By Brett Blake ALIEN: COVENANT is a difficult movie to review. Looking at it as objectively as possible, this is a film with some serious issues on a narrative level (and a few on an execution level). It tries to achieve two different and competing goals - be a spiritual and thematic successor to PROMETHEUS, and be a visceral, gory monster movie in the vein of the first two ALIEN movies - and neither goal feels truly of-a-piece with the other. And yet... I can’t say I didn’t enjoy my time with the movie. For all its flaws, the visual command of director Ridley Scott and all the associated strong craft work that goes along with that were enough to pull me through. The film kicks off with the crew of the colonization ship Covenant being awakened by a solar disturbance. Once awake, the crew - comprised of various people, but most importantly Daniels (Katherine Waterston), Tennessee (Danny McBride), Oram (Billy Crudup), and android Walter (Michael Fassbender) - receive a strange transmission which draws them to a mysterious Earth-like planet. Setting down on the planet to investigate, the crew soon find themselves confronted by terrifying alien lifeforms, apparently overseen by David (also Fassbender), the sole survivor of the doomed Prometheus mission from 10 years earlier (as seen in PROMETHEUS). Other reviews have said this, but it’s accurate, so worth repeating: the movie feels like a blend of PROMETHEUS, ALIEN, and ALIENS. We’ve got the philosophical and theological underpinnings that PROMETHEUS brought to the table, the more measured and deliberately-paced horror elements of ALIEN, and the action movie sensibility (particularly in the third act) of ALIENS. In some ways, this is an uneasy balance, as those three films are incredibly different from each other. This isn’t a film hurting for ideas, but there’s a tension between the more pretentious aims of PROMETHEUS and the more violent, monster movie horror/action that Scott all but surely mandated be included here after some were underwhelmed by the scarcity of that stuff in PROMETHEUS. Primarily this story is a sequel to PROMETHEUS, but where PROMETHEUS seemed overly preoccupied with its themes (some might say at the expense of everything else), this movie manages to better incorporate those ideas into a horror and action movie framework. Thematic ideas are not sacrificed, but are eased into place where they might have been hammered home in the previous film. There’s a trade-off, though. While the movie acquits itself (mostly) fine thematically, the actual plotting of the narrative leaves something to be desired. The structure is a fairly conventional retread of ALIEN, so much so that those very familiar with the rhythm of that story will likely be able to “feel” when certain story turns/developments are on the horizon here. There’s also an incredibly obvious, forced “twist” in the third act that is so predictable as to be vaguely insulting to the audience. Additionally, for narrative expediency the movie plays extremely fast and extremely loose with the nature and duration of the traditional alien life cycle in ways that are strikingly blatant and contradictory to the first ALIEN movie. These issues will be deal-breakers for some people, and that’s fair enough. For me, they drop the movie down a few pegs, but don’t totally sink it. As with any Ridley Scott film, ALIEN: COVENANT looks absolutely stellar. Scott is tremendously at ease with a production of this scale, and though none of the design elements reinvent the wheel, Scott puts them on the screen in ways that are compelling and entertaining. There’s an admirable usage of big-scale, practical sets and real locations, and the movie feels more impressive and grand than it otherwise might have if the production had been too green screen heavy. Additionally, the alien/creature horror is effectively handled, even if most of the big moments are slightly more intense, amped-up riffs on things we’ve seen in past entries of this series. The gore is in-your-face, wet, and freely-flowing, which is something genre fans should certainly appreciate, and the major new creature design has an eerie and unsettling visage that feels like an appropriate cousin to the more familiar title alien. There is one big caveat to the creature work, however: the usage of CGI instead of practical aliens is often pretty blatant and - at times - unconvincing. By the time we get to the third act, with fully-animated classic xenomorphs running and jumping around in daylight, the creature that was once a frightening denizen of the shadows loses a little bit of the mystique. The members of the cast all do fine work with (admittedly) fairly surface-level characters. Waterston and Crudup (who may be the sneaky MVP of the movie) get a complicated dynamic to play and invest their parts with as much depth as they can, while McBride surprises for the way he so naturally slips into a grounded “straight” role. But, given that Fassbender has a dual role here, it’s no surprise that he takes center stage, and the movie is all the better for it. His Walter is markedly different in personality from David, and Fassbender expertly illustrates these differences in overt (accents) and subtle (body language) ways. Every scene in which Fassbender - as either character - is a focus is great, and the moments he gets to play opposite himself are some of the strongest scenes in the movie. The film is obsessed with the concept of creation, and it uses these two characters to really drive at that. Walter respects humans as creatures capable of the incredible ingenuity and talent to create artificial life such as himself; David is totally dismissive of humans, seeing them as nothing more than fodder for his own creation experiments. He sees himself - a creation of man - as superior to man, godlike, and fully justified in pursuing morally questionable (and dangerous) experimentation. Fassbender sells this aspect of David with a chilling, fascinatingly unhinged quality which suggests the character has totally lost his (artificial) mind in the time since PROMETHEUS ended. As much as the screenplay tries to make Waterston’s Daniels the center of the story, it’s the Walter/David dynamic that truly feels like beating heart of the tale. Their discussions - about creativity, literature, human emotion - are totally compelling. I would hesitate to call ALIEN: COVENANT a “style over substance” movie because I think there is some legitimate substance here. Its faults are not with its intentions, but with the execution of some of its intentions on the page. Ridley Scott is someone whose particular brand of filmmaking I generally find very appealing, and that’s no different here. There’s enough good present to unashamedly recommend the movie for fans of Scott and/or the ALIEN series, but I suspect those with little attachment to either will be left somewhat cold. At the end of the day, it's the third-best ALIEN movie. Whether or not you think that's damning with faint praise will probably determine whether or not this is a film you're going to enjoy. Ultimately, I enjoyed it.
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