Alien: Covenant

The ‘unnecessary’ sequel to the unexpected prequel award goes to Alien: Covenant. Ridley Scott seems intent on tarnishing his reputation and whilst, to my mind, Prometheus was a successful sci-fi film lovingly set in the Alien-verse, Covenant, and its desperate attempts to homage the original classic, just feels like a lazy effort.

Being Scott and being Alien it is, of course, not without merit; a returning Michael Fassbender is the film’s (ironically) beating heart as he plays both the returning David and new AI Walter (with just a subtle accent change to differentiate the two) and we learn of his fascinating events directly after the ending of Prometheus. These sequences set on the Engineer’s planet are thoroughly absorbing and give some context as well to the original Alien films (with the first emergence in these prequels of the classic ‘facehuggers’) even if they do give us probably the ‘unintentional laugh’ of the century with a particular line about ‘fingering’ involving a wooden recorder.

Elsewhere, though, it seems a little deja-vu. The 'space film' genre has exploded recently after the successes at the box office of Passengers, Interstellar, Scott’s own The Martian amongst others and Scott seems to have realised this; trying vainly to skip through the bits where the crew members are in hyper-sleep or actually on the original craft.

This makes the initial 20 minutes or so feel extremely rushed. Whilst, yes, endless empty corridors and banal ‘system status’ chat would have made this film too identikit to its predecessor it throws the pacing off massively, something the rest of the film can’t live up to.

The crew members, as well, just aren’t memorable enough in their entirety to not feel like Alien-fodder. We get to know Katherine Waterston’s Daniels and Danny McBride’s Tennessee pretty well and both are eminently likeable (Waterston lives up to the established leading character precedent set by Sigourney Weaver and Noomi Rapace) but the rest are there to be eaten and chest-busted in ever bloodier and graphic ways.

The tightness of the original Alien isn’t here despite the script honing closer to the bonhomie and banter shared in the original; even if Ridley can’t help but glaze it in Promethues’ God-complex. Is it just me or is it a little confusing, as well, as to who's married to who in this film?

There’s a few jump scares and the aforementioned gory chest-bursters are brilliant, but this skews firmly into sci-fi, rather than horror, territory, perhaps frustratingly for Alien-lovers. It moves the plot on just about satisfactorily enough from Promethues, with the set up for YET ANOTHER entry into the franchise (perhaps with a Rogue One-esque ‘jump into the original segment’) but the feeling of ‘seen it all before’ just won’t go away.

I’m a great lover of the Alien franchise and, indeed, Ridley Scott in general but I can’t escape the lack of necessity in Covenant. It can’t stand alone as an Alien film because it links too heavily to Prometheus, it doesn’t reach back into the horror genre enough to be a ‘modernised’ version of the original Alien and it doesn’t quite create the same depths of story as Prometheus did.

Enjoyable, of course, but ultimately hollow.

3 stars ***