I have a long-term love affair with the Alien franchise. Aliens was the first film I saw in the series. James Cameron's brilliant sequel filled my mind and eyes with such bombastic delights that I never forgot it. Lines like "Game over man" became part of my vernacular. Then later I saw Ridley Scott's Alien and was completely floored by the visceral experience I had. Both reactions center on and are in large part due to the alien design and the ideas woven into these cinematic monsters.
This is why I went into Alien: Covenant with all the enthusiasm of a fan boy and it is also why I left the film disheartened. There was a great mystery at the center of Alien that we never need to know, what happened prior to Ripley and the gang finding that ship and those eggs. Prometheus and now Alien: Covenant seek to explain away that mystery and in doing so really lessen the overall ferocity of the xenomorph. The alien on display here seems to develop several times faster than what should be the more evolved versions of the creature in Alien. This again illustrates how these prequels undermine what the first film was truly about.
Covenant follows a crew transporting 2000 colonists to a new habitable planet. The ship undergoes an accident, killing the captain. Oram (Billy Crudup) becomes the new acting captain. He tells us that no one will trust him as he is a man of faith. While the crew repairs the ship, they intercept a signal from a planet that appears to be habitable and is much closer. Second in command Daniels (Katherine Waterson) objects to going off course but Oram decides this is what should be done. On board is android Walter (Michael Fassbender) who is an advanced version of the synthetic we saw in Prometheus. Once they land on the planet, all hell breaks loose as one might expect.
"There is so much here that doesn't make sense" says a character at one point in the film and it reflects so much of how everyone behaves. The characters speak is ways that just seem unnatural in any context. They reference Byron and Shelly in really on the nose ways that work for the films pretentious themes on creation but don't work in terms of investing us in characters. The film attempts to explore themes of creation, faith and God but this undermines what made the original Alien so great. The film should be about a perfect eating machine that uses humans as hosts and food and keeps changing from egg to face-hugger to chest-bursting creature to full on xenomorph. It is pure nightmare fodder when done right. When Cameron made the sequel, Aliens, he respected this and took things further in creating a Queen, tying these creatures to the insect world as Dan O'Bannon, original scribe of the series, had intended.
There is some technical talent on display in the film. A few scenes really work well and get the blood and brain pumping. Waterson and Fassbender both give solid performances here. Ridley Scott is very good at world building and the planet the crew lands on feels fully realized.
These few good elements can't save the film. The screenplay is a disaster that undermines Alien as it goes along. As a big fan of this series, someone who even finds good things in Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection, I left the theater with a heavy heart that having seen this film may have lessened the greatness that is Alien.
2/5
No comments:
Post a Comment