Alien: Covenant, the latest in the Alien franchise and the link between Ridley Scott's 2012 prequel Prometheus and his original 1979 sci-fi horror that launched the series, hit theaters last Friday and took the number-one spot at the box office, earning an estimated $36 million.
Reviews, however, have been mixed—as they were with Scott's previous feature in the franchise. Alien: Covenant is already proving to be the most divisive blockbuster of the summer, with some critics embracing Scott's attention to world-building and others hoping for more of a return to the original film's horror basics. Here, two of Esquire.com's contributing film writers parse the good and the bad for a point-counterpoint review.
Nick Schager: Prequels, by and large, suck, and there were certainly some who thought that fact pertained to Ridley Scott's Prometheus, the director's first return to the Alien franchise he began in 1979 (and subsequently handed over to others). Yet for all its considerable missteps—including a steady stream of dumb character behavior, and a plot that unduly teased the arrival of the actual H.R. Giger-conceived xenomorph—I think the director's 2012 effort was a different, more ambitious species of prologue.
Rather than simply existing to explain backstory details that needed no explanation in the first place, Scott cast his new material as an origin story about not only the monster itself, but about mankind as well. Prometheus was an expansion that spoke directly to the series' fundamental fascination with pregnancy, birth and physical invasion/corruption/expulsion. It was a sci-fi thriller that doubled as a creation myth.
Alien: Covenant goes even further in that direction. Heeding complaints that Prometheus didn't deliver enough of the gruesome genre goods, Scott fashions his latest as a striking hybrid beast. It harkens back to the body-horror of his original Alien while retaining the loftier concerns raised by Prometheus—and, in fact, escalating them to biblical proportions. Moreover, it does so while simultaneously fulfilling its more prequel-y requirement to tie everything back to Alien, in that it elucidates exactly where the xenomorphs came from—and, more interestingly, why they came into being. I think the obligation to make everything directly connect to the 1979 original is only a pretext for Scott; I think he cares less about those specifics than he does about using his universe as a thrilling genre context for investigating Big Questions.
As such, I think his latest two entries in the saga form a tandem unrivaled in prequel history, because they build upon the franchise's core themes without sacrificing its trademark extraterrestrial terror. Far from cash-grab opportunities designed to cheaply exploit a popular property for endless profit, they constitute a sincere artistic attempt to grapple with bedrock issues of life and death, even as they provide a healthy serving of gorgeous, ominous outer-space nastiness. In short, they're the rare prequels to actually justify their own existence.
Corey Atad: There's a lot to grapple with in Alien: Covenant—most notably, the fact that of its existence. Nick, you reference the Ridley Scott's newfound interest in using the franchise to explore the nature and meaning of creation, but the only questions raised in my mind are about the creation of the films themselves. Watching Alien: Covenant, I kept going back to one thought: Who asked for this? It's not that there isn't a strange nobility in attempting to expand a franchise of horror films in space by exploring harder science-fiction ideas about humanity, religion, and the effects of technology on both. I see what Scott is after. To go back to the world of Alien after so long required something more than just some new horror sequences. Confronting God? Now that is a premise.
Where we depart isn't just on the Alien: Covenant's quality as a film—I'm sure we'll get to some of the specifics of the mess shortly—but on whether those high-minded explorations serve as ample justification for the film's existence. I wouldn't stoop to calling either Prometheus or Alien: Covenant cash-grabs. I think better of Ridley Scott than that, certainly. But the fact that these films have some high ambition doesn't negate that the ambition is largely misplaced, or at least misdirected. What does it add to the Alien franchise to be exploring the ideas Scott sets out to explore, and further, what does it say that the exploration is amateur at best?
From pompously quoting Shelley, to obvious references to Wagner, the supposedly big ideas the prequels have introduced operate as little more than signaling. "This is smart stuff," they scream. As though 1979's Alien wasn't already incredibly smart. As though it didn't have intelligent things to say about the relationship between corporate interests and the labor and public they exploit. As though its combination of body horror and psychosexual terror wasn't enough to chew on. As though the treatment of the android/human relationship wasn't expertly crafted for both dramatic effect and intellectual stimulation. So Alien: Covenant gives us more, and gives it to us bigger, on an operatic scale. How much do we really get out of that, though? And more crucially, what use is a grand operatic tone without a story to match?
Schager: I agree with you Corey, insofar as I think most sequels/prequels/spin-offs/etc. don't need to exist. In almost every instance, the justification for such follow-ups is monetary first, artistic second. To wit: one of the 2017 films I most love, John Wick: Chapter 2, primarily gives us more of the same, but grander. There is no reason to make it, other than to exploit a popular property for additional profit, as well as to allow filmmakers and audiences to spend more time in the company of heroes and villains who are entertaining, and have—along with their unique milieus—the capacity to be further developed in some way.
As someone who holds Alien in the highest regard, I feel this way about all of its subsequent chapters as well—including James Cameron's Aliens, which for all of its considerable merits, could also be deemed "unnecessary" from a narrative/thematic point of view. What I'm trying to get at is, the issue of what "justifies" a sequel has a lot to do with whether the sequel in question is doing something one values. I think we both agree that Scott is not simply rehashing; he's trying to go biblical with the film's core themes. Given that Fox was going to keep making sequels one way or another, and considering that I simply enjoy Scott's particular vision of this series' chilly, ominous atmosphere and underlying ideas, I'm fine with Alien: Covenant arriving to further build upon what's come before.
Now, where we clearly differ is in Scott's execution, and what we get out of this. I, for one, relished his unconventional have-it-both-ways approach. Scott pulls no punches in his set pieces involving his protagonists taking up arms against a variety of aliens, locating a sturdy middle ground between the mounting dread of his Alien and the more gung-ho mayhem of Cameron's Aliens. Alien: Covenant is punctuated by blitzkriegs of chaotic combat that are familiar, and yet satisfyingly jarring. Even when it takes a breather from such action, however, Scott's exquisite sense of scale—his characters routinely dwarfed by their imposing natural surroundings, and suffocated by darkness—maintains a constant sense of volatile unease, as if things could tip over into unholy ghastliness at any second. And then, he takes the film totally sideways (and toward Prometheus)in its second half, with the David-centric drama mutating it into something monstrous in an altogether different manner.
As for the Wagner and Shelley elements, I don't think that's just "signaling"—I think it's a legitimate attempt to cast the material as an old-world Frankensteinian creation myth. Is it grandiose? Yes. Does it sometimes tip things over into camp (in ways we can later discuss)? Yes. Does that often make the film over-the-top? Yes! I see Scott's high-minded striving for something epic as a plus. And as a middle chapter in a larger ongoing saga about evolution, I think it's a film that gives you the best of both worlds.
Atad: It seems to me the fundamental difference between us rests in execution. In my mind whether or not Scott's ambitions are justified comes down to how successfully he translates them to the screen, and nothing in Alien: Covenant convinces me that his ambitions have amounted to much more than furthering a "dead" franchise by adding to its mythology. In the past, I've been inclined to reward, or at least appreciate, ambition and put aside structural failures. But Alien: Covenant's failures go beyond the structural. There's a disconnect at its very heart between its ambitions to be a different kind of sci-fi film, and its subservience to the franchise it's prequelizing.
It's not just that it sets out to answer questions about Alien that never needed answering. That would be bad enough, but Scott's latest entry makes the mistake of thinking it can marry operatic camp with college-level intellectualism, and bind it all with creeping horror. The operatic camp is always more campy than operatic. The ideas barely register as more than something a stoned teenage might've thought up. And the creeping horror never creeps, and is rarely horrific.
Strangely, this is a Ridley Scott film that feels slapdash in a way even Prometheus was not. Where that film was genuinely beautiful to look at, and impressive in its visual scope, Alien: Covenant is a grim, muddy, often quick-cut affair. It's messy in its plotting, and messy in its visual scheme on top of that. The film favors action over horror at every opportunity, and its action is rarely coherent or exciting enough to make the trade worthwhile. There's exactly one good scene in Alien: Covenant, involving a xenomorph bursting from a man's back, which is quite terrifically horrifying, and its construction is fast, but scary. And still it features stupidity like two different characters slipping on a pool of blood. Still, it feels the need to cut so fast in moments so as to dull the effect of the creature's frightening appearance. I longed for 1979 Ridley Scott, or James Cameron at least. Hell, I'd have taken Fincher again.
I also don't buy that the body-horror present in that sequence is up to the level of what's come before in the series. Nevermind the chest-bursting in the original Alien. Even Prometheus featured a more disturbing scene of body-horror, when Noomi Rapace's character does surgery on herself to remove the alien. Meanwhile, the potentially interesting double-play between the two Fassbenders in the film fails to register, in part because of the poor writing of their shared scenes, as well as the twist it all leads to, which seemed a foregone conclusion the moment the characters first met. There's no drama in such obviousness, which only made the two-hour running time feel utterly interminable. I could not have been more glad when the end credits finally arrived.
Schager: The nocturnal siege sequence and the ship hangar-set climax are edited in far too choppy a manner—a prevailing modern style that I generally detest. But from its prologue, to its exploration of the mysterious planet, to its exteriors of David's home, I think Alien: Covenant boasts a visual grandeur that's equal to that of Prometheus. Furthermore, I think Scott's decision to only periodically present lucid views of his creatures is frustrating in the right way. As in Alien, it doesn't allow us to wholly focus on the entire beast at once, thereby creating (as with the albino xenomorph) a sense of confusion that compels our imaginations to fill in the blanks.
I derived considerably more pleasure from Alien: Covenant's alien-centric centerpieces than you did; I think the back-burster sequence is great, and I think the battle atop the ship between Katherine Waterston's protagonist and the xenomorph is also a new, adrenalized variation of a classic battle. Still, it's clear that Scott is ultimately less interested in the aliens than he is in David. They're merely tools, for David and for the filmmaker, who both view them as a means to greater, grander ends. I found that balance—between giving us a new breed of swift, vicious alien carnage, and simultaneously pushing the beasts further to the side—an ideal way to handle an iconic monster that's probably, at this point, too familiar to thoroughly terrify anyone other than franchise newbies.
As for the film's "college-level intellectualism," we'll just have to agree to disagree. To be sure, Scott's latest swan dives off the philosophical deep end to muck around in a primordial stew of Big Questions about creation. Yet I think it does so in ambitious, clever, well-developed ways. As in Alien, everything in Alien: Covenant is gorily sexualized. The action is awash in instances of birth that are brutal and fatal—tearing apart the "mother," as well as families/clans in general, as many on the Covenant are romantic couples. The director, however, uses those conception-ish events as microcosms of his larger creationist tapestry, which here concerns the inception, and evolution, of three different genus: human, alien, and synthetic. Scott blends various classical legends to posit an overarching vision of life in which progeny invariably kill/replace their parents in order to beget the future. Destroying the past and its gender and class status quos, progress is the force that rules the universe—it's a divine agent.
Moreover, it trades in those highfalutin concepts with more than enough good humor to prevent it from tipping over into pretentiousness. One can sense that in its love of horror-cinema terror and gore; in its inter-character banter; and in its chillingly unhinged Fassbender lead turns, which—besides culminating in a final note that I found ideal, regardless of whether it was predictable—are all the more enjoyable for being just a tad too exaggerated. The signature sequence between Fassbender's two androids is perfectly in sync with the movie's comingling of the serious, the sensational, and the sexualized. It's unnerving and outrageous in equal measure, which is how I feel about Alien: Covenant as a whole. It's a film that's bold enough to go big with its ideas, and yet canny enough to know that those notions are best when wrapped up in a slimy, sinister intergalactic package. I can't wait to see it again.
Atad: Unnerving and outrageous is probably the best I could have hoped for out of Alien: Covenant, but it didn't give me much that was unnerving, and to the extent that it was outrageous, it garnered little more than eye-rolls. That David-on-David scene you reference was on its face the most compelling of the series, but its ponderous conversation felt like outright explication of themes that were already well trod in Prometheus, and its euphemistic sexuality was more laughable for its bald intent than it ever was seriously outrageous. I imagine a film made outside the strictures of a Hollywood studio might've gone the full distance on that scene, leaving audiences reeling in a way Alien: Covenant is only ever comfortable winking at.
And maybe it's that winking I just couldn't get over. The whole film felt like a giant wink to me. See what I'm doing? *Wink* This is grandiose, but also a little silly. *Wink* It's exploring philosophy, but it all connects back to the franchise. *Wink* Don't you get it, they're all couples! *Wink*
At some point I needed the film to step back a moment from its ideas, and its mythologizing, and its obvious metaphors, in order to tell a good story. I never got that. Outside of the admittedly fascinating Davids, there's not a single compelling character in the film. Only a collection of tropes meant to demarcate a notion of story bound together by theme. But both the themes and story are flimsy at best, overloaded by a need to both go as big as possible, while still being stuck within the bounds of the film's own interest in extending itself and its franchise. That made for scattered viewing. Boring scene after boring scene, with the occasional story beat stuff in to make the plot move forward, but without any care for a sense of momentum, or engagement for that matter. I was thinking back on Katherine Waterston's character and performance, and about how there's nothing memorable about it other than a steady stream of tears and looks of bewilderment. She and I had the latter in common, so there's that.
