Friday, May 12, 2017

Alien: Covenant


Although touted as a sequel to the venerable first film in the franchise, the opening scene of Alien: Covenant, with a sophomoric, inconclusive discussion about God and creation between Michael Fassbender and Guy Pierce, firmly identifies it as a direct sequel to Prometheus. Fassbender reprises his role as David, the android whose motives trumped those of the human exploration crew in Prometheus; he also plays a sibling android, Walter, who is part of the crew of the Covenant. A colony ship that, after receiving a signal containing a distorted version of John Denver's 'Country Roads', diverts its course to an Earth-like planet in nearby star system and the expected xenomorph mayhem.

The film is beautifully designed and shot, with sets that nicely reproduce the workaday retro interiors of the early films, and a palette of blues and dark greens and deep shadows for exterior shots that evoke the Gothic romanticism Caspar David Friedrich's paintings. But as in Friedrich's metaphysical landscapes, the human figures are the least significant elements. Billy Crudup's acting captain makes much of the fact that he's a man of faith, but his confrontation with David's delusions of godhead is an inconclusive fizzle, and apart from Danny McBride's Tennessee and Katherine Waterson's Daniels (who nicely evokes Ripley's gritty determination), the rest of the crew are, even if you've watched the online prologue that isn't included in the onscreen film, mostly two-dimensional cyphers. Meat for the Wagnerian plans of David, who snared them by broadcasting that signal from an alien city littered with corpses. There's inventively gory body-horror, some good jump-in-your-seat shocks, and plenty of fan-pleasing references to earlier films, but stringing together variations of iconic scenes fails to create a coherent or interesting story. It's not the worst film in the franchise, but its final revelations undercut mythology with trite and unnecessary explanations, and the slingshot ending isn't aimed at the Nostromo, but at the continuation of the far less interesting and original Promethean trilogy, and David's ongoing issues with his dead dad.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

That's disappointing but not surprising.
The thing I hated most about 'Prometheus' was that they took one of the coolest things from the original film - the 'space jockey' - and turned it into an idiotic helmet on a big dumb humanoid.

May 16, 2017 4:41 am  
Anonymous William Donelson said...

I just saw Katherine Waterston and Elisabeth Moss in "Queen of Earth", a small art-y film which had terrific acting and camera work. I had no idea until your blog here that Watertson was in Covenant...

Looking forward to it, like I look forward to a good solid nightmare (Yeesh!)

May 16, 2017 1:55 pm  

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