Review of Alien: Covenant (2017) by Patricia W — 23 Feb 2018

After being woken up early from cryo sleep the crew of The Covenant receive a signal from a nearby planet and decide to investigate in hopes of colonising it. As you can imagine, things quickly start to go wrong.

Unlike a lot of people I didn't mind Prometheus. I thought it had some interesting ideas, some well fleshed out characters and very well executed scenes but it was far from perfect. However a lot of people were unhappy with its reflective tone and the lack of xenomorphs so in response to this Ridley Scott has given us a flimsy action film, with aliens galore and no plot or interesting characters to speak of.

The characters in this film are 2 dimensional and all seem to have suffered a blow to the head because the majority of their actions are idiotic and ridiculous. It feels as though the film makers had certain scenes in mind that they wanted to show but didn't know how to tie it all together so they have characters do ridiculous things like running into a room with a neomorph for no reason or ignoring their mission because of a random signal of someone singing. There's also a 'twist', if it can even be called that, that is so obvious and predictable that you will be amazed how long it takes the characters to figure it out.

The best actor in the film by far is Michael Fassbender, partly because he is given the most to work with with his characters David and Walter and gets some more interesting thoughtful scenes to develop them. Katherine Waterson is fine as Daniels, a very watered down version of Ripley, who spends most of her screen time crying or looking scared. I honestly couldn't tell you the other characters' names without looking them up because they are utterly forgettable cannon fodder that are pretty irrelevant to the plot.

The neomorphs/protomorphs also look surprisingly bad. It's sad to say that the facehuggers, xenomorphs etc. looked better about 40 years ago with the use of puppets and costumes than the floaty, lazy CGI that is employed in this film. The actions scenes in this are also quite poor. There are a lot of cuts in fight scenes and some of the larger action sequences are so over the top that they are almost comical.

There is also an issue with pacing and tone in this film. There are a lot of action scenes dispersed throughout but then the film will grind to a halt for 20mins and completely change to a different, more reflective atmosphere (akin to Prometheus') that doesn't fit with this rest of the film.

On a positive note, the best thing about this film is how it looks. The outdoor setting and wide shots of scenery are beautiful and really help build the atmosphere when they first land on the planet. There are also some interesting concepts and looks at the development of the xenomorph but these are eclipsed by the rest of the film.

Unfortunately with this film's release there are now more bad aliens films than good which is a real shame and it's the original creator of Alien that's the one driving the franchise into the ground.