Why I Love… #172: Alien: Covenant

Year:  2017

Director:  Ridley Scott

Stars:  Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Michael Fassbender

Long time readers (do I have those?) might well pull a face at this entry in my Why I Love… series. “Wait a minute? Didn’t he review this one on release, and pan it?” Yes, imagined reader. My initial encounter with Ridley Scott’s second prequel to his perfect organism Alien was not favourable. I found the film to be stilted, haphazard, marred by arch choices and some seemingly rushed decisions. 4/10 on first approach. But few films have nagged at me like Alien: Covenant, have gotten me returning time and again in spite of myself until, after three separate revisits this year alone and now nine in total, I’m forced to admit my position has changed dramatically. My initial writing is no longer reflective of my stance on – I’m calling it – my second favourite Alien movie. It still has problems. Niggles. But this 180 needs to be documented, because it’s been one hell of a journey.

What put me off so? Well, mainly the terribly rendered xenomorph birthing scene some 90 minutes into the film (which I still think looks abysmal) and, frankly, my own version of many people’s dissatisfaction with Alien³… they ruthlessly killed off someone I was invested in. Dr. Elizabeth Shaw’s brutal evisceration off-screen at the hands of David still hurts, but it also serves to shape how far from his programming Michael Fassbender’s marooned android has strayed. I begrudged the pivot from a female protagonist (which this series has favoured so well) to a ‘male’ antagonist. I fell at the first hurdle of film criticism; it didn’t give me what I wanted.

Now, the sheer belligerence of Alien: Covenant is part of what impresses me about it, especially in the wake of the fan-service heavy Alien: Romulus. That film’s unseemly pandering makes Scott’s choices with Covenant seem even more ballsy and exceptional. This isn’t about repeating past glories or even catering to established structures. This is a profoundly bleak indictment of the foolishness of mankind, beyond anything that the enjoyably adventurous Prometheus proffered us. If that movie rested on the dark idea that our creators existed and weren’t happy with us, Covenant goes one further. Not only have our gods abandoned us, but our creations are done with them and us. It isn’t just that there’s no saving the crew here. They don’t deserve it. The judgement has been made.

After an elegant prelude that introduces us to David prior to the events of Prometheus (and also to Jed Kurzel’s itching motif and lilting theme) we jump into the cold depths of space and the Covenant; a colonisation vessel with a crew of 15 transporting 2,000 colonists and 1,140 embryos to a distant planet called Origae-6. Awoken from their hyper-sleep by a purely random solar flare that spells disaster, the shocked crew – including Katherine Waterston’s destitute Daniels – watch their captain incinerated in his cryo-tube; a loss that echoes throughout the remainder of the film almost like a kind of Japanese curse. 

Here we have the more reassuring presence of Walter (also Fassbender); a more loyal and simplistic version of the ‘David’ model, curtailed through control of what ‘he’ can and can’t create. The smooth American accent reassures us. 

I’m not going to rehash the whole plot. You have the other review for that as well as any number of online synopses. It’s true that Covenant divides starkly into three sections that don’t always tessellate well. But this very morphing feels more and more apt as the re-watches pile up; like a variation on the fits and starts of the rapidly evolving life cycle of the alien creature genetically created by David. 

The opening hour – the recon mission as the crew hopefully seek out the source of a strange signal – contains a level of schadenfreude hitherto unexperienced in the Alien series, as poor decisions and blind faith lead the expedition members from the Covenant to infection, violent death and brutally dashed hopes. Acting captain Chris Oram (Billy Crudup) is among the series’ most tragic figures, deeply naive and unprepared for the circumstances he finds himself in. Crudup plays this so well, the intonation in his voice just shaky enough to bely his failing nerve. We in the audience know things are destined to go south. This is an Alien film and certain things are going to happen. But even in this Scott and writers Dante Harper and John Logan subvert expectations, birthing nasty new monsters into the film’s fraught and moodily overcast arena (and how gorgeous are those night shots lit by fire?)

The transition into act two is the movie’s biggest stumbling point as David suddenly appears and gathers the survivors in a dead city that seems totally divorced from the terrain previously encountered. There’s a moment of “where the hell did this come from?”. An abutment that softens and slackens with repeat viewings. It is clunky, but Scott is eager to press on into a baroque, overtly gothic midsection, one that feels closer to Vincent Ward’s ambitious ideas for Alien³ than Fincher’s finished product. Act two is also where Fassbender’s double duty truly comes into its own. The scene in which David teaches Walter to play the flute is a technical tour de force. Seamless and absorbing. 

Here too are some of the film’s biggest upsets, as we slowly tour the bestiary that David has been industriously cultivating since the events of Prometheus. The idea that the xenomorphs were an android’s pet science project has infuriated many, but who’s to say that’s exactly what’s being offered here. Weren’t there carvings of the xenomorph species in the Engineers’ dung-heap pyramid? Might their bioweapon be an attempt to recreate something already encountered, or drawn from the most primal, psychosexual collective nightmare? Regardless, it is here that we bed down with David’s callously articulated argument that humanity has reached it’s end. 

Having had all their hopes decimated, the surviving members of the Covenant’s landing party find themselves in what feels like a giant mausoleum. There’s a vibe of blight and damnation about the situation that Daniels, Oram and co. find themselves in. As David so eloquently vocalises in his ultimatum to Walter, you can either “serve in heaven or reign in hell”. David’s heaven is their hell. That this artificial person has found some measure of merciless beauty in the lethal creatures he has fathered is immensely disturbing. We’d want a robot to love us back, not conjure love for the fiercest threat to our existence. It’s a wildly effective nightmare of its own. Fassbender’s expression of this as David dances high camp and he is given some wonderous lines to hang it all on.

Third act is the escape. Finally we have a lithe and lethal xenomorph to contend with, and the set piece in which Daniels swings wildly about the crane rig combating the thing impresses more with every pass. It’s a pitilessly fast, hectic but never confused bit of action, and a welcome sating of our desire for adrenaline following the mid-section’s pensive claustrophobia. But this is only the false finale. A second xeno births back aboard the Covenant (thanks to a spuriously brief facehugger incident for Demián Bachir’s Lope), allowing a further face-off. The cargo hold battle is breathtakingly realised once the bay depressurises. Scott – ever the aestheticist – litters the environment with scattered debris. It looks, gorgeously, like a slow-motion snowstorm in space. 

Dank, wet, dour and morose, Alien: Covenant boasts production design as gorgeous as that found in the jaw-drop beautiful Prometheus, but more befitting of the film’s glum and macabre tone. Many have been quick to connect the dots between Covenant‘s grief-stricken aura and the death of Tony Scott in August of 2012. That Covenant’s anger and disillusionment stems from that event, and that the film in some way represents Ridley’s own mental state. There could be some truth to that.

Scott isn’t a screenwriter though. Those motifs were brought to the page by Harper and Logan. Scott’s attack on the material is undeniable, however. Covenant is both Alien and Scott at their most misanthropic. Belief in better is punished. And the punishment is relished. Relished by David. Relished by us (the chaos caused by Amy Seimetz’ panicking Faris is a series apex of Bad Decision Making, and incredibly enjoyable to watch; the most entertaining car crash imaginable). Covenant is a great Bad Mood Movie. Lost faith? Covenant is right there with ya, buddy. If misery wants company, look no further. 

While the size of the crew here means that many of them remain basically anonymous until they meet a grisly death, they’re the most convincingly workmanlike folks since the ones we met aboard the Nostromo. Some are competent, some less so, but everyone feels to some degree distraught or bewildered by the horrors they encounter, and all of that stems from the random accident that robs them of Captain Branson (James Franco). Even Waterston’s effectively-rendered Daniels – who manages to combat two xenomorphs quickly and efficiently – never seems fully up to the events that consume her life. When David ultimately tricks her, sealing her in a cryo-pod and effectively damning her to the same fate as Dr. Shaw, it feels cruelly inevitable. Her luck was always going to run out somehow. 

Because the world of Covenant is godless, hopeless, doomed from the start. That kind of overwhelming negativity in a big studio picture like this is one hell of a swing. It’s no wonder audiences – myself included – rejected it and Scott’s proposed trilogy was never allowed a conclusion. I’d love to see it now, though. One can only wonder what horrors could have topped Covenant‘s cruelties. Maybe the box office success of Romulus will bring it to bear, but I’m not holding my breath. 

And if it doesn’t? Well, there’s something quite beautiful and tragic about an unfinished masterwork.