Yesterday, my brother Josh and I went to see the latest film in the Alien film franchise, Alien: Covenant. The first Alien (1979) movie is considered a modern-day classic of horror/science fiction filmmaking. It revolves around an Alien "Xenomorph" a creature created as a biological weapon that attacks anything it comes across, notably designed by the late Swiss artist of the surrealist tradition, H.R. Giger, and it has been successful enough to spawn an entire film franchise, spanning decades. The Alien series is noted as being "grown-up" sci-fi, frequently rated R, and containing a sizable amount of profanity and violence and other objectionable material, but balanced by genuinely serious themes and noble artistic intentions.
Going to see Alien movies has become a tradition of sorts for my brother and I, as we have gone together to see every one when first released to theaters, save for the original Alien and the first sequel Aliens (1986.) I am also not counting the two Alien vs. Predator films, which I count as a completely independent spin-off series.
Josh and I were both too young to see the first two movies in the Alien series when they were initially released in theaters, as they are both rated R movies, and neither of us was anywhere near close to age 18 when they premiered. It's a pity, as those first two films are widely regarded as the best in the series.
I decided to write about Alien: Covenant in my faith-based as opposed to my secular blog, because of the grand creation themes the film explores as a direct sequel to Prometheus (2012) The Alien movie-without-Alien in the title.
Speaking of Prometheus, it is impossible to talk about Covenant without referencing that previous film. Both movies, like the original Alien, are directed by Sir Ridley Scott. Scott did not write either film, but it is his vision that is the driving force of both. It is Scott that attempts to answer the age-old questions, via film, of where human beings came from, who created us, and why.
As a Catholic Christian, I have the benefit of knowledge from my religious tradition that human beings were created by God to know Him, love Him, to serve Him in this world, and to be with Him in Heaven after death.
Scott is writing with a wide, mainstream, secular ticket-buying audience in mind. He assumes that the average Jane or Joe is not going to be satisfied with any theological answer to man's questions of existence. And, to be fair, since the Alien series is a work of fiction, Scott is free to explain human origins in whatever way he sees fit.
We find out in Prometheus than human beings were created by an ancient, pale, hairless, gigantic, bi-pedal race of very similar-looking creatures to humans. These "Engineers," as they are dubbed, seeded the ancient planet earth by tasking a member of their race to perform a ritual suicide on a barren earth, eons before any life inhabited the planet. The disintegrating body of the suicidal Engineer, destroyed after ingesting mysterious black goo (that achieves further importance later on in the movie) put the building blocks of DNA into the world's oceans and thus, enabled life to evolve on earth.
Who created the Engineers? It's never explained by the movie. In any case, at one point in Prometheus, David, an advanced robot created by humans, asks one of his human crew mates, Dr. Charlie Holloway, on the spacecraft Prometheus why humans created him. He is casually and callously told "Because we could." David takes exception to this explanation, replying that if humans could hear the same explanation from their creator, they might take exception as well.
Later on towards the end of Prometheus, Peter Weyland, the founder of the Weyland Corporation (forerunner of the infamous Weyland-Yutani company of the previous films of the series) does in fact have the chance, via David, to ask a surviving engineer on a faraway planet why humans were created. Instead, he wants to ask the Engineer how to prevent his death from extreme old age. It is up to Elizabeth Shaw, the main protagonist of the film, to ask the question of where the Engineers (evidently indisputably humanity's creators at this point) came from and what humans did wrong to deserve extinction (which apparently is the Engineer's plan for the human race.) We never do get a clear answer from the Engineer, who unceremoniously decapitates David, and uses his severed robot head to kill Weyland. It could be that this act of violence is the Engineer's way of dismissing creatures (and their questions) that it deems beneath it? Similar to Holloway's previous disregard of David, when answering a similar important question to his "creation"?
Prometheus ends with David and Shaw commandeering an abandoned Engineer spacecraft to explore the Engineer's home planet. We are left with a cliffhanger ending, wondering what the adventures of Shaw and David will be like as they travel to the Engineer's home world, seeking further answers to their questions of creation. In an aftermath sequence, we see the appearance of what looks to be an ancestor of the Alien "Xenomorph" creature, birthed from the belly of the Engineer (who was impregnated by a parasitic creature, that had been birthed from Shaw earlier, who had been implanted with an 'alien' fetus by Holloway, who himself had been infected by the black goo by David (got all that?)
Fast-forward to the main subject of this post, Alien: Covenant. This movie, though directed by Scott, is written by a different pair of writers than the two that wrote Prometheus, and it shows. Covenant is set ten years after the events of Prometheus. Shaw and David are long-presumed lost and disappeared, along with the rest of the Prometheus passengers and crew. Covenant begins on the spaceship Covenant, a colonization vessel from earth that is inadvertently diverted by the fall-out from catastrophic solar flares to, you guested it, the Engineer's home planet, that same planet where Shaw and David were last seen headed to in Prometheus.
We never do get an answer as to who created the Engineers in Covenant. What we do get is a glimpse at a burgeoning sociopath in the form of David in this movie. It is shown in flashback that upon arrival on the Engineer's home world, David intentionally unleashes his ship's deadly cargo of bombs filled with the black goo, which, in this instance, is dropped on the unsuspecting Engineer population of an entire city, killing everything in its wake.
David, over the next ten years, becomes obsessed with using the black goo to create and perfect new lifeforms himself. At some point, he kills his (mutated?) companion Shaw, dissecting her in the name of his creation experiments. David ingratiates himself to the crew of the newly-arrived Covenant, lying about his actions and motives along the way. The black goo released by David ten years ago has since mutated to an airborne form, bonding with a Protozoa-like vegetation and sending its spores into two of the Covenant crew. We get out of these infected crew a Xenomorph-like creature, dubbed by the script a "Neomorph" which resembles the Xenomorphs from the previous films in superficial ways. Later on we discover that David has created an egg-like structure similar to the eggs of Xenomorphs found in the previous Alien movies; a "face hugger" creature infects the acting Captain of the Covenant, which later bursts from his chest, skipping the "Chest-burster" phase and going straight to an adult-like Xenomorph form.
So it appears that Ridley Scott was not interested in exploring Elizabeth Shaw's interesting protagonist from Prometheus, unceremoniously killing her off here, making us wonder what the purpose of her survival was in the first place from the first movie? No, the character that Scott is much more interested in is David. But, instead of exploring the origin of humanity by way of exploring the origin of humanity's creators, this new movie seemed more focused on exploring David's compulsion to both create (and destroy.)
Scott doesn't seem to be all that concerned when it comes to inconsistencies over various Alien movies, including the ones he directed himself. I left the theater with various questions, such as:
-In the original 1979 Alien movie, a crashed Engineer ship, on remote planet LV-426, along with what was known in fan circles as the "Space Jockey" pilot (what we now know is an Engineer) is found by the crew of spacecraft Nostromo. A crew member, Kane, is infected by a "face hugger" alien, that is birthed from an egg in a cargo hold of the Engineer's ship. These eggs look remarkably similar to the ones that David engineers in Covenant. So, does David have something to do with this crashed ship? Did the Engineers create Xenomorph eggs similar to David's? Why do the Xenomorphs birthed from hosts in Alien go through a separate "Chestburster" worm-like stage, absent from Covenant?
I was similarly let-down with the question of what faith has to do with Alien: Covenant. The acting captain of the ship, Billy Crudup's character Christopher Oram, is described in various film-related media as a "man of faith" who thinks the crew's role on the Covenant is "an act of destiny." I am never sure what wisdom tradition Oram belongs to, and I never get a sense of what the point of having him be a "man of faith" is supposed to be in the film, unless it has something to do with his faith being futile when opposed by the primal, raw, organic, energetic force of the Xenomorph created by (humanity's creation) David?
The "big questions" of the movie not being satisfactorily answered aside, Alien: Covenant is satisfying in other ways.
Covenant is in the tradition of other Alien franchise movies in that it straddles the line between horror and science fiction, not to mention fantasy (albeit dark fantasy.) You know what you're getting into seeing an Alien movie, and you're seeing a portrait of the world, of the future, that is not so nice. "Dark" is how my brother described Covenant, and it's an apt description. The science of the film may not be ultra-realistic, but this movie follows the pattern of other films in the series that have gone before, where a suspension of disbelief is required.
Ridley Scott is at his best when creating worlds, in creating atmosphere, in employing expert wardrobe, set, and overall production design. I love the fact that Covenant borrows music cues from the original Alien in its score, in addition to Prometheus, where appropriate. I love the scares in Covenant-I haven't really been jolted out of my seat in an Alien film, until this film-the Xenomorphs are genuinely frightening, and near-invincible in this film. I dig the subtle nods to the title design of Scott's previous Alien movies in the opening credits. I appreciate that David the robot share's the same first name with Alien film producer David Giler, just as Walter, David's "opposite" robot (both played by Michael Fassbinder) shares the first name with longtime series producer Walter Hill.
It will be interesting to see where the series goes from here, as there is another cliffhanger ending. We need to know how Covenant connects to the original Alien, and we have about a thirty-year time gap between movies, so there's room for one or more films to fill in the gaps. Looking forward to it!
