Review of Alien: Covenant (2017) by Themanmountain — 09 Jul 2017

I, like many others, got really excited when Ridley Scott decided to return to the Alien franchise, a film that to this day stands the test of time and is still one of the greatest science fiction and/or horror movies of all time...

Then he gave us Prometheus, one of the worst films I think I had seen at the cinema at the time. It looked stunning but was full of terrible plotholes and incredibly poorly written characters - not to mention it turned what was one of the scariest creatures in movie history into a joke... created from magic space goo...

Spoilers for Covenant follow:

Alien: Covenant comes along and we start to think that Scott has learned his lesson, he knows Prometheus was terrible and he has listened to the feedback from the fans... The xenomorph is back and we're going to see how the Engineers created them... NOPE! What an absolute mess of a film... The first 30 minutes was dedicated to the tragedy of space sails, followed by holographic distress beacons... Then the entire crew (bar I think 3, if I recall correctly?) was sent down to the planet (no room for precautions here) and we're subjected to a lack of safety protocols (which made the Prometheus crew at least look competent) and weird albino aliens that grow once again from magic space goo into full blown adults in about 12 minutes. We're left with a flashback showing that David (somehow now fully repaired and looking brand new after being decapitated) randomly decides to just kill all of the engineers... He is somehow immune to the aliens (despite the fact previous films have shown androids getting attacked, see Bishop) and can act as a father figure (this makes sense in the same way animals can attach themselves to the first thing they see, however the alien is fully grown and still sees David as "papa Smurf")...

Then we're left with people dying, 1 by 1 in very poor and generic ways, until the reveal that David made the aliens (kinda, I mean the chestburster is now a teeny tiny alien rather than a chestburster so you could argue that these are not the Xenomorphs we know and love!) - which leads to what is left of the crew (including the new android who is more powerful, can superheal and other things) going back to the ship (because we see David, killed by his doppelganger off screen so we KNOW it can't possibly be David going back to the ship, RIGHT?!) - and then once again we are left with a fully grown Alien on a spaceship, only thanks to the much more advanced technology (despite it being a prequel) we see the alien on cameras and on a map and you know where it is at all times...

And then the "strong female" character, who isn't a patch on Ripley, Sarah Connor or other strong characters from the past, decides to work out if David is David when she's already entered a cryo pod (she could have just, I dunno, looked for the stab wound from earlier seeing as David doesn't have super healing)...

The film is not only poor in terms of action and suspense, but it doesn't feel part of the universe it's proud to reference - there's far too much CGI (when practical effects could have been used) and the technology feels centuries ahead of what you see in the previous movies, where we had a "random beep every 12 seconds" in Alien we're given an almost fully rendered hologram of Dr Shaw...

There's no horror elements as you're fully aware of where the alien is at all times, there's no suspense because all of the big setpieces are either in broad daylight or overly CGI and there's no mystery because everything is just so generically overdone.

If you want to see a GOOD follow up to the Alien franchise please check out the game Alien Isolation (If you're not a gamer I'm sure you can find some good rundowns and videos on YouTube or Twitch) which both respects and honours the source material but also adds a story of its own...

I am not clued in with sales figures but I truly hope this film has failed to make money so that we don't get a saequel... Please either leave the franchise alone or bring in someone who hasn't lost their touch.