A Solid, Suspenseful Thriller with Spaceships. And Wagner.

Alien: Covenant
A more nerdy than read-y movie review
by Michael Isenberg

I went to see Alien: Covenant because I wanted answers, dammit. Answers to all those lingering questions from 2012’s Prometheus, which I hoped Covenant, its sequel, would address. Why did the Engineers turn on humankind? Why did David the Android put something in Charlie’s drink that caused him to impregnate Elizabeth with alien spawn? And what happened to David and Elizabeth after they flew off to find the Engineers’ home planet at the end of the film?

Covenant did answer two of my three questions. Maybe all three—one answer might have flown by too fast. However, the answers probably take up less than three minutes of this two hour movie, mostly in the form of exposition. They just aren’t what Covenant is about.

What it is about is a new adventure, the story of the crew of the ship Covenant, en route to a distant planet with a cargo of some two thousand colonists in stasis, a bunch of frozen embryos, and a small crew recently awakened to deal with a mechanical crisis which killed Captain Branson. As they make their repairs, they pick up a scratchy transmission of a human being singing John Denver’s “Take me Home, Country Roads.” They trace its origin to a previously unknown planet that’s every bit as ripe for settlement as their destination, but years closer. And so Branson’s successor, Oram, opts for a detour. Since he does so over the objections of Branson’s widow, Daniels, it’s clear this isn’t going to end well. This is the Alien franchise, after all—Ripley, Shaw—you ignore the tough-as-nails hottie with the short hair at your own risk.

What follows is a taut, suspenseful thriller with a couple of neat twists that kept me riveted. Yeah, I know, that's a bunch of cliches. But cliches become cliches because sometimes they're right on the money, and that's definitely the case here.

Convenant flows well, with just the right amount of breathing space amidst the violence, and just the right amount of gorgeous cinematography of spaceships. On that last point, director Ridley Scott successfully found the middle ground between the excessively long, wet, sloppy space kisses that made 2001 and Star Trek: the Motion Picture so boring, and the frantic pace of today’s movies, Guardians of the Galaxy for example, that don't give you an interstellar hardware fix at all.

Suspense, spaceships, and a wonderful clip from Wagner’s Das Rheingold were enough to keep me entertained for two hours, which is a good thing because that’s all this movie really has going for it.

The attempts to give depth to the characters fall flat. I don’t know Branson and Daniels well enough to feel her grief at his loss. And, yeah, the crew doesn’t really trust Oram, so I feel a little bad for him, but not much because he’s not all that great a leader. I thought the problem was that he came across as uncertain and he didn't listen to the people who worked for him, but in his mind, the problem was that men of faith such as himself are not trusted in the year 2104. I don't know where he got that idea. I can't recall any other mentions that that was a thing in this universe. It wasn’t a problem for Elizabeth in Prometheus to be a woman of faith. And there’s another crew member of the Covenant who goes around openly wearing a Star of David around her neck, but her crew mates didn't seem to think any less of her. I wasn’t sure who she was. Aside from Daniels, Oram, the android David, the other android Walter, and the pilot Tennessee, I wasn’t sure who anybody was. But some of them were so stupid they made me want to scream, “You’re highly-trained astronauts, God damn it. Don’t you have f--king procedures regarding the safe handling of alien plant life?!” But in any case, the whole business of faith is not discussed any further, other than a throwaway line later in the flick.

And speaking of discussing stuff, the dialog does not sparkle. The only memorable lines were written, not by the six men who got writing credits, but rather by John Milton and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as quoted by David.

It seemed to me that the movie covers the tropes that made the Alien franchise famous pretty well: People wearing meaningful objects around their necks. Lots of gooey bodily fluids. Fights in claustrophobic quarters. However, it's apparently not enough for hardcore fans. My friend Derek Power, who wrote the screenplays for The Relationship Triptych, tells me they feel Covenant is too Prometheus-y and not enough Alien-y. Of course, he cautions, "If you try to please everybody, you end up pleasing nobody."

As for the most famous trope of all, alien babies popping out of peoples' stomachs, they got that too, but every time it happens, a song runs through my head: "Hello, m'baby. Hello, m'honey. Hello, m'ragtime gal." Thanks, Spaceballs.

So by all means, go see Alien:Covenant. You'll get a solid, suspenseful thriller with spaceships. And Wagner. Just don’t expect more than that.

Michael Isenberg is editor in chief of Nerds who Read and author of Full Asylum, a solid, suspenseful thriller without spaceships. And it's a comedy. Available at Amazon.com.

Photo credit: IMDB