Some Things to Consider About 'Alien: Covenant'

Recently, news broke that Ridley was developing yet another Alien film. I, along with people who didn’t like Covenant, rolled my eyes. As a fan of the film, I have to admit I’m not a fan of its director. I concede that regardless of whatever praise I have for the film, nobody should put it past Ridley to make a good film by accident, which I strongly suspect is exactly why Alien: Covenant exists. 

This isn’t a disclaimer, though - cuz fuck disclaimers - nor is it any sorta caveat or asterisk. This is central to my love for the movie: the understanding that the motives behind making it don’t (and shouldn’t) have any bearing on the quality of the film itself. Maybe Ridley knew what he was doing, maybe he didn’t; there’s evidence for both. What I’m more interested in is why it works despite plausible exterior factors.

Here are some things to consider: 

Jed Kurzel (or: the best atmosphere of any Alien movie) 

I’ll start where every Alien installment does: atmosphere.

The first thing I notice about all of them when I watch them is their score - primarily because I’ve always contended that they’d all be better without one. If you want an example of the aforementioned evidence of Ridley’s incompetence, just listen to the score for the original film. It seems obvious to me, especially in the decade immediately following 2001, that any discerning filmmaker would’ve looked at the subject matter and concluded that silence in a ‘space horror film’ was scarier than... trumpets? Unsurprisingly, Goldsmith has described working on the original film as “one of the most miserable experiences [he’s] ever had in this profession” because Ridley “can’t communicate.” The now-famous score sounds, to my ears, like it was composed by somebody who had no idea what Ridley was making.

That same score kicks off Covenant - as if tauntingly, in retrospect, because the sounds of the film take a sudden ghostly turn. Kurzel’s compositions are some of the creepiest music I’ve heard in any horror film. The garish trumpets are quickly swapped out for an appropriately minimal, ethereal, and otherworldly drone that sounds like wind escaping through a narrow fissure somewhere deep in the crust of the Earth. And amazingly, this noise - I hesitate to call it ‘music’ - is used sparingly throughout the film, like feeling someone’s breath on your neck when you think you’re alone. My preference for a purely ambient soundtrack was wrong after all.

 I originally planned on laboriously comparing Kurzel’s score to all the previous movies’, but I couldn’t remember what any of the ones after ‘79 sounded like. So, there. 

 

production design (atmosphere pt. II)

Lemme gather my thoughts cuz this’s where I can easily just gush, but that’s not the point; something specific needs to be articulated.

And I think that something is this: the biggest problem with Alien: Covenant is that it’s an Alien movie. I don’t wanna step too far outside of subjectivity here, so I’ll keep it blunt: there’s a film-within-the-film that I think all of us would hypothetically dig. I place Covenant in the same category as 10 Cloverfield Lane, a film whose potential and legacy were more or less crushed beneath the weight of J.J. Abrams’ ego. 

We’d all be better off if this and Prometheus were allowed to be their own thing: I wouldn’t have to always be on the defensive, and Alien fans (like the owner of this blog) wouldn’t have to listen to me trash their babies. But that’s the nature of “nostalgia culture.” Great ideas are filtered through existing properties. Some of the best movies of the 2010s are ‘theme park rides’ for this very reason, and necessary reboots are few and far between (Blade Runner 2049 and Doctor Sleep are the only two I can think of off the top of my head). 

To illustrate this point: my favorite moment in Covenant is one that requires no canonical safety net; it stands entirely on its own. 

The scene in question follows the much-reviled “back-burster” sequence (more on that later). David emerges to save the Covenant’s crew from newborn Neomorphs, and they follow him back to what he calls his “dire necropolis.” The characters step through a gate of enormous columns and lay eyes on the aftermath of a genocide in some ancient city; a sci-fi/horror update on the destruction of Pompeii. 

Now, I hadn’t seen trailers for the movie going into it the first time (I still haven’t watched any), so perhaps other viewers were primed for this moment by spoiler-y marketing, but I wasn’t. The result: 

I contend that this is the single-most evocative moment in any Alien film.

My eyes widen like a little kid every time I see it. I couldn’t believe something this cool was in a Ridley Scott film (oddly, I found this stuff to be more Lindelofean than anything in Prometheus). And it just kept getting better and better from there:

Next, we enter the Temple - or: the Devil’s Workshop.

One of the most visually stunning sets in all of horror, and Ridley doesn’t linger on any of it long enough to satiate us - we get just a taste; enough to keep me coming back again and again for another fix.

David’s obsessive pathology lines the walls and corridors in the form of vivid sculptures, illustrations, medical cadavers, and preserved specimens -- H.R. Giger’s artwork, once a mere source of inspiration for art direction and creature FX, has finally been incorporated into the lore itself. And why not? It was always cooler than the movies were. 

David & Walter

It needs to be said: at the end of the day, I wasn’t a huge fan of Prometheus’s bombastic ambitions. Covenant didn’t exactly abandon those ambitions either - rather, it kept them intact... inside the mind of David. The writers reinterpreted Lindelof’s grandiloquence as David’s delusions of grandeur. A bit of ‘shade-throwing’ perhaps, but a decision I approve of nonetheless.    

Turning Frankenstein’s monster into the new Dr. Frankenstein is my favorite plot development in the entire franchise.

Make no mistake about it: David very much belongs to the Gothic horror tradition - a tradition which the franchise never fully embraced, until now - and this story very much belongs to its romantic, Dantean villain. One of the things I appreciate about it is that the Covenant’s crew aren’t the main characters. Like any Chainsaw Massacre or Friday the 13th, the ‘good guys’ are merely prey.

Covenant, incidentally, deals with a lot of the same themes as Ridley’s Blade Runner, except this time it’s interesting. Needless to say, David is my favorite character in the Alien canon and one of my favorite villains, period. The scenes betwixt him and his counterpart, Walter, easily stand head-and-shoulders above the Terminator films and Ex Machina for me (Fassbender’s underrated performances are largely to thank).

What makes David so dangerous is how human he is. Walter, conversely, is morally unyielding because he’s more machinelike. This is a boldly pessimistic place to take the story, and it’s consistent: the Engineers created humans in their own image but ultimately regretted their creation and decided to kill us. Humans would then go on to create David in their own image and fear him, and David, consequently, would create a monster to kill his creators in the same way the humans’ creation killed the rest of the Engineers. A downward spiral of destruction in the name of creation. 

Characters are rewarded for their savagery in this film. Looking at it macrocosmically, the Xenomorph is perhaps “perfect” because it represents the final stage of human devolution. That’s an altogether new and exciting philosophical concept for both the sci-fi and horror genres.

Elizabeth Shaw

The most compelling thing Elizabeth Shaw ever did was die off-camera. And that’s not a slight against her character; quite the opposite.

Prometheus was about faith, but in Covenant characters are punished for having faith. In all the comparing and contrasting between these two films, nobody ever acknowledges how they complement one another’s moods perfectly. From a continuity standpoint, obviously there are more than a few fuck-ups, but still: the low-lying spookiness of Covenant doesn’t work without the hopefulness of Prometheus’s ending. By killing off such an optimistic character, the writers set the stage perfectly for this new chapter: if Prometheus was about God, then this one is about Satan.

Among the detritus of David’s handiwork are the remains of Shaw. The Covenant’s crew discover the Engineer ship along with some of Elizabeth’s personal effects. Most compellingly, however, they discover Shaw’s lost radio transmissions broadcasting into the void, as well as eerie, distorted holograms of her singing alone to herself aboard the spacecraft. In classically Gothic fashion, her innocent spirit haunts this marooned vessel for eternity. 

“But the characters are so dumb!!” 

Have you ever seen the movie Alien from 1979? Have you ever seen a movie?

Just like its predecessors, Covenant’s premise is predicated upon stupidity and shortsightedness, because that’s how drama works - human fallibility is the soul of fiction. If that sounds obtuse, it’s meant to. Calling the characters dumb isn’t good enough - if they weren’t, we wouldn’t have a movie. So we have to look closer: 

As I alluded to in the previous section, the humans in Covenant are described as “a dying species, grasping for resurrection.”  And why are they dying? Well, from what we can gather: they’re reckless, selfish, shortsighted, irresponsible -- y’know, the things that account for their behavior in the film. 

The scene that prompts this particular complaint from viewers the most is one in which the Covenant’s crew discover they’ve been infected by some mysterious pathogen, resulting in a so-called “back-burster” (more on that later), and the crew, in turn, fuck up so fantastically in their response to this problem that they end up destroying their lander, stranding them on the planet. Alien fans fucking hate this scene. Granted, the characters’ actions are undeniably dumber than normal for an Alien film. But this is exactly why I like it: for the first time in the entire franchise the characters’ reactions to a fucking extraterrestrial monster feel 100% authentic. 

See, Covenant suffers from what I’ll call “the Uncut Gems Paradox.” One of the most common things I’ve heard about that film from audiences is that its characters’ decisions are so stupid and irresponsible that the film becomes “unwatchably stressful.” I suspect the same thing is happening here. When I first saw the film, I was more riveted by this scene than practically any set piece in any previous Alien installment. Why? Because it was stressful. And there’s the catch-22: if the film had been less effective, maybe people would’ve enjoyed it more.  

*winces*

When people - older people, specifically - talk about their experience watching the ‘79 chest-burster scene for the first time they describe how horrified and shocked they were; how it “changed them” as moviegoers.

I never sympathized.

Don’t get me wrong: I dig that scene. But let’s not pretend that it’s still “shocking” or “horrifying” to anyone. So what do you do when making a sequel or prequel? You one-up it, of course. Covenant does so in two respects:

The first is very direct: toward the end of the film, the chest-burster is predictably recycled wholesale, but completely re-interpreted from the standpoint of direction and music. This time, instead of intending to shock or frighten, it’s treated as triumphant! This spectacularly hammy scene is one of my favorites in the film. David’s very own “It’s alive!” moment. 

For the fans, this seems to be considered the lowest low point of the film: David created the Xenomorph, booooo! Based on the reactions to both this and Prometheus, I suspect that the franchise’s fanbase would’ve preferred that the Xenomorph’s origin be just a bigger Xenomorph or some simpleminded shit (that’s basically what Aliens is, after all). 

The second way in which Covenant one-ups the original chest-burster comes earlier in the film - the aforementioned showcase of human stupidity. For the first time while watching one of these damn things, I was actually squirming in my seat and grating my teeth. The back-burster approaches the brutality of Bone Tomahawk while the mouth-burster (the best practical effect in the movie) sees gallons of blood spouting from every hole in a man’s head like a geyser as he violently regurgitates a Neomorph. (The idea of two separate, distinct births seems much more in the spirit of the original film than having every birth be the chest-burster.) 

Upon becoming conscious, the creature is immediately on the attack - it doesn’t run away and hide to be found later; it bites, scratches, flails aimlessly, even managing to take off a man’s jaw with its tail seemingly by accident. It wants to kill even though it doesn’t know exactly who or how yet. A brainless, newborn killing machine.

The Neomorph > The Xenomorph

Fans always said the Xenomorphs were “giant insects.” Of course, that was bullshit. Insects don’t tediously lurk and stalk. Insects are chaotic, dumb, vicious, myopic. They act more like Neomorphs. 

The Neomorphs are treated like animals while the Xenomorphs were always treated like, say, Bruce the Shark. And that’s a welcome change in my opinion. Like any animal, they have a nature; they’re fallible, and they can be manipulated and studied. We observe how they learn to hunt and bide their time by following them even when there are no prey around, just scouring the surface of this desolate planet in search of food. And they emit a noise - a ticking noise - that makes my skin crawl.

And putting all that aside, on a more basic, cinematic level they’re visually superior to Xenomorphs. That pale, disgusting embryonic flesh; the cluster of spikes protruding from their backs; their malformed, scrawny, awkward bodies. Put it all together and you get an H.R. Giger spin on the classic Grey Alien. That’s fucking cool.

The Protomorph > The Xenomorph (or: yes, the final 30 minutes are the worst part of the movie but I have a lot to say about that)

If there's one thing in the film I’d cut out or revise it would be this sequence, and the reason is that it’s merely a recreation of my least favorite part about Alien. The same can’t be said for the film’s detractors, however. They love Alien, but they hate this scene for some inarticulate reason. They say “it’s just showing us what we’ve seen already!” Hmmm, I seem to recall everyone being pretty hyped about the Starkiller Base blowing up. Besides, any fan of Aliens complaining about “retreading old ground” is automatically disqualified. 

For me, I didn’t like it the first time I saw it, so logically I didn’t care for it this time either. But ironically, I’d still say it improves upon the original film. For one thing, the monster-in-the-basement shit only lasts about 20 minutes as opposed to a goddamn hour, and for another: the Protomorph > the Xenomorph.

CGI is always a valid gripe because it can always look better, and the Protomorph is no exception, but that’s a trade-off: in the original films, Cameron and Scott were limited in what they could do with the creature, but in Covenant it’s a proper monster - fast, blunt, and mean. I don’t recall the ‘79 version bashing its head into windows or attacking TV monitors simply because it saw what appeared to be human faces in them. Sure, it could look better, but at least it’s not tediously “lurking in the shadows,” only to be revealed under clear lighting as some dude in a hokey costume... 

[terrifying trumpet music playing]

When I first saw Covenant, my biggest complaint about the ending was how “Walter” was obviously David and the film had done such a poor job of tricking me. Watching it now, I realize that I was wrong: if you’re paying attention, the movie makes it clear at several points who we’re really looking at, and the tension of these scenes comes not from the predictable hunt for the monster, but rather from anticipating whatever David has planned for these new human lab rats of his. Will he help them, or it? What is he up to? What’s the game? Imagine if the original film revealed Ash’s motives before the creature ever came aboard. It’d be a very different experience. The script wasn’t as dumb as I thought the first time round -- indeed, it was ahead of me. The lesson: you might enjoy Alien: Covenant if you stop pretending that you’re smarter than it, even if you are smarter than the people who made it.