Few filmmakers have been fortunate enough to have their early careers defined by classic works as Ridley Scott has, the creator of cult sci-fi films Alien and Blade Runner. Although commercially successful and established as one of Hollywood’s most influential producers, Scott has struggled in recent years to deliver films of the same calibre to both audiences and critics. It is therefore somewhat understandable that he sought to return to his roots, and by circumstance, 2017 saw him release—either as director or producer—two films based on his greatest successes: Blade Runner 2049 and Alien: Covenant.
The latter serves as a prequel to Alien and a sequel to Scott’s 2012 film Prometheus, through which he attempted to connect the Alien film cycle with the two Alien vs. Predator movies. The plot begins 11 years after the events of Prometheus, following the doomed expedition aboard the ship of the same name. In 2104, the Covenant, a vessel carrying frozen colonists bound for planet Origae-6, suffers a malfunction that awakens its 14-member crew from cryosleep. During repairs, the crew detects an unusual signal originating from a nearby planet with conditions suitable for human life. Captain Oram (Billy Crudup) decides to divert the ship and send an expedition to the planet. Upon landing, the crew encounters what appears to be a paradisiacal world filled with lush vegetation, though it strikes them as odd that no animal life is present. The reason becomes clear when two crew members are infected by mysterious spores, from which small yet highly destructive creatures emerge, killing them and several others. Temporary salvation arrives in the form of David (Michael Fassbender), the android survivor of the Prometheus disaster, who leads the remaining members of the ill-fated Covenant expedition to a city built by the enigmatic humanoid Engineers. There, evidence of an unimaginably destructive catastrophe and genocide is visible. As they attempt to organise an evacuation to the orbiting ship, it becomes apparent that the answer to what destroyed the Engineers is far closer and darker than anyone anticipated.
Of all the films in the Alien saga (assuming, of course, that this includes the sequels), Covenant is the one whose plot and structure most closely resembles Scott’s original Alien. Sir Ridley clearly approached this new film as an opportunity to create something that would simultaneously serve as both homage and remake of his most famous work, with perhaps the clearest indicator being Benjamin Wallfisch’s score (co-composed with Hans Zimmer), which draws on motifs from Jerry Goldsmith’s original 1979 soundtrack. At the same time, it provided an excellent opportunity for Scott to demonstrate how special effects technology has advanced over the past forty years, featuring several genuinely striking and disturbingly explicit scenes of violence. Yet, as with many previous instances, all this availed Scott little, as he was once again unlucky with his screenwriter. John Logan simply isn’t in the same league as Dan O’Bannon, who provided Scott with the genius screenplays for Alien and Blade Runner.
This is most evident in the film’s utterly bland and easily forgettable characters. For instance, the nominal protagonist, Daniels (played by Katherine Waterston), simply cannot hold a candle to Ripley as portrayed by Sigourney Weaver. The only actor who might be said to have delivered a noteworthy performance is Michael Fassbender, though this is largely thanks to a script that assigned him a dual role—as David, the android from Prometheus, and Walter, the Covenant’s android, who happens to resemble David’s identical twin. Then there is the so-called “surprise” twist at the end, which any seasoned viewer could have predicted from several light-years away.
The script’s greatest flaw, however, lies in its violation of one of the rules insisted upon by Borivoj Jurković, former editor of the Croatian sci-fi magazine Sirius: “fools don’t travel in space.” This rule was already broken in Prometheus, but in Covenant it is violated even more explicitly, with characters behaving like idiotic teenagers from 1980s exploitation slasher films. Scott seems to have been aware of this, as Covenant includes a shower scene where two crew members act like randy teenagers, ending precisely how they would in Friday the 13th and similar films. Though well-directed, the scene feels utterly unconvincing and appears too late in the film for anyone to interpret it as anything other than cheap exploitation. Indeed, Covenant as a whole is a rather poor exploitation of something that once represented one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, and the thought of an inevitable sequel causes far greater unease among fans than any scene Scott included in this film.
RATING: 4/10 (+)
(Note: The text in the original Croatian version was posted here
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