Spoiler
I think the best one-word review of Covenant would be "breathless". It moves at a fairly ruthless pace, pulling the audience from one tragedy to the next in fast succession. For the first half of the film, this is fine — it allows us to experience the kind of disorientation that our characters and, and hurls us into the action just as much as them. For the second half, however, it seems to transition from brisk pacing to simply rushing.
There's a lot of nice things to say about Covenant. The atmosphere in the first act places us pretty firmly in the world of Alien. Space is equal parts romantic and ominous; pretty to look at while hiding deadly traps. Our crew are regular people who feel real. Nobody seems ham-fisted into acting one way or another for the sake of plot or convenience; everyone's coming from somewhere and everyone reacts like actual people would.
Tension amongst the crew of the eponymous Covenant start fast. Tragedy strikes the ship, killing several members in their cryo-tubes. One happens to be the captain, placing the second in command, Oram (Billy Crudup), in full command before he's completely ready. He wants to run the situation as by the book as possible; pack away the dead, run diagnostics, fix the ship, return to sleep. Everyone else wants to hold a funeral. They're both realistic responses.
After detecting a mysterious transmission, the crew decides to investigate the source — a seemingly inhabitable planet. Daniels (Waterstone) thinks this is risky, but everyone else agrees that not dying in their sleep sounds like a wonderful idea. A landing party sets down on the planet, and tragedy invariably follows.
The initial tragedies — the infection of some of the crew by alien spores, the birth of horrifying "neomorph" creatures, the destruction of their landing vessel — are tense, nail-biting stuff. There's a genuine sense of distress from all involved. The crew is made of couples; everyone that dies is someone's husband or wife. The characters respond to these losses with due emotional weight.
It feeds into a sense of dread that is only partially allayed when David (Fassbender) saves the crew — partially, because he then immediately walks them to a city of corpses. Engineer corpses. It's an interesting turn; outside, where it was idyllic paradise, was unsafe and deadly. Inside, surrounded by corpses, it's ostensibly safe. You could cut the unease with a knife.
And then, to put it frankly, the film shits itself.
Where whisking the audience through the first half put us equal with the characters, the speed with which the second half unfolds leaves us unable to process much information.
Scott said he wanted to scare us, but there's no time for fear here. One character almost immediately walks off on their own without an escort and meets a predictable fate. Wherein the first half each death felt like a tragedy, the second half has characters all but literally tripping over corpses without much concern.
Fassbender's David in Prometheus is creepy. He's Not Quite Right. He composes himself as an aloof butler who hates his lot in life and is absolutely plotting to murder you. There's clearly something sinister and amoral simmering beneath, but it's always there; beneath. Here, however, he's just a bad guy. Ranting, pontificating, and about as subtle as a wood nail to the throat. He's a Bond villain describing his grand scheme for humanity. Beyond the blue jumpsuit he feels utterly different to the David we knew.
And then, at last, there's the Alien.
Whether certain revelations will satisfy or enrage the audience is something everyone will need to work out for themselves, but there's perhaps something we can all agree on: you can almost feel the contempt with which Scott included them back into the story.
There's no reason for the Alien to be here other than the film's title. They achieve nothing. They are utterly unremarkable. They act and move almost identically to the Neomorphs, and indeed beyond looking different and having acid blood there's no appreciable difference. They could have kept the Neomorphs throughout the entire film and not a damned thing would change.
Which is, more than anything, perhaps the most disappointing thing about the film. The last act is the Cliffs Notes of the original Alien, sans any sense of fear, dread, foreboding, or even mild interest. We've seen this before, and the very climax we have seen three times before.
Where the first half of the film was new and interesting, the second half feels like Ridley Scott responding to criticism over the lack of Aliens in a mocking tone. It happens because he thinks that's what people wanted, not because it feels right or even resolves the story in a particularly satisfying way.
Is the film terrible? No. This franchise has certainly generated worse. But like its predecessor it's an undeniably flawed film; how much these flaws bother you will be up to you to decide, and may largely be proportional to how much of a fan you are of these movies.
6/10
^Thank you for the review and including this information. It's what I was suspecting after reading some of the other reviews, so I'm so glad I got to read your review. I think you were very fair and genuine. I'll definitely not go see it in the theater but I'll purchase it on a used blu ray when it's released. Time for me to find another franchise to get interested in. As a long-time Alien fan, I'm grateful for Scott and further development of the franchise and films but I'm also a little disappointed that this is the direction he's choosing. Yes, I absolutely understand it's not about me or how I think things should be or that Scott should change everything so that I like what he's doing, etc., etc., etc. It's Scott's creation and it's the direction that he's chosen because he thinks it's more interesting, but I can't help but feel that with the direction Scott is heading with the franchise, it's kind of lost something, so I'm not interested in it anymore. Time for me to catch up on Syfy's Faceoff and Magicians anyway. SiL, thanks again for the excellent review. Now time for me to focus on other sci-fi franchises. Fare the well o mysterious SpaceJockey creature. We hardly got to know thee.
