Alien: Covenant

It’s strange to think that the Xenomorph, one of the most fearsome and beautiful aliens in cinema, has been terrorising screens and churning guts for over three decades now. The success of Ridley Scott’s classic sci-fi/horror hybrid spawned a complete saga of films as well as a crossover series with Predator. But as the saying goes, you can’t have too much of a good thing and inevitably what goes up must come down. Ok, I never actually saw Prometheus, but from what I have heard it was nothing to rave about and it seems that Scott is not going to take theses responses lying down. 

Alien: Covenant takes places years after the events of Prometheus with the ship, Covenant, travelling through space on a colonisation mission. When disaster happens, resulting in the loss of their captain, the crew are wakened from their hyper-sleep early and receive a strange transmission from an uncharted planet. Putting the mission on hold, Captain Oram (Billy Crudup) land on the planet and takes a team out to investigate, only to find that it’s not the paradise they initially thought. When two team members are infected and become incubators for Xenomporphs, all seems lost, but hope comes in the form of an android named David (Michael Fassbender) who happens upon the troupe and take them to his home. Unbeknownst to Oram and his team, the nightmare is only beginning, as David quickly turns out to be not as nice as he appears and has a horrifying ulterior motive for helping them. 

You can give an Alien movie any title you like and it’s still going to tell a story exactly like all its predecessors. The first problem with Alien: Covenant is that it’s highly predictable and even though the gore and jump scares do the trick of creating flinches and exclamations of ‘ew’, they feel like they’re just there for a quick and easy way to do that; the equivalent of adding cornflour to thicken a sauce. There’s not a lot of payoff with any of the violence or gore that happens and this creates a bit of a distance between the film and audience because the same-old-same-old events and tricks just don’t inspire investment. 

Story-wise, it feels as though this is a means in which Scott can justify Prometheus and these themes of humanity and superiority of species come into the mix, sadly just not really bringing any value to it. 

There are quite a few characters and none of them get any real development, they’re all sort of boring and generic and whilst the performances are all fine, no attachments of any kind are established between us and them. 

And honestly, I did not really get the point of the whole Fassbender-on-Fassbender thing: was it exploring themes of narcissism and self-hate or did Michael just say to Scott, “so I really liked playing dual roles in Assassins Creed, think we can work that in here?” 

Admittedly, at the end of the day Alien: Covenant gets the squirms, the in-seat flinches, and the exclamations of “don’t do it!”, but this can be chalked up to its use of genre tricks that always work and therefore are employed a little lazily. The story itself is predictable, the violence and gore is there for violence and gore sake and the characters are nothing o write home about. It’s not the worst movie in the world, but I wouldn’t waste a full-priced ticket on it. 

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterson, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demian Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Jussie Smollett, Callie Hernandez, Amy Seimetz, Nathaniel Dean, Alexander England, Benjamin Rigby, Uli Latukefu, Tess Haubrich, and Lorelei King 

Rating: MA 

Year: 2017