Alien convent
The awakened crew are shaken, demoralized and still far from their destination, so when they hear a distress signal coming from a nearby planet that seems habitable, they decide to take a leap of faith and head there rather than go back into hypersleep and risk death again. And they all live happily ever after in a land of rainbows and unicorns. Just kidding! They end up trapped on a rainy planet filled with creatures that want to eat or impregnate them.
They’re momentarily rescued by David (Fassbender again), who settled there after the bloody climax of the first film and now has long hair, a Jedi robe with hood, and a sullen and grandiose demeanor. He lives in the ruins of an ancient city originally colonized by the Engineers from “Prometheus.” Daniels, who is determined to realize her late husband’s dream of building a cabin by the edge of a lake, went along with Oram’s plan to detour to this new world, but now feels trapped and hopeless. So do the other colonists, some of whom have ingested spores that will gestate into xenomorphs.
If this sounds a bit like a variation on the plot of every “Alien” film ever, that’s because it is. The series’ repetitive structure is a feature, not a bug, as in the James Bond, "Star Wars" and Marvel franchises. If you don’t like them, you can complain that they recycle the same images and situations. But if you like them, you can compare them to sonatas or sonnets or three-chord pop songs, where part of the fun lies in seeing what variations the artists can bring while satisfying a rigid structure. The ritualized beats of the “Alien” movies offer many such scenarios, including initial landing on the dark planet, the first alien attack, the realization that a character that you thought was part of the team is actually treacherous, the escape from the complex that’s about to be wiped out, and the second ending that happens when you thought the story was over.
This one has a lot of nifty variations, most revolving around Fassbender’s dual performance. The film starts with a flashback prologue showing the android David in conversation with his creator, technology magnate Peter Weyland who acted the role in old age makeup in “Prometheus”). Alert viewers will realize that the movie wouldn’t start with a flashback to David’s creation unless it intended to bring him back in later. His entrance is delayed (perhaps too long, though your mileage will vary), but once he’s in the story, saving the wrecked colonists from an unrelenting, expertly choreographed attack by xenomorphs in a field of tall grass, Fassbender gets numerous chances to act against himself, via digital compositing so subtle that we forget we’re seeing effects.
CAST
The necropolis is where David devises new life forms and tantalizes Walter by insinuating that he’s missing out by failing to evolve, as David has been able to do. He’s a Frankenstein’s monster who has, over time, become a version of Dr.
Alien - Covenant
Director - Ridley Scott
Cast - Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Danny McBride, Billy Crudup, Demian Bichir
Rating - 3/5
Frankenstein (in effect becoming his own “father,” Weyland). His dubious achievements include delusions of godhood. But there’s ultimately more of Shakepeare’s exiled sorcerer Prospero in the character, as well as echoes of Caliban, the hideous and jealous son who, like David, is obsessed with impregnating the humans he despises so much. (In Shakespeare’s play, Caliban declares, “Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else/this isle with Calibans.”)
I Ioved this movie so much that its flaws—which include a cannon fodder sameness in the minor characters and a failure to develop the religious dimension laid out early in the script, except as it relates to science—barely registered. “Covenant” has its own personality and rhythm, a remarkable achievement considering how many “Alien” films have been made over almost four decades. And it touches on so many of the recurring obsessions in Scott’s long career (he turns 80 next year) that it feels like a summation of everything he’s about. The macho Ridley Scott, the unexpectedly tender Scott, and the maker of Biblical epics, conspiracy thrillers, fables, and eye-candy advertisements, are all represented here.
How could an alien race – which, for the sake of this argument, we must assume is far more advanced than ours – be even slightly interested in colonising us? How could a people whose understanding of life – in addition, of course, to the magical technology that has allowed them to travel to our remote corner of the universe, perhaps even through time – even consider ‘ruling’ us, the petty, violent blobs of insignificance that we are?
To wipe us out – every tiny sign of our brief, inconsequential existence on this little blue dot – our past, present, and future (remember, these aliens don’t look at time in a linear manner like us savages), would probably take them a week. And it would require roughly the same level of mental (and physical) effort as you squeezing sanitizer onto your hands. So the only realistic situation in which these… Aliens… would even bother to waste a reflex glance in our direction would be if Trump accidentally lobs a nuke at Texas. Or if, like Douglas Adams wrote, Earth was getting in the way of a massive intergalactic highway, and building a bypass was too much of an inconvenience.
Alien: Covenant does the only logical thing: It makes us, the delusional schoolyard bullies that we are, still thinking we’re the centre of the universe, the aggressors. It makes us the colonisers. Like the pilgrims who crossed the Atlantic to populate/desecrate the New World, the humans at the centre of Alien: Covenant travel in a spaceship with the intention of colonising a distant planet.
En route to the planet, which they’ve named Origae 6 – which suggests that five Origaes have previously come and gone – they receive a distress signal that sounds an awful lot like John Denver’s Take me Home, Country Roads. Against the protests of Daniels (the Sigourney Weaver surrogate played here by Katherine Waterston), the crew heads out in search of the mysterious source.
Obviously, things don’t quite pan out as pleasantly as they’d expected.
History, and the movies, haven’t been particularly kind to colonisers – except, in a classic American move, Christopher Columbus, who was, by most accounts, a rather evil man. And nature finds a way of punishing the Covenant’s crew.
Alien: Covenant is a quasi-prequel to Ridley Scott’s classic 1979 creature feature Alien, and a quasi-sequel to Prometheus, a film I still maintain, five years after its release, is an unfairly slapped around gem. It is a movie that, in a turn of events that was so shocking to the mainstream audience that so savagely dismissed it, valued substance over style, ideas over resolution. Because Scott has a uniquely understated approach to filmmaking that makes even his grandest films seem like intimate dramas. He does that by grounding these dense, philosophical ideas with stories about regular characters experiencing regular, unremarkable, but identifiable emotions. The large-scale, lavish visuals are there to compliment the story, and not as a distraction from the lack of it.
However, being a sequel to Prometheus definitely hurts Covenant. For one, I’d assume it would be nearly impossible to follow the plot without having already (and relatively recently) seen Prometheus. In fact, much of the story’s central thrust hinges on how well you remember David, that idiosyncratic android played so wonderfully by Michael Fassbender in the previous movie. But the larger problem is this: When films try to retroactively course-correct a franchise, abandoning established ideas and tones, you’re left with a movie that feels neither here nor there (Batman - ahem - V Superman).
The crew at the centre of Alien: Covenant, of which only two or three members resemble real characters (the rest are simply lumps of meat for the Alien to chew), is far too large, perhaps a conscious decision since they seem to die at an alarmingly rapid rate.
But watching them die, the terror of the buildup, and the release of the gore, that is when the film works – and not when it is posing, and failing to answer the biggest questions of them all: Who are we and why are we here... And this is unfortunate, since we so often complain that movies nowadays are designed in boardrooms by ruthless corporations with third-quarter targets.
Here’s Alien: Covenant, a film brave enough to have one Michael Fassbender driod kiss another full on the lips, opening up a world of philosophical debate, but we sit there impatiently wondering if the Alien only eats humans.
I rarely, i mean, it's the first time I read a novelization of a movie. Book that was the base of a movie? yeah, novel based on a movie? nope. Why i did so for Alien Covenant? first, I'm a fan of the alien franchise, second the movie left me with a lot of questions and i was curious to know if there's answers here. In the end the novel is based on the first drafts of the script so one must take its events with a grain of salt. Only Ridley Scott knows everything and maybe even he doesn't know all
If you don't know already, Alan Dean Foster is perhaps our greatest movie novelizer. He's a great writer in his own right, but from A New Hope to countless others, Foster finds a way to bring the best of the movie onto the page, time and time again.
This one is no exception. He doesn't stray that far from the movie, but he brings the best. Great action sequences, great dynamic between Walter and David.
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