K-SCORE: 38
Director: Ridley Scott
Writer: John Logan, Dante Harper, Jack Paglen, Michael Green
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, a dead James Franco
Spoiler Level: Moderate
“a ton Michael Fassbender”
Alien: Covenant is incredible. Usually if I write that, it means I couldn’t believe how good it is. In this case, I simply cannot believe that Ridley Scott was able to perfectly capture the precise way and degree to which Prometheus was bad in the second entry in his Alien prequel series. Alien: Covenant is exactly as bad. It’s stunning.
It’s as if the director has spent years deluded into thinking that fans of his sci-fi franchise were fans because of the weird way he portrays androids or because they’re deeply curious about Wayland-Yutani Corp. We’re not. We like the aliens, the face huggers, the acid blood, and the space marines that are somehow no match for these truly terrifying life forms. Worse than that, in his attempts to explore the androids and the corporations and the weird origin races, he’s bungling up plots we didn’t care about with inconsistencies, holes, motivational craziness, and characters that are fundamentally dumb. In both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, a ship descends on an unfamiliar world with shocking similarities to Earth (like that wheat grows) and the colonists never question that and simply split up into easily killable groups and explore deadly environments and mysteries in ways that are irresponsible if they’re pioneers, tactically ridiculous if they’re soldiers, amateurish if they’re scientists, and unprofessional if they’re just there to operate the machinery. In Alien: Covenant, you’ll get a Snakes-on-a-Plane-esque shower sex ambush, which is fine. But in Prometheus, you’ll get DIY alien abortion, which is also fine. In Alien: Covenant you’ll get an actress named Amy Seimetz playing a girl who fails spectacularly to quarantine an alien while simultaneously panic firing a shotgun into some fuel cells that blow up herself and her ship without killing any threatening creatures, which is great. In Prometheus, you get Charlize Theron playing a girl who fails to outrun a giant donut and gets crushed, which is also great. In both films you get a ton Michael Fassbender being a creepy mother fucker, expostulating on life and creation without making any sense, which kind of sucks.
I wish these films would cut to the chase and call their new picks for actresses that likely will not recreate Sigourney Weaver’s performance Ripley. There’s one in each and as Ridley Scott adds more random ingredients to his monster horror pie so they have less and less to do. All it takes a protagonist in one of these things these days is to be female and alive at minute one-hundred.
For a second I was going to write that Alien: Covenant gets a bonus point because there’s a moment where you squint at a burning body in a hybernation casket, I mean pod, and go, “Is that James Franco?” but then I remembered in Prometheus, there’s a moment where you squint a guy getting out of a hybernation casket, crap I mean pod, and go, “Is that Guy Pearce?” Yes and yes, and yes they’re both irrelevant. So they both get the bonus point. And both films are basically trash.