Even before “Alien: Covenant” opened to softer-than-expected box office, I was dubious it would really offer the creative goods. That’s why I placed it in the “I’m not so sure about” section of my summer movie preview, and watching the film didn’t really change anything. I still wish they had made a more direct sequel to “Prometheus,” and I don’t just mean mentioning the fates of characters from that film, so much as continuing its exploration of “The Big Ideas” the early “Alien” movies really had no interest in.
This might also be a good time to mention that I’m not really a huge fan of this franchise—which predates my birth—in general, and that includes the overrated original “Alien.” To me, “Prometheus” felt like a step in the right direction of this growing sci-fi exploration of “The Big Ideas” that we’re seeing in “Gravity,” “Interstellar,” and possibly the “Blade Runner” sequel due this winter. See, I kind-of blame the original “Alien” for kicking off a “haunted house in space” genre that has turned so many sci-fi films into junk where an alien chases ten or so hapless astronauts around a cavernous ship, and I’d like to see a return to the “2001: A Space Odyssey” space movies only a decade before the original “Alien.”
What Works: Once again, Ridley Scott has assembled an interesting, offbeat cast of potential “stars of tomorrow” including Katherine Waterston, Carmen Ejogo, Demian Bichir, Billy Crudup (who’s always right on that cusp but never quite gets there), Jussie Smollet, Amy Seimetz, and the always-terrific Danny McBride…
What Doesn’t: …And once again he has done absolutely nothing with them. Even McBride’s considerable charisma isn’t given much to do here, and the rest of the cast are lucky if they get a second dimension or even a sentence of non-expository dialogue. The only complex role here is Michael Fassbender’s psychotic android David, but unlike “2001” it does not feel like an intentional move to make the robots more human than the humans, so much as a side-effect of bad characterizations. James Franco pops up in a cameo, and you have to wonder if Scott looked at his scenes and said “no, no, no he has a personality, you may actually be rooting for him to survive death against genocidal robots and aliens, this won’t work at all.”
The script has a ton of problems from easy to spot “twists” (if you can’t figure out a character’s last scene intentions before Katherine Waterston’s character does, you may have never seen a movie before) to supposedly intelligent scientist characters doing incredibly stupid things (Billy Crudup tricked into following Fassbender’s David into his doom even after he distrusts him) to foreshadowing that’s never elaborated upon (Crudup mentions he met Satan when he was 12, and this goes nowhere).
What I Would Have Done Differently: “Prometheus” original questions of “Who created us? Why did they create us? And why did they create something to destroy us?” are so tantalizing, I’d gladly watch the next “Alien: Annihilation” or whatever if they promised to get back to The Big Questions. And I don’t mean just token scenes where Fassbender’s David is shown “answering” those questions by killing everything that makes them relevant.