We have finally reached the final film of this journey through the Alien and Predator franchises, and what a tangled and convoluted journey it has been. But here we are with Alien: Covenant, the latest film from Ridley Scott in the Alien franchise and the second film in a new prequel trilogy (or it might become another quadrilogy) happening before the original 1979 Alien.
It's 2104, eleven years after the events of Prometheus and the spaceship Covenant is heading for the planet of Origae-6 for colonization. A solar flare hits the ship and damages it, causing the deaths of 47 of the colonists in hypersleep as well as the ship's captain, who is burned alive inside his stasis pod. While repairing the ship, the remaining crew pick up a human radio transmission from a nearby planet that is meant to be uninhabited and seems to be far more suitable for colonization than Origae-6, which is still seven years away. They land on the planet to investigate and discover not only abundant plant life but also a crashed alien spacecraft. Two of the crew become infected with spores from some of the alien plant life on the surface and "give birth" to creatures similar to Xenomorphs but still noticeably different (neomorphs); the surviving crew meet David, the synthetic from the Prometheus who leads them to safety. David has been living on the planet for several years, he tells them, (after he and Elizabeth Shaw flew there after the end of the previous film) but he says that Shaw died when they crashed on the planet and that the planet's inhabitants - the Engineer race - were all killed when the ship released its bio-weapon payload on them. David has also been busy in the years since then, as he's been working to create a new species - the Xenomorphs. It falls to the few remaining crew members, including the captain's widow Daniels and Walter, the ship's synthetic who is a more advanced model than David but still looks like him - to defeat the new Xenomorphs and stop David from using them all in his science experiments...
Before we go any further, I need to get something off my chest. Alien had Ash. Aliens and Alien3 had Bishop. Alien: Resurrection had Call. Prometheus had David. And now Alien: Covenant has... Walter. What the hell happened to the naming convention? I don't get it and I don't like it, although I'm at least professional enough not to mark the film down too much for it.
The prevailing theme of Alien: Covenant, and indeed many of the Alien films, should really be that First Contact protocols are there for a reason. It wasn't too bad in Alien, as most people would be torn between doing what is right and following the rules as Ripley was (and of course Ash had ulterior motives in letting Kane back in), but several of the deaths in Alien: Covenant are because of people being stupid on an unexplored planet and sticking their noses right into alien plants and taking a great big sniff without any protective gear whatsoever. Weyland-Yutani really needs to make a safety video explaining this stuff because it would save them an awful lot of money in lost spacecraft and employees.
The return of Michael Fassbender as David (and Walter) is both a blessing and a curse for the film. On the one hand, Michael Fassbender is brilliant in his role as always and is far and away the best thing about the film. On the other hand, we know from Prometheus that David is an antagonist, and while that dramatic irony works well in Covenant when the crew first meets him, it also makes certain climactic scenes very easy to predict. After all, why have a second synthetic who looks just like David if you're not planning on having some sort of "which one is which?" twist somewhere in the film's climax (and the film really draws that one out, long after the audience will have figured everything out and gotten bored waiting for the film to catch up with them).
There are a lot of callbacks to Alien (and a couple to Aliens) in Alien: Covenant, most notably the character of Daniels, who is both our protagonist and a clear Ripley-substitute, right down to a similar hairstyle. Her inevitable climactic battle with the Xenomorph has elements from both Alien and Aliens, but unlike some of the other callbacks we've seen in previous films, this at least has enough of its own identity to not feel like pandering to the audience.
And on the subject of pandering... One complaint that people had about Prometheus is that it didn't really feel like a film in the Alien canon. Originally, Ridley Scott had wanted to explore the origins of the Engineer and of humanity much more than the Xenomorphs, because he felt that the Alien films were "overdone and overexposed". But after Prometheus's divided fan reaction he changed tack and brought the story back to the Xenomorphs more. Alien: Covenant does take a step back from the story of David the megalomaniac stalker synthetic (although he still has a key role to play) and so for the die-hard fans this should please them. Even then though, Scott said that he wants to focus more on David and other AIs for Alien: Covenant 2, which suggests to me that he really does not want to keep making films in the Alien franchise because that sounds a lot more like a Blade Runner universe (which I wouldn't be opposed to, but let's not get the two franchises blended together until they're indistinguishable).
So, that's all the Alien and Predator films up to this point (August 2018). It will remain to be seen if the Alien franchise can regain its impact with any future films, as plans are apparently on hold indefinitely after the divided fan reaction to the most recent two films. As for the Predator franchise, we only have to wait another month or so to see if The Predator will be a return to form, although the team of (Shane) Black and (Fred) Dekker as writers and director shows promise.
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