The Greatest Questions Ever Asked Baked Into An Episode Of Scooby Doo

Rating: 4/10 (4 June 2017)

I entered the cinema with high hopes but moderate expectations. Promethus held promise. Standing alone it was another Sci Fi movie, but in the context of a larger narrative, it could be redeemed.
What Ridley offers is in effect one of the greatest questions ever asked baked into an episode of Scooby Doo - complete with the fact that the Caretaker did it, and classic lines like, 'Let's split up to search'.
Alien Covenant (AC) starts well. Its opening scene is both weak and strong. Weak in the sense that Peter Weyland (Pearce) when discussing the more philosophical themes barely seems to have a real grasp on the nature of the questions he ought to be thinking about, and David (Fassbender) makes basic observations but completely misses the big questions he ought to be asking (It's the kind of philosophical questioning i'd expect from high school students and not from the leader of major space exploration company or a cutting edge droid - to me this was a warning that this film hadn't been thought through enough, or if it had, the people doing the thinking were not as smart as the franchise really needs). Strong in that it opened the door and made me think this movie really might go in the right direction and offer the kind of depth this franchise needs to be more than a lucky monster flick set in space.
Other reviewers have listed a litany of issues with this movie. I will offer some which IMO were the most troubling, not just with the movie, but reveal the lack of thought, or a blatant the disregard of the audiences intellect by the writers.
The crew - Let's be frank, you wouldn't let this lot crew an oil tanker across the pacific let alone be in charge of 2000 colonist lives. The crew resembled an AA meeting, or perhaps a collection of Occupy Artists. What they did not resemble was a crew of individuals educated and qualified to be in space. The average 'trolly dolly' on a United Airlines flight would've done a more rational and sensible job over those in this movie.
Sci Fi as a genre can be really poor or stunning. It can dredge the lows of the genre or set out a really solid story with a highly intelligent characters in which events unfold that genuinely stretch the thinking of the brightest viewers and land new ideas or expound on old questions in an original way that leaves the audience thinking about the depth of the movie long after it is over. AC in not the latter and is most assuredly heading toward the former.
With a crew this bad you begin to see why i have likened the film to Scooby Doo, because effectively we have Shaggy, Scooby, Wilma, and Fred etc haplessly wandering around on an alien planet only to find out that the villain is ...wait for it....David the caretaker.
In this movie i learned - That an advanced race of aliens (the engineers) have no air traffic control protocols or security measures. That their population exists in a place similar to the Vatican square. That you can just fly in and bomb them all with no problems. That they build out of stone and seem to have excellent eyes as well lit rooms are not important to them. The Engineer concept is great and was a great introduction idea in Prometheus, but it has been unpacked very poorly to the detriment of the concept.
The movie also fails to address 'growth', how a xeno can grow inside a human at that rate without absorbing material, and once out of the host move from about a foot in size to about 10 feet tall without consuming organic matter to fuel its growth? You can't have intelligent science fiction without addressing these major holes Ridley, and if you're not doing intelligent science-fi than you're making B movie junk.
David and Walter - the moment David cut his hair we could all tell where this was going. But for a crew like this, i'm sure that went right past them. The same crew that has just one landing ship and chooses to try to land during a storm, that rather than sending a drone to explore the planet sends the crew, that rather than flying over the signal area in a first pass lands 8 miles from their objective and decides to walk, that wears no protective gear beyond 1950's Norwegian Kagools, that smoke, sniffs plants of unknown make up, washes their face in alien water... the list of stupid goes on and on and on.
So you see, you combine one of the most important questions ever asked 'where does life come from, who is our creator' with Shaggy, Scooby, and the Gang and hey presto - Alien Covenant.
Finally, the explanation of David as flawed (the reference to Shelley vs Byron) struggles to address the pointlessness of David's quest. Unless David is purely in psychopath territory his quest seems misguided. All life forms share some degree of intelligence, it is our intelligence that is a common factor, a unifying factor. Yes we behave differently, but all species evolve and typically evolve up to greater intelligence. Therefore intelligence is the real directional marker, not life itself. Where is intelligence going? Producing xenomorph's that behave like ants is a step back. It doesn't address any question. It's nothing more significant than playing with biological Lego. I'd expect a 'being' like David to see this. To see into the complexity and realise that biological forms are all moving in a direction that brings them closer in the end not further away but then to wonder why and where this might end.