, this beast would have programming code for blood, except on random but contractually mandated days when the Neomorph would be "played" by an acrobat in a latex body-stocking or by a mo-cap performer who is very particular about being called a "body artist of intermedial rendering." B quarreled often with the tyrannical, alien-averse A and quarreled just as often with himself.
C, though I hate to spoil a secret, was the novelist Umberto Eco, working incognito, but recognizable to anyone paying attention. Who else on Earth or indeed in all of space felt so strongly that if you're going to orchestrate a narrative around a merciless series of killings, you should pause as often as possible for lengthy and gnomic disquisitions on metaphysics, Creation, rarefied artistry, obscure conspiracies, people who look the same to an outside eye but are in fact mutually contemptuous opposites, and the thin line between having a major epiphany about Being or Divinity and wanting to murder almost everyone you can? Neither A, despite his own taste for esoterica, nor B, who wondered how long an Alien tail would have to be to graphically menace a woman from outside her shower stall, could make much sense of Eco—I mean, of C.
I should mention that none of these men had been outside in many years. The cigars and the Montrachet, with some Red Bull for B, were shoved into their writing room, via a Lecter-like sliding contraption in one chrome wall. They also had not seen a movie for some time.
Sadly, Eco/C died in February 2016 before he could pull the grudge-bearing, detail-obsessed A and the self-divided, bloodlusty B into his grandiose vision, which he hoped might qualify the whole project for both an honorary doctorate and a special issue of Fangoria, if there is still Fangoria. His death, while mourned, gave the producers the excuse they needed to halt the endless writer's room process. Especially with a May 2017 release date to meet! The loosely composited draft—spread across A's 50,000-word Wiki posts, B's legal pads in frenzied ballpoint, and C's calligraphed parchments—was harvested as is so that production could begin.
It is believed that A and B, at least, remain cuffed to that table.
The producers could not believe that after all that scripting, nobody had written any dialogue! So, even though one of their commissioning briefs to A, B, and C had been "paint the future of A.I. in the darkest possible terms!" they leaned on that very tool to get themselves out of a jam. The best available beta-models for ChatGPT in 2016-17 complied up to their pronounced limits, which is how they wound up with such lines as, "Some sort of vehicle, I guess" (*a paraphrase) and "This is wheat! Believe me, I know wheat" (*a quote).
The producers hoped that "visionary director" Ridley Scott would stake out a path through all of this confusion but were chagrined to discover that Scott very much thought of himself as a producer. Indeed, as lead producer. In fact, he had not technically "directed" anything since, conservatively, Matchstick Men, though certain legalities required him to be billed that way. When not complaining about the vats of Montrachet that had been wasted on A, B, and C (though he may have been alone on the Covenant payroll in sharing at least some priorities with each ), he kept fomenting ways for the movie to be bigger rather than better. What if an entire prehistoric yet also futuristic gray-stone plaza of robed people, assailed all at once by two intensely designed spaceships that are on screen for about 10 seconds apiece? What if a dozen actors to play the five crew members of the ship, just so we can have even more murders than we seem to have people? What if we silenced all those who bitched that Alien³ opened too abruptly by making a movie that takes a half-hour to get started? What if Guy Pearce? What if James Franco, but only in GoPro flashback?
The production designers were all for this approach, and they came through pretty admirably, from those who curated existing locations to double as extra-terrestrial Edens to those whose forte was the motor pool and loading dock of a sleek-but-sludgy spaceship in 2104 A.D.. The cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, never one to push back against a synthetic visual scheme, did okay in some areas and whiffed in others. Too bad he short-changed the plasticity and textures of the physical environments. The costume designer felt a little sidelined despite every other department's effulgent budgets—and who's the one with an Oscar, who?? She got her digs in during the sequence when Michael Fassbender meets his dark twin, garbing the latter in the exact same cloak that Evil Kermit wore to his own gothic self-encounter in Muppets Most Wanted.
Not everyone in Alien: Covenant's cast remembers the experience. Some, conversely, remember it in painstaking detail and are thus flummoxed at barely appearing in the film. There's a late moment where the screen fills with a photograph of the entire Covenant crew in happier times—perhaps the only instance of that familiar trope being deployed in a big Hollywood film only to have the audience ask en masse, "Who are all those people?" Also, some bad blood persists because of a tremendous gaffe in early production, when the Kill Bill-style declension of who would be eliminated in what order was pasted upside down into the script. For some reason involving agents, lawyers, and vicissitudes of Adobe Acrobat, this couldn't be fixed. So, strong actors who'd expected to tease out layered, conflicted, and/or charismatic characters for the full stretch were agog to find themselves unceremoniously offed. By contrast, folks who'd already committed to a family vacation starting on Day 5 of production could not get out of their AirBnB Luxe bookings when they discovered, holy shit, I'm actually in this whole thing! The inevitable cast party was....challenging.
What can we do but hang our heads, dear reader/watcher? And yet, as this chronicle wraps, I offer you just what the movie offers at its own long-anticipated close, which is a pretty fierce twist. (Even if you've guessed it, that twist slaps, as paced, edited, shot, and performed.) Despite every self-enforced error of conception and production, despite the brazenness with which Alien: Covenant stretches out a still-lucrative IP minus any chance of this script yielding a hit, despite Ridley Scott no longer hiding his sexual fetish for top-heavy cinematic concepts, and fuck you if you prefer economy or momentum or intimacy or insight...
...despite, despite, despite all that, Alien: Covenant isn't a full write-off. For a movie that gets away from itself almost from the jump, it also gets away with itself, just often enough. There's the image of the 2,000 never-glimpsed colonists in the cargo hold, warehoused inside thin sleep-pods that look like six-foot security badges, which jangle and slide on their massive racks whenever the spaceship runs into trouble. It's a perfect image of human life holding on by a pitifully thin thread, but it's equally eloquent of a humanity long ago dehumanized. There's a kick, visual and narrative, to the new way that aliens embed themselves in human hosts, even if its potential goes to waste as the story unfolds, and even as it registers how far Covenant is willing to travel from Alien's defining gestalts.
There's a shockingly powerful sequence—shocking in part because it's so much more tensile, better acted, better shot, and better edited than anything up to that point—where the panic of passing in minutes from a bad hitch in your plan to a hellish likelihood of demise makes smart, skilled people act terribly careless, and where the cold logic of self-preservation just decimates any sense of compassion. That sequence, which I barely believe was produced or directed by Ridley Scott, is a corker: it jacks up a story that has previously shown little juice, and it allows you to feel every conflicted emotion in a movie otherwise low on feeling.
And even if the Xenomorph is too much of a cameo player, and the brand-new alien species smells to me like fish that's already been left out too long, there is still some real acid in this movie's blood. Its fury at the follies that humans perpetrate over and over and over is palpable early and only gets more potent. Its almost cruel lucidity at human dishevelment and inadequacy in a crisis makes a stark impression. Its sense of space travel as precarious, hubristic, questionably staffed, and probably doomed is a strong counterpoint to a visual scheme and a story scope that can't help flirting with the epochal and the sublime. That friction sharpens the movie's finale to a knifelike edge; the whole audience, whether or not they enjoyed the two prior hours, might feel face-hugged on the way out.
Has the voice of this review suddenly veered off into a different galaxy? If it has, that's also how it feels when you occasionally catch an echo or whiff of something deeply rotten and darkly sincere inside this crude, callous exercise in profit-extraction. Yet another Ridley Scott behemoth proves consistently maladroit and occasionally laughable, in ways that make you impugn yourself for watching—or, like many of us this week, re-watching. But there's a tell-tale heart beating somewhere inside it. I don't know that it's Scott's heart, which feels little in evidence. I sure doubt it's A's, B's, or C's. I can't imagine this seething heart was solicited or maybe even detected by the suits at Fox. I don't think it belongs to anyone in the cast or crew; I think it's somehow the movie's own. Alien: Covenant, for better and often for worse, is a machine. And like at least one of the machines on screen, it really hates us, which is by far the most interesting thing about it. Grade:C+
