Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A colonist ship follows a distress call to a nearby planet where a mysterious entity awaits them.
About: Alien Covenant is the… 6th film in the franchise? 7th? Ahh, who’s counting anymore. The film opened this weekend at #1 at the box office with 36 million alien bucks. It was scripted by “All You Need is Kill” writer Dante Harper and the man responsible for writing all the recent James Bond films, John Logan. Ridley Scott is back with the bullhorn. And Michael Fassbender has returned in clone-form, as he’s playing two parts in the film.
Writers: Dante Harper and John Logan (story by Jack Paglen and Michael Green)
I have a soft spot for the Alien franchise.
Aliens was one of those experiences that shaped my love of movies. And when something is wedged that deeply into your nostalgic subconscious, anything else you throw at me in the same universe I’m going to see it. And that, in a nutshell, is why the movie business is so successful. Once they get you on something, they can market that something to you for the rest of your life.
But the sad truth is, the Alien franchise has been terrible since Aliens. I don’t care what anybody says – Fincher’s Alien 3 was an embarrassment. Then there was that “Am I really seeing what I’m seeing??” Winona Ryder Alien 4 catastrophe. From there, they went from “We don’t know what we’re doing” to “We’ve officially given up,” dropping that Aliens vs. Predator abomination on us. It got ugly, folks. It got real ugly.
Then Ridley Scott returned to the franchise and, finally, it seemed like chest-bursting might be cool again. Indeed, Prometheus brought a lot of fun back to Alien. But it still came nowhere close to the quality of the first and second films. Then came a confusing array of events that, at one point, had District 9 director Neil Blomkamp helming a parallel Alien se-prequel that went back to Alien’s roots (bringing back the series’ star – Ripley) while Ridley Scott, who couldn’t care less about Alien for 40 years all of a sudden wanted to make four more Alien films.
WTF?
If there ever was a moment that symbolized the clumsy architecture of this franchise, that would be it. So it shouldn’t be surprising that Alien Covenant is just that – clumsy. What starts off as a pretty awesome flick turns into… well… I don’t even know what. But knowing screenwriting like I do, I’d distill it down to “writers who ran out of ideas.”
And look, I’m not ignorant here. I understand the studio priority ladder. It’s so hard to match up a director’s schedule with a star’s schedule with a studio’s schedule. So when those three worlds match? You pull the trigger no matter what state the script is in. You have to. Because if you don’t, the movie never gets made at all. And what good is a script if it never gets made into a movie?
It’s then up to big-name screenwriters to accomplish the impossible – construct a great original screenplay in the amount of time it usually takes you to finish an outline. Despite being hired to fail, these writers go into these projects with the best of intentions – hoping to pull off a miracle. Sadly, they rarely do. Which is why we get so many movies like Alien: Covenant.
For those of you who have no intention of seeing the film (and you shouldn’t) the plot starts out pretty basic. A colony ship 7 years from their destination receives a mysterious transmission from a nearby solar system and decide to go inspect it, partly because this planet never appeared on their colony research and they figure, hey, maybe we can cut 7 years off our journey and colonize this planet instead!
Once on the planet, they go looking for the signal location, and a couple of colonists sniff up alien dust. Within minutes, these colonists are sick, and when our infamous aliens burst out of their bodies, a mad scramble ensues on the landing ship, resulting in a catastrophic accident that blows the ship up.
Up until this point, I was onboard. But then things get weird. Like, really weird. While getting attacked by other aliens, a… a jedi [????] shows up, scares off the aliens somehow, and tells the colonists to follow him. Mysterious Jedi Dude (I call him this because he was wearing Obi-Wan Kenobi’s robe for some reason) brings us back to some giant spooky circle town that’s been long since abandoned, and when he takes off his hood, we realize it’s David, the psychopath robot from Prometheus.
Meanwhile, the colonists have their own robot, Walter, who’s an upgraded version of David. Walter immediately senses that David has gone off the deep end, but is still intrigued by him, to the tune of the two sharing a couple of sex scenes together. I’m not kidding. I mean, they don’t have sex, but they basically have sex. It’s too weird to explain and too dumb to recap so you’ll have to seek it out yourself to get the full dumbass experience.
Eventually we learn that David’s been breeding alien embryos and is excited to have some new humans to experiment on. So the killing begins, and this is where things get stupider and stupider, culminating in one of the oddest action scenes I’ve ever witnessed, where a woman who’s had three lines up until this point becomes the movie’s main action star, willingly jumping out on the side of an out-of-control ship to try and kill an alien.
There’s more – a sort of extra final act – but I’m not sure why they included it, since everybody already knew what was going to happen. It’s bad writing on about every level.
So let’s talk about how this movie fell apart, because I’m fascinated by how these things happen. For starters, there was no main character. While I’ve discussed the no-win situation you place yourself in when you don’t build your story around a hero, it’s not a script killer. In fact, the very first Alien didn’t have a main character either! Ripley didn’t emerge as the “hero” until the very end of that film.
But there’s a reason why that worked and this didn’t. The first film was CONTAINED. So it kept our focus laser tight on the situation at hand. The tight nature of that story allowed for a more fluid situation to emerge with the characters.
Alien Covenant was the opposite. It was all over the place. It was part contained horror, part ‘group explores a planet,’ part mystery, part philosophical drama. The film was trying to be so many things that messiness was already embedded into its DNA. Trying to pack more messy (identifying our main character on page 100) onto already messy made things feel, well, too messy.
To Alien Covenant’s credit, it was attempting to be more than your average summer blockbuster. It posed big questions about God and creation and why are we here. You have to give the writers credit for not throwing another by-the-numbers popcorn flick at us. But you only want to pose big questions if you have the time it requires to come up with answers. If you try to answer the biggest questions humanity has ever asked with 2 weeks left before production starts, you probably aren’t going to come up with satisfying answers.
At some point, the writers realized the answers weren’t coming, gave up, and started using screenwriter shock-tactic tricks (robots giving each other blowjobs) to deviate your focus from the fact that nothing in the story made sense.
One of the easiest ways to tell that a writer has run out of time (or doesn’t care) is when characters start acting illogically. Why would the Captain (Billy Crudup) willingly follow a robot that he knows is systematically killing his crew into a room full of gestating alien eggs? “Take a closer look,” David says as the Captain checks on an egg. “You can trust me.” And the Captain then takes a closer look. That really happens.
And there isn’t just one of these instances. They happen again and again.
The only reason I’m not giving this film a “What the hell did I just watch?” is because I loved the first 30 minutes. Otherwise, this movie is awful. Pulling in 36 million is 20% less than what Prometheus opened at. So I’m hoping that’s it for this franchise. And yet, like the aliens in the movie, these franchises never seem to die. They had the audacity, the other day, to announce another Terminator film after Terminator: Genisys.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You have to be willing to move off your original idea if it’s not working. I get the feeling that Scott went into this wanting to create a philosophical science-fiction piece that was bigger than aliens chasing people down corridors. That’s a noble pursuit. But good writers know that stories are living breathing things. Sometimes what you thought would work ends up not working at all, and a direction you’d never considered all of a sudden makes the story a lot better. Be malleable as a writer. In the end, it’s about finding the best story, even if that’s not the story you set out to write.
