Last (for the time being) in my series of not-technically-a-rewatch posts.
Alien: Covenant
(2017, dir. Ridley Scott)
Fake-out credits opening, solid black before shifting to David’s eye.
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Weyland believing in God solely because he can’t comprehend not being a Super Special Boy is the best piece of character building in both these movies, but Scott doesn’t seem to be aware of how deeply pathetic it is in either. The horror is that this idiot shithead is destroying countless human lives according to his deeply stupid whims, and that horror is undermined if everyone else is also outrageously stupid and destroying themselves.
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Title card: Again we have no nebula, just a black field with a little blip of light moving across the screen. I like that.
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Origae is not a real-world star so no fun space maps. I looked up some screenshots of the later planning session and there weren’t any interesting bits in there. Also weird that it's almost Auriga, which is both the ship from Resurrection and an actual constellation (probably at least subconsciously intended), and almost Origa (whose presence on the soundtrack would kick this movie up three letter grades)
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Yay, solar sails. I’ll take what I can get.
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Walter looks like such a dork with his hoodie, it’s kind of charming.
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Ah, yes, the flamethrower cryopod, the cryopod with a flamethrower. If you’re not drowning in it, you’re cooked.
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Katherine Waterson does a good job as Danny, I feel bad that she got stuck in this movie.
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Oh hey, actual science: things traveling at lightspeed don’t let you know they’re coming until they hit you.
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“Until our next jump” - looks like they’re using skipping-stone style FTL for this one, rather than the apparent continuous-transit of the Nostromo. This won’t ever be relevant, but it is a nice detail.
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Wood? Wood?! What kind of fuck-you money does Danny have to import a cabin’s worth of wood over interstellar distances? You are in space! Building your house out of diamond-encrusted lithium would be cheaper than wood! And you're going to a planet with a terraforming zone that will need to have trees growing in it anyway!
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The follow-up to the captain’s death - Danny in her cabin, the whiskey in styrofoam cups at the funeral - this is good. It’s about the only actual human emotion anyone is allowed to express in this movie.
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Oram, it’s not the religion that makes people not like you (since at no point is it ever brought up what the fuck you even believe); they don’t like you because you’re a cunt who can’t read the room.
I don’t understand why Ridley keeps trying to bring up religion when he is apparently utterly disinterested in ever exploring it, or even being specific about it. It's always just "religion" *hand wave*.
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Tennessee goes out on a space walk without a tether and casually obliterates all tension in this movie by hard confirming “oh these people are stupid stupid”.
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This movie takes place in 2104; "Country Road" released in 1971, 133 years prior, making it the equivalent of characters in 2017 (the year of this movie’s release) singing something from 1884. Which isn’t unreasonable in and of itself ("In the Pines" is from the 1870s) but why on Earth did it have to be "Country Road"? Like I can see it becoming more or less a folk song, but even with that in-universe justification it’s jarring by virtue of being an overplayed advertisement song in the time the film was made.
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Danny, in repetition of Ripley, is the one sane woman, lone voice of reason, and objectively correct; the planet is an obvious trap. If there was a significant human presence there, the Covenant would be picking up other radio signals; if it was a distress beacon, it’d be something clearer than a couple garbled seconds of a 133-year old song that no one on the crew is going to know outside of weirdo cowboy-religion guys like Tennessee (I presume his getup and stereotypical accent is costly signalling for religious reasons).
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If the storm is a “motherfucker to fly through” then STAY IN ORBIT. No one in this entire series, except Ripley, seems to understand the idea of orbital superiority.
Unrelated, their flight helmets give me Imperial Guard vibes. I wish this was a 40k movie, it’d be better and make more sense if it was. By this point in the series I've developed a new appreciation for Tyranids, because they at least come in more than one color.
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Aaaaaaaand we’re waltzing out into an entirely unknown biosphere with no protective gear: either it’s going to kill you or you’re going to kill it. Way to go, assholes.
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“Believe me, I know wheat” - one of the lines of all time.
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Ledward? Ledward?!
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The total lack of animal life should have people freaking the fuck out, because you don’t get biospheres of this complexity without animals of some description.
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The scientists taking samples is a nice change from Prometheus, but is immediately undermined by yet another form of the oobleck. You know what would solve your oobleck problem? A fucking helmet. The other guy who gets oozed is even worse because he was sticking his face in the clearly-marked spore pod instead of haphazardly stepping on it.
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The whole sequence to follow feels like a Mothership panic spiral done wrong. Like all the pieces are in place but we only got here because people were damn fools and fucked up multiple steps that they had no reason to fuck up long before the panic spiral started.
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This is definitely the goriest of the Alien movies, which feels aligned with the “jangling the keys in front of an infant” that most of the lore-plot developments have going on.
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I am so desperate for a movie where the xenos do literally anything but mindlessly attack the nearest human. This entire series has been waffling back and forth on how smart the fuckers are, how much of an animal they are vs a weapon, blah blah blah. Either come up with something interesting or come up with something new, and there hasn’t been anything interesting that hasn't been immediately abandoned since Aliens.
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The scene with the lil’ xenos in the tall grass would have been sick in a better movie with actual tension.
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David shows up in Jedi cosplay (lame) and takes everyone to a hell of a set piece (the necropolis), so I guess it evens out.
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Engineers love giant stone heads and hate interior lighting.
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The weirdly intimate flute lesson feels like a symbol designed by someone who doesn’t understand symbolism and it is the scariest, tensest scene in this movie. What the hell am I watching.
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More Pinocchio bullshit. Fuck Pinocchio stories, all my homies hate Pinocchio stories.
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The oobleck only affects animals, which means the entire planet has a xenomorph-based biosphere with thousands of variants that we never get to see.
Fuck you too, man.
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“We need your faith” oh fuck off. The movie hasn’t even specified what his faith is! It's just Presumed Generic Christianity!
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David genocides the Engineer colony, because heaven forbid anything that gets introduced not get abandoned in this series. I don’t even like the Engineers, but you can still squeeze something interesting out of them if they're permitted to exist for more than 20 seconds. Like just in this flashback we can surmise:
- Engineer colonies were either low-population & low-infrastructure to begin with, or could transition into that lifestyle fairly easily.
- The inhabitants of this particular planet have maintained their spaceport infrastructure, but it’s likely used pretty infrequently considering how the arrival of a ship is reason for everyone to come out and watch the landing.
These aren’t groundbreaking theories but they’re more than the movie is interested in giving us.
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Tennessee endangers over a thousand people, billions of dollars, an entire colony ship (and by extension, the colony itself) and his flunkies roll over and go along with it. The most charitable read of this scene is that he’s an unprepared idiot serving as acting captain on a ship that’s already lost the actual captain and acting captain in less than 48 hours, but even then he should have some sort of understanding of the basic requirements and risks of the job.
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The neomorph standing fully upright is effectively creepy, because it's a deviation from expectations. But I ultimately feel bad for the thing, it’s either going to get shot at by the Covenant crew or is stuck listening to David yammer on.
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SHOOT HIM SHOOT HIM SHOOT HIM SHOOT HIM GOD FUCKING DAMN IT ORAM SHOOT HIM HE TOLD YOU WHAT THESE THINGS DO at least Kane didn’t know what he was getting into!
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David is fucking unbearable: Like Weyland, he’s an imbecile who thinks he’s this brilliant and profound thinker, which is a great antagonist archetype because people like that are deeply pathetic egomaniacs who weave their own undoing… but the movie also thinks he’s this brilliant and profound thinker and keeps wasting time on his pontificating and trying to hype him up.
Fuck, if you want to write a movie about religion so badly have Danny confront David on ethics. Or point out the hypocrisy of his obsession with creation while ignoring that hybridizing xenos and drawing technical diagrams is art. Or just have someone shoot him while he’s monologuing.
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And there we go, the least-surprising reveal possible for Shaw from the last film. The series keeps killing off protagonists between movies, no wonder it’s gotten this bad.
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Oh. Huh. The weirdly intimate flute lesson was not a one-off, then.
Ridley, if you want Michael Fassbender selfcest I’m certain there are many people out there who would both be happy to help and do a better job.
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David breeding new strains of xenomorph could have been the sickest shit imaginable and a way to introduce dozens of new gribbly monsters into the setting, and yet with the bar on the ground they just use the old xenomorph.
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The Walter vs David fight is tone-obliterating clown shoes and it looks bad. It’s painfully, embarrassingly post-Marvel. Heaven forbid there be any impact or weight behind violence.
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The extraction from the necropolis could have been tense, if we’d spent any time with Danny and if I even knew who the fuck the other guy was and we had actually escalated things properly and…
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Xenomorphs repeatedly using their heads as battering rams is an interesting consistent detail, but did David design them to do that? Do they butt heads in the wild for territorial fights? That’d be sick, why don’t we get to see that?
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Long fucking denouement in this one.
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Fuckin’ dippy bird. DO YOU SEE IT? DO YOU RECOGNIZE THE THING? CLAP! CLAP BECAUSE YOU SAW THE THING!
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Jesus how fucking long is this movie.
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Perfunctory shower sex with tonally jarring diegetic music. Who the fuck even are these characters?
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Why won’t this movie end.
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The xenomorph having regular-ass human color vision with a lot of floaters is such a boring choice. And of course it doesn’t look good.
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“Mr. President, a fifth act has entered the movie.”
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THIS IS NOT A TWIST. THE SIGN POSTING COULD BE SEEN FROM ORBIT. THIS IS WHAT YOU GET FOR NOT CHECKING SERIAL NUMBERS.
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This movie has so many climaxes it could qualify as pornography, and yet no one is satisfied.
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You pompous oaf of course you’d be playing Wagner you absolute clown- wait what the fuck is this scene. Ridley, if you want a scene of Michael Fassbender laying eggs I am certain there are plenty of talented people out there who would both be happy to help and do a better job.
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I learned, while writing this review, that the conceit of the Covenant mission is that all the colonists are couples. Because Peter Weyland demands compulsive space heterosexuality to fulfill his breeding fetish symbolism, I guess.
What the fuck is this movie. You almost had something to say.
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The only redeeming feature of this movie is the visual design. All of that is solid. Props and VFX departments showed up and did their damnedest.
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Like the android it obsesses over, Covenant is locked in a hell of its own making, incestuously and mindlessly repeating the past in desperate attempt to make Real Art and totally unaware that this is what has damned it. It's like poetry, it fucking rhymes. I'd give Ridley Scott credit for this as-above-so-below meta brilliance, but it's the kind of meta brilliance that can only occur if the artist is entirely unaware that they are performing it.
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Final Rankings
- Alien
- Halo: Combat Evolved
- Aliens
- Metroid
- Browsing Tyranid articles on Lexicanicum
- An actual root canal
- Alien 3
- Alien: Resurrection
- Prometheus
- Alien: Covenant
It’s wild to me that this enormous franchise is based on 2 good films. 1.5 if I'm not feeling charitable. There is so damn much of it and like the flagship monster it replicates and consumes and never grows or changes or adapts in any meaningful way
Looking back from the effective end of the run (I'll probably watch Romulus eventually, but neither of us are going out of our way for it at the moment), I keep wanting to compare it to the Legend of Zelda, of all things: No meaningful continuity between most of its entries, a stable of tropes and visuals that it shuffles around for each new release, a laundry list of interesting bits that show up for one game and then never return. Zelda's just way more consistent in quality (and higher quality at that).
An anticlimactic end to this series was somewhat inevitable, though I'm glad I did it. Maybe we'll do Predator next.
This one doesn't deserve MS Paint
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