Well Danny… this is why you shouldn’t get excited about anything. You did the same with Prometheus and you have once again been shot down. The cargo bay door has been opened and you now feel yourself drifting away in the dark abyss of space, watching all hope disappear before your eyes. We are almost at the stage with the Alien franchise that we are with the Predator one (and Terminator as well in fact); in that there are more bad Predator films than there are good ones.
I am going to throw this out there. I don’t mind Alien3. It is time we moved on from what they did to the characters that survived the end of Aliens, and just enjoy it. The more I watch Alien3 (the Assembly Cut), the more I like it. It is by no means perfect, but It is a better step in the right direction than what Ridey Scott has done with Alien: Covenant. Right… now that is out of the way…

*Spoiler free*

It’s not to say that Alien: Covenant was terrible. There were some enjoyable bits in and after you have read this, it should hopefully kill the initial buzz that this is the alien film to descend from the heavens and lead us to the promise land. With that mindset you might actually enjoy this forgettable nail in the coffin of the franchise.
The first half hour I really enjoyed and was onto a sure thing. I enjoyed the short glimpse of the crew of the Covenants life and what little we got to see each of the characters. Even the egotistical pretentious intro was well written and acted. Then we had the classic distress call to an unknown planet and the crew had to decide to investigate. Nothing we haven’t seen before, but at this stage in the movie, after the strange series direction that Ridley Scott decided to take, I was happy for some familiarity, no matter how much ground it was retreading.
Once the crew found themselves on the planet, the film soon took a bit of a nose dive and it didn’t stop from there.

Being a massive Alien and the Alien lore fan for many years might have corrupted my opinion of this movie, maybe I was expecting too much once again. But even from a generic film fan, with no experience of the Alien franchise, this one was a colossal mess.

Following on from Prometheus it had to do something. The mistakes it made in the plot and the strange route it had taken, you could see that director Ridley Scott had desperately tried to bring it back to the Alien franchise. It had the word ‘Alien’ in the title for a start, as well as the Xenomorph itself (that’s not a spoiler! it’s in the trailers!)
I did rewatch Prometheus recently and reasonably enjoyed it (I seem to like it every other time I watch it), so maybe the same can be said about Alien: Covenant in time. I used an analogy of Star Wars to help explain Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. Remember in the Phantom Menace when they said that the force was microscopic bacteria in your blood? Yeah, it wasn’t great, but it could work. We could let that go. That is what Prometheus was like with the black goo.
Alien: Covenant on the other hand was like saying “Darth Vader was a woman”. It truly did mess with the entire lore of the series.

As with the previous film, the route Ridley chose to take the Alien franchise was not the best decision. It had a few things from Prometheus that annoyed me the first time round, so if you enjoyed the pretentious storyline about the creation of mankind and confusing discussions works of literature and orchestrated music that only 3% of the audience will get, then this is for you… or, alternatively, if you liked it when Michael Fassbender played the flute, then this movie has you covered (only extended this time around).
The whole thing felt rushed. The last 30 minutes was a horrendous rush-job, the likes of which even ruins some of the evolution of the Xenomorph that has been set in stone with previous films and other media for 20+ years now. How long does it take for a chestbuster to become an adult male? How long does it take for a facehugger to lay an egg? Apparently however long you want that best fits in with the hurried plot. Okay Ridley, you didn’t like what James Cameron did by making them like bees with a monarchy and a Queen (but at least that explains the eggs in every movie, how the do you explain the eggs in yours?), I liked it. If you hadn’t decided to cut the egg-morphing scene from your original Alien film, then people would follow YOUR way of the Xenomorph’s evolutionary cycle. But you didn’t so everyone loved Aliens and liked the Queen idea. Don’t start trying to rewrite it. It’s established. Deal with it. Of course to get my geek truly on, you can use the egg-morphing to explain how a lone xenomorph can survive, but this is neither the time nor the place for such a debate.
You are forgetting that this is a man whose original ending of Alien was that the Xenomorph killed Ripley and then used her voice to call for a rescue.

Anyway, back to the film…. The cast was okay. Danny McBride and the newly appointed Captain were probably the characters who had the most depth. The main character; Daniels, was a bit wet in my opinion. She flickered between miserable and badass at the press of a button. One moment is is crying about something or other, then she is swinging on the side of a moving vehicle firing an assault rifle, followed again by moping around the ship’s passageways. It just seemed like poor writing to try and make the character as Ripley as possible in as short a time as possible.
James Franco was excellent however. A really well done performance that was totally unexpected. This was possibly my favourite part of the film.
Michael Fassbender was good as both David and Walter, but I did kind of think that maybe he hogged up too much of the screen time. He could have bulked up other characters so that we felt a detachment from them when they died. It was clear that Ridley might be a little… IN to Michael Fassbender, if you know what I mean.
The rest of the cast were just cannon fodder. Didn’t even learn most of their names nor knew who was dying half the time. Everyone was apparently married to someone else (as they were colonists) but other than two people, no one really showed the real emotions of losing a spouse (which is what I thought was the point of having them married in the first place), and of course most of them did stupid stuff that is just lazy writing. The original film had real human characters, who were smart, they were just in a difficult situation. Most of the time the characters of this film got themselves into these stupid situations, or made them completely worse, all the while posing as scientists or what have you. You even have a few cliché horror movie moments, such as a shower sex scene that ends bloody (again… it was in the trailer).
Marked as a “return to its horror roots”, along with the “Run!” and “Hide!” posters lead me to believe that this was going to be a horror, but the cliché stupid moments from the cast were the only sections of the film that closely resembled a horror film.

The new Neomorphs felt a little unnecessary in the grand scheme of things. If you didn’t have the classic Xenomorph, then these would have been fine as the enemies, or visa-versa, but by having both felt like it used up too much screen time. You could have used that time to build up the story more and better character development. When the original Alien is introduced, it is still not done correctly, or how previous films (some of which have been directed by Ridley himself!) had done it. The point of it is to stalk from the shadows, lying in ambush, which is what made the original scary. In this it likes to stand in broad daylight so we can marvel at the CGI effects that look all but far too unrealistic, and will seem dated in only a couple of years time. Don’t even get me started on the chestbuster; another rewrite of a classic xenomorph’s design.
You could argue that this is more of a Prototype Xenomorph, but I don’t think that is what Ridley was going for with this.

The pacing of the film was all over the place. The entire 20 minutes could have been removed to make the confrontation before it a little more expanded, or any of the scenes in fact. Some scenes felt incredibly rushed and as soon as Michael Fassbender’s; David, character is introduced, the film really splits into two. I think in all honesty I preferred the little snippets and prologue scenes that FOX show us before the film was released. One explained what the crew of the Covenant were actually doing, in more detail, as well as showing them as husband and wife (again, which was the main point of the crew that was NEVER utilised properly), and the other bridging the gap between Prometheus and this film. They gave a bit more depth to the story, but I guarentee that 70% of the audience have not seen them. Maybe I need to wait for the director’s cut with added scenes on DVD to come out before I truly make up my mind on this matter.

Overall, other than a few interesting story aspects into the genesis of the Xenomorph and a few gruesome deaths, the overall film was disappointing. Which makes it doubly disappointing as I was willing to let Prometheus slide if this one bridge the gap between it and Alien nicely. However by the end I couldn’t help but feel further away. The whole horror aspect that we were forced to believe from the marketing material is none existent, which was a huge selling point for me personally. It was clear that FOX were pressing Ridley to put the classic Xenomorph in and make it a proper prequel to the original movie, which might be the reason why the film was such a mess. It really did feel like two separate parts.

What could have been the shining pinnacle of light in a dying franchise, instead merely added another nail to its coffin. Much like the themes of the most recent films, maybe it is time to question its creator and take control of it from their grasp. Similar to Star Wars, it is perhaps time to let someone else do something with it and take the time to correct what has been done with confusing and plot holed prequels.
Help me Neil Bloomkamp… your my only hope.

This is Danny, last survivor of the Stortford Empire Cinema… signing off.