Alien Covenant

– Warning: this review contains several spoilers.

The sixth installment of the Alien franchise and Prometheus’ direct sequel, Alien: Covenant aims to revisit the concept behind the iconic monster by contextualizing it around the discussions sparked by its predecessor. The movie, however, has some obvious shortcomings, failing to develop most of its characters and to build a proper climax.

This time, the story accompanies the crew of the spacecraft Covenant, who is traveling on a colonization mission. After an accident that kills the captain of the ship, the team receives a transmission from a nearby planet and, realizing that it was sent by a human, decides to ascertain its origin. When they arrive at the planet, however, some members are infected by a parasite, giving rise to terrible creatures. When they receive the aid of a mysterious android, the members of the ship begin to understand that that planet holds more secrets than they first imagined.

Daniels (Katherine Waterston), a woman who becomes the second in command when her husband is killed in the accident, is the movie’s main point of view. Daniels quickly established herself as the voice of reason, questioning the new captain, Orem (Billy Crudup), about the dangers of the investigation.

The beginning of the movie focuses on the interaction between the crew, indicating their main characteristics. Orem, for example, is a man of faith who is unsure of his authority over the rest of the crew. Faris (Amy Seimetz) shows uneasiness in the few moments she is put under pressure, which foreshadows her reckless actions when the first member becomes ill.

It’s only during the second act,  when the android David (Michael Fassbender) appears, that the movie’s main themes come to the surface and the narrative gains urgency. The place in which David lives impresses by its scope and details: while the exterior of his dwelling is a terrifying necropolis, which holds mummified corpses of several Engineers, the interior of the place is decorated like a bio lab, indicating the android’s obsession with life and the anatomy of the Aliens.

The eventual revelation that David aims to create the franchise’s most famous creatures is fundamental to the construction of the movie’s core idea, as it establishes a sequence of creations that has its beginning with the Engineers and its end with the Aliens. Thanks to the numerous scenes that show the monsters coming out of Engineers and humans, and remembering the beginning of Prometheus, which shows mankind emerging from the Engineers’ DNA, it’s possible to see both movies establishing each point of this chain of creation as a degraded representation of the nature of the one that came before.

From this sequence of beings (Engineers -> Humans -> Androids -> Aliens) Alien Convenant shows a process of “distillation” that ends with the ID gone wild. First, there are the Engineers, who usually appear towering, austere, and distant. The bluish coloring of their skin gives them an ethereal air, establishing them as something more transcendental than their creation. Their motives are sometimes left unexplained, rendering them as mythic unattainable figures, and sometimes explained by logic and observation, such as their plan to destroy humanity in Prometheus. Humans, on the other hand, appear more complex, making a balance between reason, faith, and desire; elements that are put in different characters – Daniels, Omer, and the copilot Upworth (Callie Hernandez), respectively –, signaling the diversity of our composition. David, however, is the ultimate representative of a man-made being and, in him, there is an even greater denial of the superego when comparing him to his creator: David positions himself as a rebellious figure, who rejects authority, despises the capacity for self-control and rationalization, and frequently reveals to be moved by emotion and desire. It’s no coincidence that one of his most developed characteristics in the movie is his sexuality: when descending these chain of creations to reach an essence, it is precisely this element that we arrive at, culminating with the Alien figure, which represents sex in its most monstrous form. If the first creator is ethereal, the ultimate creation is just violence and sex, a purely animalistic being, as David himself suggests in a particular scene, when he explains that he was trying to tame the creature.

The scenes in which the android interacts with his double, Walter – who accompanies the Covenant crew and is a more advanced model of David, and also played by Michael Fassbender – are packed with eroticism. This sexual tension overflows throughout certain images (such as when David inserts a phallic object into Walter’s mouth) and dialogues (while saying “let me do the fingering“) and is further reinforced in another scene by the presence of the same phallic object now erectly positioned over the android’s crotch. If the end of this scene is emblematic due to revealing David killing Walter in the same way that his creations will – by penetration – it also points to the narcissism that dominates the personality of the character and to the fascination he feels over his own identity.

In recognizing his position as a creation, David wants more than anything to overcome it, becoming precisely the thing that he hates more than anything: a creator. The flashback with Wayland that opens the movie is important because it reminds the viewers that David himself was created for the same reason, with Wayland appearing equally frustrated, trying to be as superior as the creator he so much wants to find and understand. The difference between Wayland and David is that the human wants his creation to serve him, while the android lets them run free. This parallel between the two, in fact, signals a cycle that may indicate the motivations of the Engineers themselves when creating humankind and which was constantly questioned in Prometheus: after all, someone created the Engineers and their actions can be the result of the same frustration, an attempt to overcome the same inferiority complex.

David is the most fascinating character in Alien: Covenant and it makes much more sense to consider him the protagonist of the movie than Daniels, although he is the villain and she, the heroine: David is the gravitational center of the movie and the one who has a character arc that complements the themes developed. Daniels, on the other hand, does not even have an arc to call her own and is there only to serve as a point of identification for the viewer.

If the various characteristics of the human personality are scattered among the crew members, David carries them all inside himself, being individually complex. There is a strong contrast in the character: while his diction is monochord and his movements are unnatural, indicating his robotic origin, he is, in fact, dominated by emotion. The most important element of the scene in which he assassinates the Engineers, for example, is not the genocide itself, but the anger stamped on the character’s face. Although he constantly lies throughout the film, it is not hard to believe that he’s being honest when he exposes his feelings for Prometheus’s protagonist, Elizabeth. He may have killed her, using her as a guinea pig – and you can imagine her complaining, “Shit, David, again?” – but that would not stop him from believing that he loved her. While Walter defends his relationship with Daniels as a duty, rationalizing it, David categorically states that he “knows best,” repositioning the actions of his double in the field of emotion.

It’s a shame, therefore, to attest that the surface of the movie is so problematic, failing to take advantage of its rich themes. The only suspense scene that really works is the one that marks the first turning point in the story: the infection of two Covenant crew members and the eventual appearance of the Aliens. Here, Scott works with dramatic irony, using the fact that the audience knows what will come out of the infection to increase the tension, since he locks another character with the infected person, causing the viewer to immediately realize that she is in great danger. In addition, the despair of Faris, who is watching everything impotently, adds to the scene, as her actions begin to fail precisely due to the pressure of the events, increasing the tension, while the gore, represented by the final state of the infected’s body, closes the package by shocking the viewer.

The other action scenes, however, don’t show the same care in their construction. The second climax, for example, which ends with Daniels returning to the mothership, uses a worthless artifice to generate an unnecessary plot twist, not revealing who survives in the confrontation between David and Walter: this only makes it clear that it is David who survives, for unless the director has lost his mind, he would never kill the main character of the movie off-camera without any preparation for the moment.

Now, the final clash with the Alien in the Covenant ship fails precisely because of lack of preparation. The environment in which it occurs is a random part of the ship that has had no importance until then; the strategy to kill the creature also comes up just in time, never having been mentioned before; and the sequence is neither visually interesting nor especially intelligent. Worse still is to attest that this last fight doesn’t complement in any way the discussions raised until then, being devoid of any dramatic force, which makes the movie feel like it ended in an anticlimactic way.

The various killings that the Aliens makes throughout the film are also problematic, being irrelevant or juvenile in their composition. While the death of a woman at David’s necropolis causes no reaction at all because the audience hardly remembers even the character’s name, the shower scene that appears in the trailer, in which an Alien kills two people having sex, despite reinforcing the sexual nature of the creature, is too exaggerated for it to work: the monster’s tail slowly rising beneath the man and moving towards the woman’s vagina can only cause laughter because of the artificiality of the situation.

The members of the Covenant ship are also poorly developed. While some have their main features hammered constantly (Orem uses the word faith at least three times during the movie’s first hour), others don’t even have a trait to call their own. The woman who is killed at the necropolis, for example, is simply devoid of any trait, existing only to die. To make matters worse, those little fortunate enough to have some semblance of personality are not used well: Orem’s faith, for example, leads to absolutely nothing and he dies by acting as stupid as any other minor character.

Nonetheless, the actors do their best with their characters, though only Michael Fassbender actually has material to work with. Building two characters that complement each other, Fassbender even tries to make the twist that David is pretending to be Walter at the end work: his sigh when the Alien is defeated, for example, is very ambiguous, allowing it to be understood, at first, as a sigh of relief that Daniels has survived and, on a second visit, as a sigh of disappointment because his creature was easily matched by a human.

Finally, the script still shows a surprising lack of care with the consistency of the franchise, breaking, without any decent justification, one of its oldest traditions: if the names of the androids in each movie followed alphabetical order (Ash, Bishop, Call, and David), the one introduced here is called… Walter.

Alien: Covenant is not the worst chapter of the Alien franchise, but it is certainly the most irregular: it has a complex protagonist but a lot of flat characters, contains a rich theme but action sequences that have nothing to do with it, and even goes back to work with the sexual concept behind its main monster but also unnecessarily departs from one of the franchise’s traditions.

December 04, 2018.

Originally published in Portuguese on May 29, 2017.