ALIEN COVENANT: Spoiler-Free Review - An Improvement On Prometheus, But That's Not Saying Much

Space, where they only send the smartest dumb people to die, or is it the dumbest smart people, either way, space, the place people go to die. 

Remember when the Alien films were just straight-forward monster movies set in space where unsuspecting crews always wound up faced with one or more fearsome Xenomorphs? You know, we had two good ones, two not so good ones, those Alien Vs Predator movies that really shouldn’t count and then we had Ridley Scott come back to the series and decided that we needed a shit-ton of backstory, mythology and theological questions about the origins of human existence and the whole Alien-aspect of the movies can just kind of take a backseat. After Prometheus disappointed most fans and has been the subject of so many video essays on how just painfully dumb it was, does Alien Covenant fair any better? 

Set ten years after Prometheus we find ourselves on the spaceship Covenant, a deep space mission where vicious solar-winds cause the ship to lose it’s captain and in the process they intercept a distress signal that means the team diverts from their current mission to find another spaceship which ultimately leads to their doom (wait, wait, I know that that sounds like the synopsis to the movie Sunshine, but that is exactly how this film starts). So anyway, with over two thousand souls on board the Covenant, it is up to the fourteen brave crew who clearly skipped out on the three day training course that involved contamination and contagion control, to scout a new planet and avoid alien-creatures that don’t believe in personal boundaries. 

Look, I really wanted to like this film and it is a step up from Prometheus, but it still suffers from a lot of the same problems: a lot of pontificating about the meaning of life, a lot of people making very stupid decisions and a lot of characters you just don’t care about; Danny McBride is a stand-out plus the only good thing from Prometheus, Michael Fassbender, is back, and this time they double-down on him - which is both good and bad. There are some good points though, the film, much like Prometheus, looks great and this is all down to Ridley Scott, regardless of the varying quality of his work, he is a brilliant visual stylist. We get more Alien looking Aliens this time and the film seems to be heading in the right direction when it comes to connecting with the original films, all be it very slowly. 

There are pacing issues in the film, with yet again, too many ideas trying to be explored in a two hour runtime. Scott even went as far as producing a series of short films to help fill in some of the gaps which is great if you knew they were out there to watch, otherwise audiences unaware of these short films would just be wondering why big name actors only had thirty seconds of screen time in the actual film. Honestly, a lot of the elements in the short films could have been put into the actual film and they could have cut out some of the duller and unnecessary moments from the overall runtime. 

Overall, the film is still a disappointment, it is better than Prometheus, but not by much. When you bring back the director that started it all, you kind of hope that they remember what made the series so great in the first place: the original films thrived on regular people being out of their depths in an isolated location dealing with really horrific creatures. These last two films seem focused on characters with Icarus-Syndrome which ultimately makes them less empathetic to the audience. 

Alien Covenant gets Two out of Five Stars (or Two out of Five really overly ambitious ideas which make me yearn for the Neil Blomkamp Alien film that will never come…)