Random Thoughts – Randocity!

*SPOILER ALERT* stop reading now if you want to watch this film.

If you haven’t seen Prometheus, then you should probably skip this review. Also, if you want to see Alien Covenant, then I’d suggest you stop reading now as this will be chock full of spoilers. With that said, let’s explore.

Alien Covenant Story

This film begins as a sequel to Prometheus, basically where that film left off. However, it effectively tosses the Elizabeth Shaw character out before the film even begins. While we have seen this happen with the Newt character between Aliens and Alien 3, we’ve never seen it done to a main character. No, Newt wasn’t a main character. She was a supporting character and her loss was no big deal. However, I find it a huge problem to open this film and toss out the one redeeming character from Prometheus. A character that could have been as strong as Ripley. Instead, we’re left with a malfunctioning synth named David. I jump ahead a little bit here.

After a longish and unnecessary expository scene involving a very young Weyland and David, we proceed into the main film.

Colony Ship Covenant

The film starts out following a colonization vessel named Covenant with both crew, colonists in stasis and embryos. The mission is to land on an already vetted planet with a forgettable name to begin colonization. It will take about 7 years to get to that destination planet. However, the ship is rocked by a space anomaly and damaged along with the death of the captain. This ship damage premise actually starts out much like Passengers. This requires the newly assigned captain and crew to go out and fix the damage. While fixing the damage, one of the crew stumbles across a message in a bottle… or more specifically, a space transmission.

So now, the crew has decide whether to follow the transmission or continue on with the mission. Here is the first of many stupid plot devices. If your mission is to land safely on an already existing planet that’s been vetted for the purposes of colonization, why would you make a diversion to some unknown and potentially hostile planet? It doesn’t make any sense. In Alien, the reason the Nostromo landed was in part due to Mother and Ash. They had orders from Weyland to find this alien and capture it. However, the colony ship had no such orders from Mother or Walter (the resident synthetic — artificial person).

Plus, that colony ship wasn’t equipped for that sort of reconnaissance type mission in the first place. Yet, here we go traipsing into the unknown because the naive new captain deems it so even though his second actively protests. Wouldn’t they have at least trained all seconds in command for these sorts of contingencies?

We also find that there is a synthetic on board this colony ship who is named Walter and looks surprisingly like David from Prometheus, except he doesn’t have the British accent.

Planetary Diversion / Alien Backstory

So the colony ship, which was clearly not built for exploration, decides to spend time gallivanting off to this unknown world to find this message in a bottle. What do they find? Spores that turn people into xenomorphs, the Engineer ship (with Shaw’s message), a bunch of dead engineers on the planet surface and, eventually, David. We also come to find that Elizabeth Shaw is dead. We also find that David apparently chest bursted her in one of his experiments.

As the story progresses, we find there are spore plants that can infect people and back burst aliens out of them. We also find that David has unnecessarily re-engineered the species to require an egg and a face hugger. The same egg and face hugger we find in Alien. So, we’ve come full circle. Now we know who created the egg and face hugger, but what was the point?

The spores which seemed quite abundant on the engineer home planet were actually a much more sophisticated and deadly delivery system. No need for alien queens or eggs or even face huggers. Instead, just drop the spores and let them do the work. What we find is that David’s work was actually superfluous. The original design by the engineers was sufficiently deadly enough and easily delivered without the need to complicate it with eggs and queens and hives and stuff.

I’m not exactly sure why Ridley felt the need to degrade the original Alien story by setting up this crude prequel that degrades the idea. Worse, it really doesn’t even get into the head of David sufficiently to understand his motivations. All we know is that this synthetic is somehow damaged, yet still able to function. I guess that’s the point. Since the original Alien didn’t get to take Ash to a more disturbing conclusion, Ridley seems to be doing it with David instead.

Body Count

After the bodies start piling up, first from the spore aliens and then later from David’s face hugged variety, the crew gets fewer and fewer. Of course, this is to be expected and is entirely predictable in an alien film. Because the colony ship used its one and only one landing vehicle to land on the planet (why are they only ever equipped with one?), effectively the crew is stranded because a spore alien makes its way onto the ship through an infected crew member and one of the crew lights the entire ship up with gunfire into explosive canisters.

Being stranded means David comes to the rescue and this is where things turn mostly sour. After a bunch of David vs Walter stuff and some other spore alien death romps, David reveals his big surprise on the naive captain, his prized face hugger alien. Seriously, David hasn’t given himself to be that trustworthy yet, yet this naive captain calmly puts his face right over the top of an open egg. Ah, the stupidity of movie characters.

Anyway, David shows himself to be mentally unstable and Walter and David have a fight. Yet, we don’t really know how it all ends because Ridley cleverly cuts away before the end. So then, the colony ship makes a daring rescue with some kind of ship not designed to land on a planet, an adult alien gets on board and lots of yelling, gunfire and stupidity ensues. Walter and several other crew make it back aboard the colony ship in space, yet we have one more alien to take care of. Now that that’s done, we settle into our cozy 7 year nap. Just as the last crew member is in her cryotube, she realizes Walter isn’t Walter at all. David has somehow taken over Walter.

David in Walter’s body

Here’s where the film jumps the shark. So, Walter is a much more sophisticated and newer synth model. I’m reasonably sure that Weyland did not give David schematics of himself. Yes, David knew what he was, but didn’t have any idea how he was made. So, how is it possible that David could have, in the all of about 5 minutes he had after fighting Walter, transfer himself into Walter? Seriously, there was no equipment on that planet to perform such a data transfer. There had been nothing set up in the film at all to show that David had been working on anything like that. David’s experimentation was entirely with the aliens, not with his own physiology.

Expecting us viewers to suspend our disbelief that far is just insane. There is no way possible that David could have transferred his own programming into Walter that quickly. In fact, as sophisticated as those synthetics were, to believe Weyland didn’t put a fail safe to prevent such synth to synth transfers is also insane. Weyland was extremely paranoid and that idea certainly wouldn’t have slipped past him. Based on what I know about Weyland, it wouldn’t have been possible for David to transfer his programming into Walter. In fact, it’s likely that David’s programming wouldn’t have even worked in Walter considering how much newer the Walter model was.

At the end we see Walter/David burping up alien face hugger embryos. Wait… what? Since when do face huggers exist in small embryo formats like that? I thought they required eggs? I shake my head yet again. Between the embryo aliens and the David into Walter transfer, this whole movie ends up as one big unnecessary Deus Ex Machina.

Third Film

I don’t really even know if I want to see the third film. I already know what’s going to happen. Clearly, they’re going to land on their colony planet and become infested with Aliens with the help of David… unless Walter can somehow reemerge and stop it.

Alien Covenant is a below average film that tries too hard to fill in the details, but fails at pretty much everything it tries to offer. Worse, what it does offer only degrades the idea of Alien rather than enhancing it and it adds entirely nothing new to the franchise.

Stars: 4/10
Recommendation: Skip or rent if you must