By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston and Billy Crudup
Directed by Ridley Scott
Written by John Logan and Dante Harper, from a story by Jack Paglen and Michael Green
20th Century Fox
It’s admirable that Ridley Scott has been sticking with the franchise he helped launch with 1979’s ALIEN to keep up the quality control, and he certainly succeeds on a visual level with the new ALIEN: COVENANT. The material he’s working with, on the other hand, represents a lateral move at most.
COVENANT seems to be a reaction to all the fan criticism that the previous entry, Scott’s PROMETHEUS, was too highfalutin and skimped on the Alien action. I was among the camp that found its tackling of bigger ideas refreshing and ambitious, at least until it collapsed into generic action in the final act. COVENANT opens in a similar vein, with a spare, intriguing scene in which PROMETHEUS’ central “synthetic,” David (Michael Fassbender), contemplates matters of creation with his own creator, Weyland (an uncredited Guy Pearce) of the series’ ubiquitous Weyland-Yutani corporation. We then join Walter, an artificial human evidently made from the same mold as David and also played by Fassbender (this time speaking with an American accent). He’s serving as caretaker of a multiyear deep-space trek in which a small crew and a large collection of colonists and embryos lie in cryogenic suspension, headed for a distant world to terraform it for habitation.
A destructive energy pulse causes damage to the ship and wakes up the crew, whereupon COVENANT essentially becomes a combined replay of Scott’s first and James Cameron’s second ALIEN adventures. First, a transmission of apparently human origin lures the team into touching down on a previously unexplored planet, where they discover the remains of a huge spacecraft and some especially infectious lifeforms. Then several of them wind up dying, and the survivors become stranded on this suddenly hostile world, fighting to survive against the xenomorphing threat. The sequence that bridges these two sections, starting with two of the astronauts succumbing to parasitical spores and continuing with full-on assaults by matured creatures, is a lengthy, sustained, exciting and startling setpiece in which Scott demonstrates he can still deliver the bloody-mayhem goods. He also does well with a few earlier moments expressing the majesty of outer space, and has overseen a visual feast courtesy of Dariusz Wolski’s harshly beautiful cinematography and Chris Seagers’ rich production design.
Part of what makes that aforementioned passage effective is that screenwriters John Logan and Dante Harper (working from a story by Jack Paglen and Michael Green) have reimagined the Aliens’ biological development for this prequel, which is set about two decades before the first ALIEN. It is thus disappointing that at the halfway point, this fresh conception is abandoned in favor of familiar facehuggermugger and chestbursting, which just don’t have the charge they used to after seven previous movies (if you count the ALIEN VS. PREDATOR duo). And while COVENANT’s visual effects are overall quite accomplished, the digital beasties lack the dripping, visceral punch of the live-action creations employed on the first ALIEN and ALIENS.
Nor is the stuff between Alien assaults all that interesting this time around. Fassbender’s characters have their intriguing moments (there’s one involving a flute that really works), and there are promising possibilities when Oram (Billy Crudup), a man of faith, winds up pressed into service as captain of the mission. But his part in the story is underdeveloped, and it quickly becomes clear that most of the rest of the humans are just here to be cannon fodder, prone to splitting up and going off to explore places they shouldn’t or peering too closely at those funny-looking oversized eggs. (COVENANT’s crew is comprised of couples, some of whom are more given to grieving their slaughtered partners than others.) Katherine Waterston’s Daniels, the only one to initially question whether they should be diverting from their trip to check out that new planet, eventually becomes the key heroine by process of elimination, and wears the Ripley Tank Top® at the climax, but she lacks the fire and fury of Sigourney Weaver’s enduring bad-ass, and the thinly written role adds little to compensate.
ALIEN: COVENANT remains uncomfortably stranded between pushing the material in new directions and giving the die-hard devotees what they want. It has Fassbender’s synthetics drop references to Byron and Shelley and Richard Wagner, and also contains a death-while-showering that plays like something out of a made-for-video ALIEN ripoff. Younger viewers who didn’t grow up on its forebears might get more out of this film, but longtime fans might well find that (an amusing homage like the reappearance of ALIEN’s dippy-bird notwithstanding) its shortchanging of progressive material in favor of the same old represents a breach of its covenant with the audience.
