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Latest Instalment in Alien Franchise a Bloody, Hollow Mess

‘Alien: Covenant’ will leave you longing for the perfect simplicity of its perfect predecessor.

Dorothy Woodend 22 May 2017TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend writes about film every other week for The Tyee. Find her previous articles here.

As the famous line from the original Alien said of our beloved xenomorph, “Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.”

The same could be said of the film itself.

Released in 1979, Alien embedded itself in the consciousness of a generation of film lovers, filmmakers, academics and audiences, and laid the seeds for the films to come. And come they did, bursting forth at regular intervals with varying degrees of success. You have to feel kind of sorry for the poor facehuggers, subjected to different directorial visions over the years, from James Cameron to David Fincher to Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Yanked backwards and forwards, denied their original charm and power, and always getting blown out of loading bays. Surely, there must be a better, more inventive, way of disposing of our alien buddies.

So, here we are almost 40 years later, still gamely plunking down our money to see our toothy little friends. I am sad to say, however, that the newest chapter in the franchise, Alien: Covenant, is not a return to form.

Ridley Scott’s third directorial outing follows some five years after the woefully incomprehensible Prometheus. If you will recall, Prometheus kicked off with a sequence that featured a large yogurt-coloured spaceman, sowing the seeds of life on planet Earth. Toadstools, donkeys, palm trees, corgis and yes, humans, all sprang from this original god-juice, orgasmically released on our planet’s barren soil by the aptly named Engineers.

Flash forward a few centuries, and some curious scientists discover an ancient set of hieroglyphics, and sally forth to discover the origins of the Engineers on a little old planet called LV-223.

Things did not end well for the crew of the Prometheus. There was rending, tearing, various eviscerations, a spot of disemboweling, as well as a little preemptive head removal. The Engineers were not kindly loving gods, but rather just another cranky species, who decided that humans were a pain in the ass, and should be wiped out. “Hello, gorgeous!” and out popped the xenomorphs, lashing of tail and spiked of teeth, created by the Engineers as handy dandy killing machines to clean up the human mess. The aliens mowed through the crew of the Prometheus, and also managed to turn on their creators in the process. By the end of the film, there was viscera everywhere, but not a whole lot of coherent plot remaining.

If you care to revisit the porridge of incomprehensible theology, corporate critique, and semi-feminist styling that comprised the film, be my guest. There is a wad of theories, explicatory videos and yakking sessions available on the Internet for those who want to poke at the innards of the story. It is a black hole of stuff, and only the briefest look made me yearn for the clean lines and lovely simplicity of the original film.

Covenant takes place some 10 years after Prometheus, but it owes more to the original 1979 version of the film, essentially replicating the plot of Alien, but without charm, interest or a cute kitty.

All of the same set pieces are there, a handsome spacecraft, a Ripley-looking female lead named Daniels (Katherine Waterston), a duplicitous android (Michael Fassbender) and a crew of generic folk who exist to be variously torn asunder.

But before we get to the meat of the matter, we’re subjected to an extended prologue that sets the tone of ponderous noodling about our place in the universe. “Oh, God no… not this again,” I thought. But oh God, yes, here we go. A newly minted robot named David (Fassbender), upon coming to consciousness, bangs out some Wagner on the piano (‘Entry of the Gods into Valhalla,’ naturally), and then sets about asking pesky questions of his maker and corporate overlord Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) along the lines of “If you made me, who made you?”

Weyland responds by demanding tea, and the seeds are sown for a revolutionary consciousness that will come to bear later in the film.

Covenant launches with a transport ship of tasty colonists on their way to a distant world to start human society anew. Some 2,000 souls are tucked safely away in their cryotubes awaiting delivery. Charged with watching over the sleeping human cargo, is Walter, the newest cybertronic being (also played by Fassbender), who is several generations removed from the original independently-minded David. Walter is the dumbed-down version, more comforting to humans, and less apt to rebel.

Mere moments after we have been introduced to the Prometheus and her mission, a catastrophic neutrino blast disrupts the crew’s slumber, kills the captain (James Franco) and disables the ship. Before you can say, “James Franco is dead?” the crew intercepts a garbled signal from a nearby planet, and decides to pay a visit.

This is the first in a series of terrible decisions that would leave any logical soul asking “Why?” Why stick your face in an alien egg? Why decide to get naked and have shower sex when alarms are blaring through the ship? Why trust a sneaky robot that lives inside a giant mausoleum filled with enormous stone heads and thousands of dead bodies?

Such scant attention paid to basic logic is not only dispiriting, it is also infuriating. The film makes things worse by jumping back and forth in time. Interjecting elements from the earlier film and then abandoning even the pretence of physical reality. The climactic showdown between the Alien and Daniels takes place on top of a moving spaceship. What ought to be thrilling is unnecessarily convoluted, chaotic and downright silly. And in the midst of the running, heaving mess of a plot, the thing we have come here to see, the creature itself, the beautiful monster is lost. For a film that features aliens, we spend an inordinate amount of time with boring old humans and their cybernetic companions yammering on about the nature of duty, love and existence.

As the duelling robots David and Walter quote lines from Shelley’s Ozymandias, kiss and fight, it is hard not to roll your eyes at such high blown theatrics. In his dual role, Fassbender pulls out all the stops, prancing like a stallion in places, and swapping accents (Walter speaks in flat American tones and David with the mellifluous vowels of upper-crust English). Fassbender even overshadows himself. His David is a thing of wonder, silkily committing atrocities with the barest hint of a smile. Nothing else in the film quite matches his smooth vanilla evil.

But despite all the sound, fury and thespian flourishes, the film rings oddly hollow, almost impersonal. Even when the xenomorphs erupt forth, and release fountains of gore, it feels a little half-hearted, like their razor grins weren’t really into it. What is missing is elegance and restraint. Unlike the first film, where crew members were often dispatched off-camera and only fleeting glimpses of the Alien were provided, Covenant piles on the dead bodies and serves up a veritable banquet of different monstrosities. It is overkill in all senses of the word.

But there is something else at work, namely that the filmmaker has loftier ambitions than mere genre frolics. And here is where it gets really messy. Like Martin Scorsese before him Scott indulges in grandiosity, and it robs the film of any real joy. In some fashion, Scott seems to share David’s notion that humans are a dying species, not deserving of any more chances to bungle up the universe. He is less interested in the mechanics of survival than in posing questions about the nature of God.

But as in Prometheus, these musings are no more than sketched out. Rather than read as profound, they seem merely pretentious, hubristic and self-indulgent. Covenant doesn’t have any answers to the big questions, so it throws a whole mess of stuff in the way, to distract attention. What is ultimately missing is the beauty and power of simplicity. Nothing extraneous and nothing superfluous. A beautiful and perfect thing that will kill you. Wherefore art thou, Alien?

At the screening that I attended, as the houselights came up, and the Wagnerian triumph of Das Rheingold’s finale faded away, people filed out in slow motion, grim and downtrodden. It wasn’t much fun to be among them and again, I missed the zip of the earlier films that seemed much more humanistic in retrospect, possessed of humour and a more vivid brand of life and energy, even in death.

If there is one lesson to be drawn from Covenant, it is don’t mess with perfection. Or it will mess with you.  [Tyee]

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