Sequel to a film about Big Questions; prequel to a film which neither asks nor answers any.
Like its predecessor Prometheus (2012), Alien: Covenant is a story about how humans were created by a race of humanoid aliens, which shoehorns in being a prequel to Alien (1979), presumably to get more people to watch it. But where Prometheus feels like the shoehorning perhaps happened late in production, Alien: Covenant feels like it became distracted from its basic promise as a sequel to Prometheus early on in its development.
Or, more pointedly: it feels like there’s an entire movie missing between Prometheus and Alien: Covenant (perhaps the Alien: Paradise Lost project announced at one point by director Ridley Scott) – one which is shown only through flashbacks, much of which was left out of the theatrical cut (understandably so: it’s additional footage, without additional information) – about Dr Elizabeth Shaw’s (Noomi Rapace) continuing adventure to meet our makers, and how the real protagonist (or at least, the one most interesting to Ridley Scott) turns out to be the android, David (played with wonderfully eerie, properly inhuman beauty by Michael Fassbender):
The most interesting scenes, and the film’s most arresting single VFX shot, feature androids David and Walter (also played by Fassbender):
There are some other properly sleazy slasher-movie moments too, but there’s less to talk about with those, not least because the film itself seems less interested in them. And as has been observed elsewhere, the characters in the crew in this film are less interesting here than those in Alien, not because they’re less compelling conceptually (it’s potentially interesting that this time around, the crew is all romantic couples, and I like Katherine Waterston as this instalment’s Ripley), but because their dialogue is all theme and plot – faith versus science – not character. Perhaps the trick in Alien was that it felt like a documentary about blue collar workers in space which was interrupted by an unfathomable horror event; Alien: Covenant simply feels like themes colliding with themes – less electric, more didactic.
Where Prometheus felt like a fresh science fiction film hijacked by the Alien franchise, Alien: Covenant feels like Alien: Reheated from the outset.
Alien: Covenant is successful neither as a sequel nor as a prequel: as a sequel, it all but abandons any pretense of answering questions asked in its predecessor; and as a prequel, it fails to set up Alien without contradicting or undermining it, and confuses its own lore by adding muddled rules about how the Alien-ness of it all even works. The fundamental problem for Alien: Covenant is that it lies at the intersection of two fundamentally incompatible story ideas: Prometheus is interested in Big Questions; Alien works because it neither asks nor answers any.
Further Viewing
“We don’t really see any hints of the practical work in the final composites… it’s a bit surprising to see so much work put into assets that the viewer will never see on the big screen in the end.” Frame Voyager‘s detailed look at the film’s production, SFX, and VFX work tracks the journey from Ridley Scott’s original stated premise for the film to its wildly different final result:
It’s always a good day to revisit the original: