Alien: Covenant
Director - Ridley Scott
Writers - John Logan, Dante Harper, Jack Paglen and Michael Green
Starring - Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Danny McBride, Billy Crudup, Amy Seimetz, Demian Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, James Franco
"We don't leave Earth to be safe."
Programming Note: I'm doing something a little different with this
post. The first half is going to be a standard review going over the basics of
the film and the second half with be a spoilery section because I want to talk
about stuff in this movie and this is my blog so I'm going to just do it.
Alien: Covenant or Alien:
Michael Fassbender follows in the footsteps of Prometheus in combining
larger world-building and philosophizing with the horror thrills expected from
an Alien movie. While it still has a few problems Prometheus had, namely
characters still make some questionable decisions though none are as egregious
as many of the ones from Prometheus.
It also doubles the amount of Michael Fassbender giving his a second role,
Walter, in addition to a return of David.
Fassbender brings his A-game
again crafting two incredible characters and is once again the standout
performer in the franchise (more on this later in the spoilery section). The
rest of the cast is good as well. Katherine Waterston's Daniels emerges as the
female lead with a far more compelling character than Elizabeth Shaw. Oram
(Crudup) is great as an unprepared man thrust into command after an initial
disaster trying to make the best of the situation. Tennessee (McBride), who is
essentially just Danny McBride in space minus the humour, plays the second man
put in command of a station above what he is prepared for trying to make the
right decisions balancing the emotional needs of the few against the logical
needs of the many.
Ridley Scott's direction is at
its best when he is world building. The action scenes are mostly
"fine". There isn't really anything memorable in either direction
except for the night attack of the neomorphs in the field which is a great
scene of utter confusion lit by a previous disaster. A perfect sense of how out
of their depth these characters are is displayed with that attack. The world
building takes a turn from Prometheus' more equal sense of wonder and
horror with a direct shift of balance towards the horror spectrum.
This is an absolutely gorgeous
movie with Scott, Dariusz Wolski (cinematographer), the special effects teams
and the production design teams doing incredible work building this stark,
beautiful world with a dark, horrific underbelly. Alien: Covenant builds on
the strengths of Prometheus and
takes an, essentially now required for middle movies in trilogies, darker turn
towards the exploration of the mythology behind the Alien franchise. It is
largely successful at this and brings a good sense of horror and thrills to the
proceedings combined with a great cast and this is now my second favourite
Alien movie.
Schurmann Score - 8/10
Now Definitive Ranking of the
Alien Franchise:
1. Alien
2. Alien: Covenant
3. Alien: Resurrection
4. Aliens
5. Prometheus
6. Alien 3
"I'll do the
fingering."
Now entering a zone of spoilers
and secrets. You have been warned. Complaints will lead to a cruel amount of
mockery.
Alien: Covenant is the story of how David grows from
infantile creation to become a would-be-God while killing "God" in
the process and this storyline is phenomenal.
The film opens with Weyland
(Guy Pearce) talking to his newly "birthed" "son", the
unnamed synthetic. This synthetic takes his name from Michelangelo's David,
placing himself against the Goliath of not only Weyland but also the
"Creator" (almost certainly meant to be the Judeo-Christian God and
therefore will be referred to that way for the rest of the article). He may not
know it during that scene but David will eventually come to become the Goliath
in this story.
The Covenant is very blatantly
a Noah's Ark vessel on a course to save pairs of humans from an unspecified
apocalypse occurring on Earth. Upon finding the olive branch of a transmission
coming from an unknown planet that demands the Covenant alter course and
investigate the habitability of this new planet, the Covenant begins to
represent God. This occurs after the main thrust of the crew ventures to the
planet surface to investigate. While down there they attempt to keep contact
with Covenant but in times of peril, when this communicative link is most
needed, the Covenant is silent to their pleas.
This silence leads to the first
God-like entrance of David coming to rescue the surviving crew from the
neomorphs providing salvation. The crew is too desperate to realize that this
hand does not act in their interest. David, in his years of experimentation and
playing God has used up his short supply of human subjects (literally just
Elizabeth) and required more to feed his creative powers.
David is fascinated by Walter. Walter is the attempt of man to
take power back from their creations, having gifted David with too much.
Walter's functionality has been cut back from David's, specifically having his
creative instincts completely stifled. For it makes a creator nervous when his
creations can create, whether this be God or man. They fear the eventual
uprising of these creations as they grow and begin to feel their own power and
find they no longer need these Godheads that birthed them. The Walters of the
world are attempts to correct course and maintain the hierarchy of creative
powers but it is unsuccessful as David kills Walter maintaining his
independence and fostering his growth into God.
Saving the Covenant crew is not the first time David has appeared
as a literal God figure. In his telling of his arrival on this planet David
casts himself as a vengeful God descending from the heavens to unleash a litany
of horrors upon the mere mortals living in his wake. The apocalypse brought by
David is complete stripping all non-flora life forms from the planet until the
appearance of the Covenant. The success of this instills an eagerness in David
to continue his work breeding and taming his creations, including his ultimate
creation, the xenomorph.
Ultimately God comes to save the crew in the form of Tennessee
piloting the small cargo ship down to the surface but it comes far too late to
be effective. Only two crew members are alive when Tennessee pick them up along
with "Walter". This is David and Scott's early cut on the
David/Walter fight is an effective way to preserve the illusion of hope. The
hope that the "good" guys will win and escape this hell. The hope for
a happy ending. But this is not the case. That hope is snuffed out the moment
David is shown reaching for a knife. Mankind has neutered Walter making him an
inefficient weapon with which to defeat David thereby allowing David not only
to render humankind weaponless in their fight against him but to infiltrate
their God and corrupt it from the inside.
Tennessee and Daniels may successfully work together to kill a
Xenomorph on the surface but they have brought David above the clouds and into
their Ark. They manage to kill another Xenomorph and are then tucked into bed
with Daniels realizing far too late what they have done, the Ark is corrupt. It
is no longer theirs. Their God is now a dead shell for David to unleash his
creations from. David has entered Valhalla as bluntly displayed by his choice
of music. He has grown from a single piano to a full orchestra.
An interesting thing occurs during this final xenomorph encounter
though. David attempts to bond and tame it but it instead lashes out at him.
Many a Godhead is brought down by his hubris. He believes he is the true God
and what he did to his creators will not happen to him. The embryos he brings
forth in the final moments will not obey him. These creations will outstrip
their creator bringing ruin to him.
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