Alien Covenant: Evolution in Reverse

Rating: 3/10 (12 January 2020)

At the opening of this movie I must admit to feeling a surge of hope. It had a tension-building, slow-burn quality, with none of the impatience to spam the audience with juicy Aliens displayed by it predecessor. I actually quite liked the decision to kill James Franco before even getting him out of the hypersleep pod, leaving the plot in the hands of generally less recognizable and therefore more believable characters. Everything seemed set up for a taught thriller worthy of the original two outings in the Alien franchise.
But then the DNA of the movie, just like that of so many of its protagonists, began to unravel at an alarming rate. The unavoidable comparisons with the two classics of the series, Alien and Aliens, are not favourable.
The first thing that clangs is the frequently mystifying decision-making of the central characters. In unfamiliar and dangerous environments, people generally, for very good reasons, become more jeopardy-averse, rather than less so.
If the ship's computer tells you a course of action could result in total mission failure and the deaths of all 2,000 passengers, you do not blithely follow that course. If a mysterious unknown plant releases spores, you don't sniff 'em. If you start to feel ill on an alien planet and someone asks how you are, you don't say, 'I'm fine!' If two identical robots go off together - one of which is nice and the other of which is homicidally insane - you stop to check which one it is when only one of them comes back. And when you find out an Alien is loose on your ship and you have verbal control over all airlocks, you damn well seal them immediately. Unless some gung-ho scriptwriter with their hand up your bottom is transparently making your decisions for you, to drive the death-count up, of course.
All this kind of stuff does the dramatic tension no favours, but it need not be fatal. Sadly the breakdown in common sense is followed by more serious breakdown in emotional realism. Having arrived on Planet Danger expecting little more than a scenic hike, the crew of scientists and settlers witness their scout ship explode, their sick compatriot die vomiting up an alien baby, and another of their number having his jaw ripped off by a full-grown alien. These are the kinds of moments that should result in instant and lasting changes in mentality - anguish, terror, panic, paranoia. Instead the characters here seem to have hearts made of ice and brains made of crap. Nobody wails. Nobody baulks at wandering off alone. Everyone just kind of gets on with it, as if sudden lethal Alien attacks are an unfortunate but unavoidable fact of life.
Toward the end of the movie, when all but four of the dozen-or-so human characters have been horrifically slaughtered, two of the four remaining crew members, now back on the ship, mince off to have sex in the shower, where they duly get killed. This is just such a stereotypical slasher-horror movie scenario that you begin to wonder whether the scriptwriter was born yesterday. But the really upsetting thing was that after two hours I neither knew anything about these characters nor gave a monkey's whether they lived or died. They were so bland and flatly described I would not have noticed if they wondered quietly out of the airlock for an untethered space-walk.
All this is awful, of course, but I must say on reflection the biggest let-down of the movie is its basic premise. Every great sci-fi yarn is elevated to greatness by what it says not just about the future, but about the past and present. The original Alien was elevated by its powerful evocation of 'The Company', an inhuman monster of the sort we all know from our lived experience, which sees numbers rather than people and considers human life expendable in the interest of profits and share value.
In this movie, The Company is replaced by David, an avatar of the mooted potential of artificial intelligence to outgrow us. But this source of modern anxiety remains, at least for now, more imagined than real. It has none of the immediacy and relatability of the menace of corporate power, which if anything is much more resonant now than it was when 'Alien' was first made.
Neither, in the event, is it executed very persuasively. David, we are told, is a big fan of Wagner, Byron and suchlike. Am I the only one to notice that what all these great artists had in common was their humanity? Now we are supposed to believe that David is determined to annihilate every potential future Byron, along with all other humans, and replace them with xenomorphs who, to put it politely, are not exactly cultural titans. Er... why, exactly? However low his opinion of humans, we are never offered an explanation of why this intellectually active and artistic android would rather spend the rest of eternity with a bunch of creatures who cannot even hold a conversation about the weather, much less write a poem or compose a symphony. With no money-grabbing corporation looking to make readies out the the kill-skills of the xenomorphs, the whole concept of preferring them to humans just falls apart.
In conclusion, the movie looks decent. It promises much. But it flatters to deceive. The more you think about it, the worse it gets.