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I fully admit that I feel a tremendous amount of nostalgia towards the Alien franchise, and even a moderately successful entry in the franchise gets outsized love for me. What can I say? I grew up with Ellen Ripley as my de facto action hero(ine) that gave me a thrill and power. You can keep your Indiana Jones and James Bond, give me Sigourney Weaver throwing down with acid-blood monstrosities throughout the galaxy.
Hell, just the other night I went out to an arcade, played an Alien game, and announced that I was about to "live my Ellen Ripley fantasy.” I may have also screamed out some quotes while shooting down hordes of xenomorphs, eggs, and face-huggers. All of this is to say, I fully admit that Alien: Covenant is a flawed film, but it’s a competently made Alien movie and that’s good enough for me.
The chief problem is that the cast is too expansive with too little attention or time spent fleshing a large portion of them out. They merely exist to get mowed down by hungry proto-xenomorphs or work as living incubators for said creatures to pop out of. What made the first two entries in the franchise so memorable and beloved was how it managed to give its cast a series of distinct, colorful personalities that brought a lot of acknowledged history to the material. Covenant misses that mark, and has more in common in with the equally flawed third and fourth entries in the franchise.
As populated as it is by great actors, far too many of them are given the short end of the stick when it comes to material to play. Amy Seimetz, Carmen Ejogo, and Demián Bichir immediately spring to mind. Nothing against Katherine Waterston, a very fine actress and making the best of a fairly homogenous role, but I wonder what Seimetz or Ejogo would have brought to the part.
Even worse is how the themes of belief and heavy-handed religious symbolism feels fairly hollow given how little time and care is paid into deeply investigating it all. It all sparks into something glorious, and frankly terrifying, when Michael Fassbender’s David introduces us to his pseudo-laboratory filled with medical curiosities and flayed open cadavers. It is here that Covenant’s looming demonic symbolism blooms the fullest as David is revealed as a better satanic figure than Satan himself. After all, the devil is merely a necessary pawn in the cosmic balance of things, whereas David is willfully destructive, chaotic, and amoral in his dreams of usurping humanity with his army of bioengineered super-predators.
It’s not that we root for David, it’s that David is the most fully-realized character on display. He becomes a charismatic figure for a variety of reasons, chiefly his ability to pull us into his orbit then horrify or threaten us. He’s a logic progression of the creation in Frankenstein. Where that creature merely wanted to be understood and loved, David seeks to remake his makers and the rest of the world in his own twisted image. He’s the type of fascinating and complex villain that so many major blockbusters could use more of.
Of course, there’s the continually presence of the xenomorphs primal horrors as being bathed in viscera, fluids, and the degradation of the human body into a mere meat sack. Several of the scares are telegraphed, but quite a few manage to land with a horrific and ecstatic plop. A scene where one crew member births an albino infant proto-xenomorph out of his spine is terrifying and squirm-inducing, same goes for his comrade that vomits one up in what looks like amniotic fluid.
Covenant never quite reaches the nihilistic terrors of the first Alien film, but it outdoes Prometheus in being a successful entry in the ever-flowing franchise. It’s a competently made and produced franchise entry, it doesn’t add enough that’s new, but it does deepen and expand upon the character of David. In the end, David may end up being the twin pole to Ellen Ripley, the chaotic evil to her heroic destruction of the toxic patriarchy and single-handed flip of the gender expectation in science-fiction. I look forward to where they’re taking him in the next installment.
