A Monster Mishmash
Ridley Scott's Alien, the original from 1979, is a phenomenal film. It has wonderful production values and atmosphere, great performances, and it's just flat-out terrifying. I'd like to see it again, but then I come back to the point about it being terrifying. All of the Alien films that have followed don't quite match the original in terror, and in some cases that's they're undoing. James Cameron didn't even try to, instead crafting an incredibly suspenseful action flick with Aliens. Now, following his 2012 Alien prequel Prometheus, Scott has once again returned to the time before his original film to deliver yet another uneven but ambitious dive into the origin of the xenomorph alien, and human life as we know it.
Set 15 years after the end of Prometheus—which saw the android David (Michael Fassbender) and Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) set out to visit the home world of the Engineers (the extra-terrestrial beings who created the human race)—Alien: Covenant finds a crew comprised of couples en route to a new planet to colonize. As you've probably guessed, something goes wrong, and the crew's leader (Billy Crudup) decides to investigate a fuzzy distress call from someone who may just be human. But how did they get out so far in space, and is their planet habitable? What the crew of the spaceship Covenant finds on that planet explains why this film's title has Alien in front of it.
Scott and screenwriters John Logan and Dante Harper do a fine job of building tension in the film's first half before Covenant's story meets up with the plot strands of Prometheus. The planet the crew lands on is eerily quiet and gray. One massive asset of making an Alien sequel is that the audience knows a monster will appear at some point, and the creative team takes advantage of their situation. It's when creatures come bursting out of people's bodies that the film feels like a bit of a retread. Sure, tiny aliens fighting the crew in a wheat field is a new spin on something we've seen (and it's a moment reminiscent of the raptors hunting the hunters in The Lost World: Jurassic Park), but it's not so fresh as to justify the movie's existence.
But then Prometheus comes back into the fold. Michael Fassbender's David was a highlight of that film, and in Covenant he is the reason to see the movie altogether. The Covenant ship has an android of its own, Walter, and he's just a newer model of David, so Fassbender is given the rich opportunity to play a dual role, and he lives up to the full potential of what the script allows. David is more autonomous and creative than Walter, and the Prometheus fascination with creation lives on in David as we learn what he's been up to since he and Dr. Shaw soared off into the stars. Getting to watch Fassbender play a bit of a mad scientist is a treat in and of itself, but to see him also play the skeptic, and have both parts feel so convincing and rich, is worth the price of admission if you can go along with the xenomorphs chowing down on the crew the rest of the time.
David's presence in Alien: Covenant gives the xenomorphs a secondary role, which is refreshing, because we already know the aliens don't exactly contain multitudes. There's no question that they're up to no good, so giving the story a central figure who might be duplicitous is key to keeping Covenant from getting boring. Scott has once again assembled a top-flight cast, so even when Danny McBride or Katherine Waterston are being chased by creatures, they're doing a good job of grounding their characters and making them compelling to watch. Waterston in particular is quite good as the clear analogue to Sigourney Weaver's Ripely from the original Alien films.
Waterston's Daniels is also the smartest member of the crew, and in a very convincing, rational way. Covenant, like Prometheus, has a problem with its supposedly very smart characters (they are scientists on a spaceship, after all) making very stupid mistakes, though thankfully not often enough to break the film's reality. Having someone as respectable and capable as Daniels on the team keeps Covenant from becoming one of those movies where you yell at the people on screen for always making the worst choice for the convenience of moving the plot along.
Alien: Covenant is an odd film, because it's really two movies in one. On the Alien side of things, we have a sometimes very good but overall fine monster movie. At the Prometheus end of the spectrum we have a rumination on creators and creations that's never fully realized and fleshed out, but is nonetheless a compelling watch. The headier, Fassbend-ier material keeps Covenant a cut above average, and it makes me wish Scott would ditch the bloody deaths and fully commit to the gothic, Dr. Frankenstein-like story he seems more interested in telling. Six movies into this franchise, we all know that you can't beat the original at its own game, so why not do something truly different?