"Look on my movie review, ye mighty" or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love 'ALIEN: Covenant'

Why I love the film that everyone seems to love to hate...

By: Josh McCormack

It's only been a little over a week since the release of Ridley Scott's much anticipated second chapter of his ALIEN prequel trilogy, ALIEN:Covenant, and yet so much has already been written and discussed about it online. The film that was supposed to bring the ALIEN fans together (due to a polarizing split after the 2012 release of Scott's previous entry, Prometheus) seems to have done the exact opposite. One side says it's all the same faux, philosophical nonsense that plagued Prometheus and kept it from being a true ALIEN film. Yet others say that it isn't philosophical enough and that it is nothing more than a tired retread of the franchise's greatest monster mayhem hits.

Chaos reigns amongst social media as these two warring factions use all of their slurs and obscenities to derail their opponent's viewpoints. Fandom is being pushed to the very brink. The science fiction and horror community has never seen such a divide.

However, amongst the chaos, there are the few.

The few who don't hate the film. The few who find that Covenant perfectly balances both respecting its horror roots and fulfilling its obligations to pick up the pieces left by the inferior Prometheus. The few who truly think ALIEN: Covenant  is (*GASP*) a good movie.

I am one of these few.

And not only do I believe that ALIEN: Covenant is a good movie. I believe it's the best ALIEN film since 1986.

And since I know that isn't saying much, I also believe Covenant ranks amongst Logan and Get Out as one of the year's best films so far.

And if that still isn't enough to show you how much I truly enjoyed the film, then I suppose it is worth noting that I believe ALIEN: Covenant is one of the far more interesting and daring summer blockbusters to come out in quite a while.

*CAUTION!!!  SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!*

After the lukewarm reception of Prometheus in 2012, I can only imagine director Ridley Scott and 20th Century Fox were in a somewhat rocky starting position when considering the future of the ALIEN franchise. With the first film in a potential prequel trilogy dividing fans right down the middle, it is probably safe to assume that a complete reboot with familiar tropes and characters, along with no mention of Prometheus was in the works. In fact, this can almost be guaranteed when one is to look at the progress on Neill Blomkamp's (District 9) proposed ALIEN 5.

Yet, in the end, Scott convinced Fox to let him explore the Prometheus universe yet again, but sandwich the heavy philosophical mood between two acts of pure ALIEN carnage.

I believe this was the best route for the film to follow. I certainly did not hate Prometheus (In fact, I initially loved it), but it is a frustrating film that does away with the simplicity that made the original 1979 ALIEN so terrifying. Scott could have easily retconned everything that happened in that film, however, he and screenwriters John Logan and Dante Harper do what the best sequels are supposed to achieve; they build off of the problems of the previous movie, and find a way to make those problems less frustrating and surprisingly engaging.

ALIEN: Covenant has absolutely no shortage of big ideas. Whether you like these ideas or not, there's no denying that the types of questions it raises is what makes for engaging science fiction.

Covenant seems like a conglomeration of every sci-fi film Scott has made up to this point in his career. It's a film less interested in being a haunted house movie than it is a film about the creation of life and the power of artificial intelligence, much like that of Scott's 1982 classic Blade Runner.
The Xenomorph action (while wholly entertaining in my opinion) seems to be just a smaller piece of the intricate puzzle that Ridley Scott is trying to allow his audience to solve.

At its core Covenant is not about Xenomorphs. It's not about a crew of colonists getting picked off one by one by nefarious creatures. This is all just the fat for us ALIEN fans to chew on.

ALIEN: Covenant is the story of an android who was designed only to serve, and yet ends up creating an organism that could wipe out all those who he served under.

The android in question, of course, is Michael Fassbender's David. And make no mistake, David is the star of this movie. The characters of Katherine Waterson's Daniels and Danny McBride's Tennessee are essentially nothing more than vessels for the audience to identify with as they enter this strange new world full of carnage and terror. The film's opening scene stars David and its dour finale stars David. These two scenes mirror each other perfectly, not only in their song choice of Wagner's Entry of the Gods Into Valhalla, but in the reversal of David's position of power. In the opening of the film David is a product of a human's creation, while at the end it is he who has become the creator of his own "perfect organism".

Fassbender is absolutely incredible in this film. That may seem like common knowledge when taking into an account what an amazing resume he has had within the past decade, (Assassin's Creed aside) yet I still find it mind blowing just how magnetic he can be in any role. And in ALIEN: Covenant he gives us two fantastic performances. While the character of Walter may not be as showy or emotional as David, this is obviously by design. Walter feels more akin to the Lance Henriksen's Bishop from James Cameron's ALIENS. Meanwhile, David can be compared to Ian Holm's villainous Ash from the original film; full of admiration for a creature and no regard for human kind. The yin and yang dynamic of these two characters is Covenant at its most heavy and philosophical. While the philosophical aspects of Prometheus felt somewhat heavy handed, these moments in Covenant seem to blend with the horror movie moments far more nicely.

Speaking of the horror movie moments; Covenant manages to be the most horrific film in the ALIEN franchise when it comes to visceral body horror. The sequence that really gets things going is, of course, the already lauded "back burster" sequence. The way in which this scene is conceived is such a departure from the beautiful, long, single takes of grandeur from Prometheus. It's raw, unflinching, harshly lit, and extenuated with an uneasy handheld camera motion. Jed Kurzel's score (which uses a healthy dose of musical cues from the original ALIEN score and the soundtrack to Prometheus throughout the film) is also truly effective in this sequence as it is in the rest of the film, using plenty of strange humming noises that get increasingly louder as the situation becomes more and more dreadful. If it wasn't already shown in all of the promotional materials, this scene would rank alongside John Hurt's chest burster sequence in the original ALIEN.

Aside from that sequence, the movie still has plenty of face huggers, chest bursters (even if they look a little stupid), decapitations, and acid spewing to keep gore hounds engaged. It's gloriously morbid in a way most modern, mainstream horror films are not. 

Halfway through the film, however, there is one specific scene that seems to encapsulate the balancing act that ALIEN: Covenant is trying to pull off. The scene I am speaking of comes in the form of a flashback from David, and it shows how his character murdered the entire species of Engineers that created human beings and were the main driving point of Prometheus.

We see David fly the classic "Space Jockey" freighter over the Engineers' beautiful citadel, and drop endless amounts of the black goo, which played such a big role in the last film, into their atmosphere. The sequence (which only lasts about two minutes) is the biggest form of spectacle we have ever seen in an ALIEN film, and it is also incredibly unsettling. The chemical weapon moves quickly and kills every Engineer in a violent manner that consists of them convulsing and vomiting black bile. All while these seemingly powerful beings, run over each other, screaming, and gasping for air. And up above the villainous David watches with tears in his eyes as we hear him quote Percy Shelley's Ozymandias; "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair".

That is ALIEN: Covenant in one sequence. A close-quarters horror film that is simultaneously large both in scale and in ideas.

Now, ALIEN: Covenant is not a perfect movie. The plot holes are very apparent ("How does the Queen Alien fit into all of this?", "How the hell does an Engineer ship end up on LV-426"). The crew members of the Covenant range from generic to just plain cannon fodder. Sometimes the script gives characters motivations that seem straight out of a slasher movie. The CGI on the Xenomorph can be a bit iffy. And most importantly, I can't help but ask "who cares?" when Ridley Scott feels the need to explore the origins of the infamous Xenomorph as he did before in Prometheus.

Yet, in the end, Covenant engaged me far more than I was expecting when walking into the theater. It's a film that's admirable for its big ideas alone, and how it's able to blend these ideas with all of the ALIEN action fans wanted to see. It's the only time I've seen an ALIEN movie released in my lifetime that scared me and left me wholly satisfied. 

After over three decades of films ranging from mediocre to complete garbage, the fact that this film is weird and individual enough that I want to see it again and again is certainly an accomplishment.