The eighth passager : Rant

Five years after the release of Promethus , Ridley Scott continues his revision of the Alien franchise with his third entry into the series alien covenant. Set ten years after the events of Prometheus, we follow a new crew of colonists as they embark on a dangerous mission after recieving a distress signal from an uncharted world.If that sounds alot like the premise of the first alien then thats because it is.It seems scott and Fox listened to the disgruntled fanbase who bemoaned the gaping plotholes and lack of aliens in Prometheus and decided to reboot the franchise in the same way  disney and universal did with star wars and jurrassic park.on paper it seemed a good idea at the time with both  films tapping into audiance nostalgia and giving them more of the same.So we have a new crew of blue collar workers , who  are  married couples sent to populate an offworld colony. 

Our crew are busy making repairs and mounring the loss of thier captain After an mid-voyage collision.Micheal Fassbender is  playing the ships synthetic but this time he is called Walter. Mid-repairs, Danny mcbrides Tennesse intercepts a signal of someone singing john denvers country roads. The new captain (played by Billy Crudup) decides to investigate the source of the signal which is coming from an earth type world strangly absent from his star maps.

While all this is a soft reboot , its fun watching Scott  playing with the original films formula  just as James Cameron did with Aliens without ever straying far from the  source material.The film opens with an exellent prologue with  scientist Peter weyland talking to his creation android David who becomes the focus of the second half of this film.The tension and dread steadily mount during the first hour untill a fantastic set piece unleashes the horrors awaiting the landing party on this hostile world.

The crew become stranded after a nasty outbreak of alien flu and then ambushed by vicious Neomorphs. David comes to the rescue, leading the surviviors to the city of the engineers  from Promethus which has been destroyed by sinister forces. David  chats with his counterpart Walter while  the crew continue to defend themself from a fresh assault of monsters lying in the crypts. The first two acts of this film are great and it looks amazing.

The film goes all out B-movie in the third act.Like Prometheus before it,Covenants narrative logic and continuity go out the window in the persuit of high octane action. Captain Oram is attacked by a facehugger  parasite  then in his next scene has an alien burst out of his chest , which grows to full size in minutes while David turns violently on the rest of the crew. The movie has a nightmare like logic to it where things go from bad to worse and like a dream makes less sense the more you think about it.

Covenant is still fun to watch but when we get a standoff between the alien and our heroine tangling off a rope with a machine gun the film veers into self parody . Sadly the Alien dosent get much screentime or present that much of a threat and is easily dispensed with during its brief cameo.Scott is not interested in the Alien and focuses on the Android which is unstandable as this is the eighth entry in the series.when you consider that his other sci-fi franchise Bladerunner is all about synethetic humans defying thier creators you wonder why he didnt just direct bladerunner 2049 instead.

I think younger audiances who have never seen Alien before or its sequels and are coming in from prometheus , will enjoy it even more than  older fans who might be frustrated by the films  illogical dream logic and unesesary  revision of the alien life cycle.It is also frustrating for fans of Prometheus because he essentially abandons the engineer subplot and kills the lead offscreen , so anyone invested in Dr shaws journey to meet her makers will feel shortchanged in the same way that people felt with the deaths of Newt and Hicks in alien 3.

I personally loved the mystery of the first film. Then you had  astronauts accidently discovering an ancient alien battleship that seeminly crashed landed there aeons before. While I appreciate that Ridley scott has  tried to reinvigorate Alien by taking it in  a different direction with Prometheus and is attempting to expand its universe with Alien : Covenant . It is disapointing that by  clumsily trying to connect events of these films to the original the world he is building actually seems much smaller than the one he created with the original Alien.

For long devotees of the series there is much to love here. Our Byronic hero David is a compelling villain and I was engaged with his story.The crew are all well played and likable , but none of them have sufficient screen time to become memorable.There are some great scenes and some really bad ones. The opening with David talking with his creator and the bodybusting scenes  are just brilliant.The alien  seems to have been shoe horned into the story as fanservice and has no impact on the story.

The highlight of the movie is the android David. There is hope of a final film to finish his journey from servant to master as he embarks to a new world with his monsters  and ship full of helpless colonists to experiment on.