Three stars. Rated R, for violence, gore, profanity, nudity and sexuality
By Derrick Bang
In space, no one can escape being
surrounded by idiots.
The Alien franchise, just shy of four decades old, continues to crank
merrily along, of late shepherded by founding director Ridley Scott. To some
degree that’s a good thing, because his films always are handsomely mounted,
crisply paced and graced with compelling ensemble casts.
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| Once it becomes obvious that something nasty is prowling on board their massive colony ship, Daniels (Katherine Waterston) and her synthetic companion Walter (Michael Fassbender) consider their options. |
They’re also usually a great deal
smarter than this newest installment.
Alien: Covenant suffers from the same
bone-stupid plotting that made the recently released Life — a rather blatant Alien
rip-off in its own right — such an infuriating experience. Nobody has a lick of
sense, the various characters utterly ignoring chain of command and basic
safety protocols, while bickering and squabbling like school kids. As I’ve
noted in the past, if these numbskulls represent Humanity’s Finest, then we deserve to be massacred by outer space
nasties.
This aggravating film’s script
comes courtesy of Jack Paglen, Michael Green, John Logan and Dante Harper, who
sacrifice plot logic on the altar of routine gore effects. You’ll find little
genuine suspense here; all the alien attacks — whether by the now-familiar
ovomorphs, facehuggers, chestbursters or adult xenomorphs — are telegraphed by
maddeningly unhurried reveal shots.
Most of these encounters are
by-the-book horror flick stuff: Somebody hears something, s-l-o-w-l-y turns
around — or peers at something — and whammo!
More blood on the screen.
This film offers neither the
shock of the opening installment, nor the full-throttle energy of James
Cameron’s immediate follow-up, 1986’s Aliens.
Most subsequent films were
disappointments of one sort or another, until Scott re-ignited the franchise
with 2012’s Prometheus. As a prequel
to everything that had come before, the Jon Spaihts/Damon Lindelof script
established an intriguing back story that explored the creation of the
xenomorphs, the origins of mankind, and the space-faring race of giant
“Engineers” who apparently seeded life throughout galaxies. Very high-falutin’
God stuff.
This new film takes place 10
years later — still roughly 20 years prior to the events in Alien (for those who pay attention to
such things) — as the deep-space Earth colony ship Covenant makes its way to
the distant planet Origae-6. The crew and 2,000 colonists are deep in
hyper-sleep, the ship monitored solely by a synthetic android named Walter
(Michael Fassbender) and an onboard computer dubbed Mother (voiced by Lorelei
King, sounding very much like Sigourney Weaver). Once the journey is complete,
the settlers hope to establish a new human outpost.
