'Alien: Covenant' is a dichotomy of creativity and banality.

Rating: 6/10 (14 May 2017)

'Alien: Covenant' is a dichotomy of creativity and banality; the film manages to be both uncommonly viscerally ugly, which feels brave, and yet also vapidly glossy, underwritten and compromised for the sake of commerciality. The former is hugely exciting and the latter is a great disappointment.
Inspired, thrilling moments stand shoulder-to-shoulder with predictable and lazy scenes; the characters are shallow, uninteresting and never feel real, like the crew of the Nostromo did -- that film allowed the characters to breathe and be real people -- we cared about them. The characters suffer loses, designed for us to empathise with them, but they just feel like cannon fodder. We simply wait for them to die, we don't ever fear that they will.
'Alien: Covenant' feels more like a reboot than an appendage. If a reboot is what it is, it has to be considered both a failure and absolutely pointless on an artistic level (like all other horror reboots are), because the original does everything more convincingly, with more sincerity, energy, creativity and drama. If it is a smaller work designed to add (a massively confusing) background story to a masterpiece of terror that all realise can never be topped, then it is a success -- assuming you can work out the story, because I lost track of it.
As was a problem with 'Prometheus', the script is often appalling. 'What the Hell is that?' is never a good line when you can see with your own eyes that the character is scared and confused, it doesn't have to be verbalised. The film also contains one of the most contrived, unnecessary sex scenes in film history -- it was clearly included to tick the box.
The original Xenomorph alien is still by far the most terrifying of all horror film creations, it feels like something that genuinely exists.. somewhere.. not in space, but deep within our souls: a combination of every fear and phobia known to mankind, born of bone and acid. It deserves to be featured in film for as long as movies as made. The more aggressive, smaller variant is horrific in its speed, violence and aggression, and in one brilliant scene involving Michael Fassbinder, in which the alien stands upright like a man, the creature could be inspired by the horror of Francis Bacon's 'Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion'.
Michael Fassbinder is outstanding. David is the only character in the film that is truly easy to relate to; that he is the only evil character in the film is either very telling about mankind, or it displays the ineffective writing and shallowness of the other characters. David is lonely; he doesn't truly know what he is or why he exists; he feels superior to the humans that created him, yet he attempts to emulate their sexual impulses, to copy them, he tries to be like them; he is intellectually self-assured, yet (as he realises with shock) flawed and incomplete; he thinks that mankind doesn't deserve a fresh start on a new planet after murdering Earth (which is absolutely hard to argue with); he is a contradiction: he wants to be a God only to destroy what he resents, yet he convinces himself he is a Creator, not a Destroyer. David manages to be scarier even than the Xenomorphs -- the film attempts to shock us with its gory scenes, but David's psychology is truly where the shock and awe lies. The homoerotic tension between David and Walter, two identical androids, is a brilliant parody of man's eternally hopeless vanity.
When a film like this is made, what it sometimes unintentionally achieves is just to draw attention to the original: Sigourney Weaver was clearly irreplaceable in her role as the hunted female with the mental strength of ten lions; neither Noomi Rapace in 'Prometheus' nor Katherine Waterston in this film manage to recreate her convincing intensity or iconic toughness.
The twist ending is entirely predictable but not in a bad way -- films do not have to be unpredictable all the time. If a predictable ending is the best ending available, it should be the ending; a different, inferior ending just for the sake of surprising people would be wrong.
Ridley Scott is both a major talent and a very clever man with good ideas, but this simply isn't the same world that it was in 1979: creating a major blockbuster horror movie with the intellectual depth of the original 'Alien' is a near-impossible feat. This is as good as it's going to get.
There's a battle going on in space, but it's really between a fascinating, intellectual film and a painfully dumb one.