‘Alien: Covenant’ is the Messy, Mythic Sequel We Needed
Ridley Scott’s Alien franchise has fared better than most horror series. There isn’t another franchise around that can match Aliens’ directorial bonafides. James Cameron? David Fincher? Fede Álvarez with the forthcoming Alien: Romulus? LV-426 isn’t just full of Xenomorph egg sacs, but also some of the best A-list talent around. Additionally, where other horror franchises positioned themselves as yearly events, there have been considerable gaps in the Alien timeline. The first two were seven years apart, and Alien 3 didn’t arrive until six years after Aliens. Five years later, Alien Resurrection was released, and then the short-lived Alien vs. Predator duo arrived in 2004 and 2007. Prometheus, the first in the prequel series and Scott’s return to the franchise, arrived in 2012, 33 years after he first helmed Alien. It would be another five years before Alien: Covenant landed in 2017.
Some history: Preempting the legacy sequel trend by several years, District 9 director Neill Blomkamp was, at one point, officially attached to Alien 5. Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley was poised to return, and like several other 21st-century revives, Alien 5 would have eschewed canon events, ignoring both Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection. The project was ultimately canceled for myriad reasons, including Blomkamp’s Chappie (Fox executives reportedly hated Chappie), Scott’s decision to film Alien: Covenant, and, ultimately, the failure of Covenant at the worldwide box office.
Broadly, the speculation suggests, Fox had the option to either back Blomkamp’s vision or Scott’s, and since the series was Scott’s to start with, they conceded to his whims, financing Alien: Covenant, his follow-up to the polarizing Prometheus and the second entry in a proposed prequel series. Listen, Alien 5 sounded sick, and in fan circles, Alien: Covenant is regularly assessed as not just another Alien movie, but also the Alien movie that railroaded a new future for the franchise. But does Alien: Covenant deserve that much derision? No, not really. The horror is too slimy and the spectacle too grand to just outright dismiss.
While Rotten Tomatoes isn’t the most reliable metric, as of this writing, Alien: Covenant is sitting at a 65% Critics Score and a 55% Audience Score. Comparatively, Prometheus is at 73% and 68%. Oh, and the reigning champs Alien and Aliens? 93%/94% and 96%/94% Critic and Audience scores respectively. Reviews matter for naught when the box office haul is respectable, but Covenant only managed a meager $240 million worldwide against an estimated $110 million budget. Barely enough, in the best-case scenario, to break even.
Still, before the movie was released, Alien: Covenant was hotly anticipated. The film was an event. The marketing was sensational (with Alien, it always is), and while Scott did helm Prometheus, Covenant was pitched as his unequivocal return to the Alien universe. Prometheus, for all its posturing, wasn’t really about the franchise’s titular aliens. A quasi-Xenomorph features briefly toward its end, though the bulk of the movie was Lost-lite. Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof’s script unconvincingly tried to sell the origin of the human race and, by extension, the origin of the Xenomorphs, but was anyone really wondering where they’d come from?
I think Prometheus is great, though, at its core, the movie was an expository nothingburger, answering franchise questions no one held to begin with. Covenant was ostensibly greenlit to right those wrongs. But Ridley Scott loved Prometheus. With Alien: Covenant, the general consensus was he tried to unsuccessfully merge those impulses. And, in fairness, Alien: Covenant is two movies in one. The first half is decidedly Alien, while the second half (after Michael Fassbender’s David appears) is the Prometheus sequel Scott really wanted to make. Oh, and there’s an Alien by way of Friday the 13th sequence toward the end, which is… something.
While I love Alien: Covenant and encourage you to revisit it before Alien: Romulus releases, even I have to concede it feels at odds with itself. Prometheus’ most tantalizing threads, including the fate of Noomi Rapace’s Elizabeth Shaw, are peripheral throwaways, blink-and-you-might-miss-it obligations. Oh, and David created the Xenomorphs by releasing a new pathogen. Alien: Covenant cares less about that, and more about David’s admiration of John Milton.
To Scott’s credit, and a huge reason I retain a fondness for Alien: Covenant, the movie never acquiesces to audience expectations. Covenant is cinema as lore clarification, though it brazenly isn’t even interested in doing that well. The third act is predicated upon a twist anyone, even a newborn, could easily predict. I wonder if David swapped places with his Android lookalike. Hmm?
For all the narrative mess, Alien: Covenant is eminently watchable. I maintain the extended med-bay sequence and subsequent birth of the neomorph is the closest the series has come to the full-throttle terror of the original. Why have alien fetuses burst from the chest when they can explode from someone’s spine? Scott even pays homage to Jurassic Park with a nighttime field attack reminiscent of Spielberg’s raptors. Cheekily, the violent plight of the Covenant crew is strictly on account of their fondness for John Denver. I’d do the same.
Where Alien: Covenant failed was in attracting a new generation. Released 38 years after the original, Covenant was no Halloween (2018). You needed to be familiar with not only the original Alien but also the immersive lore of an entire universe. Even watching just Prometheus wouldn’t be enough to render an audience eager and willing to accept what Alien: Covenant wanted to say. There’s something admirable there, which is to say nothing of how profoundly accomplished Covenant is on a technical level. As a showcase for the language of filmmaking, few recent genre releases have looked better.
When Alien: Romulus arrives, we’ll know whether the franchise has the mileage to sustain itself (which is to say nothing of the forthcoming television series). With Alien: Covenant, Ridley Scott looked to the stars. Like the Covenant crew, he had a clear-cut path forward. Instead, he opted to diverge from the projected course. Whether he did so successfully is a matter of taste, but with Alien: Covenant, Ridley Scott took us somewhere new. I, for one, think that’s worth shouting about, even if in space, no one could hear me shout it.
You can stream Alien: Covenant now on Hulu.
Categorized:Editorials
