Fine visuals and direction. But let's talk about the Alien series...

Rating: 6/10 (18 May 2017)

The film is forced, by its weighty legacy, to be about monsters terrorizing a spaceship crew that includes an android and a strong female lead. The monsters' larval stage, as we know all too well, impregnates unwitting humans, producing terrifying offspring that burst forth through the victims' chests. Given those ground rules, plus the fact that five films covering the scant subject matter have now been made, how can one possibly hope to innovate?
Well What if the creature bursts forth from the victim's *back* this time?
The original 'Alien' was a great sci-fi movie in an era of great sci-fi. It had superb direction and excellent acting; the names of Ridley Scott and Sigourney Weaver come to mind instantly. It also had tremendous artistry behind it, both visual (H.R. Giger's awe-inspiring designs) and auditory (Jerry Goldsmith's fantastic soundtrack). I would also argue that the film was based on a very strong story, written by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett. These are names we don't hear often; in Hollywood, writers seem to be regarded about as highly as the pencils they write with.
In any case, the movie was a delightful coming together of artistic talent that worked on every level.
What does this movie, which is from a very different age in Hollywood, bring to the table? Ridley Scott is back (again), and indeed, the direction is fine. The strong female lead is good. The soundtrack is acceptable; it contains some great atmospheric, moody pieces, but disappointingly reuses music from the original Alien as well as the main theme of Prometheus. In a jarring breaking of the fourth wall, David plays that theme on a flute in this movie; a beautiful and adventurous piece is clumsily retconned into being a requiem for Dr. Shaw composed by an evil android.
The visuals, specifically the look of the aliens and the few glimpses of genuinely new vistas we get in this movie, were quite good - but when are they not? And the best parts are still H.R. Giger's.
So all these elements are perfectly fine. The story is where it all falls apart. You and I both knew that before going to see this film. After all, how could it not?
Alien's story was simple but intelligent. It was also small in scale. We weren't told much about the world it takes place in, because that didn't matter. We only needed to know about one scrappy crew, one android, one evil corporation, and one terrifying monster. Alien's story also contained a great mystery in the form of the Space Jockey; the fossilized alien, found sitting in his command chair with a big hole in his chest. In space, chance encounters are surely unbelievably rare, and ages must have passed between his death and the moment our crew found this ghastly relic. Much was left unexplained; the voids in the story helped make it good, by having certain things exist in negative space.
Alas. We were forced to revisit this universe of mystery so many times that it has no mystery left. We explore one scrappy crew after another, as they are harassed by the same terrifying monsters, the same evil corporation, the same androids.
I found Covenant's first act to be particularly tedious, as we go through the motions of having our spacecraft destroyed by a freak space weather event, watching characters in whom we're not the least bit invested die and freak out. I was simply waiting for us to get to the planet, already. We soon do, at which point our characters promptly take off their helmets, ingest alien goo, and start dying. The audience has come to expect this, and is by now fully familiar with the sequence of events when an Alien impregnates an unlucky character. And so, the movie fast-forwards through the process, taking us from landing to infestation to the good stuff - bloody convulsions, cracking bones, and the emergence a fully grown, bullet-proof Xenomorph - with record speed.
There were some fun and thrilling scenes involving the creatures, and thankfully there weren't any zombies this time around.
Because this is meant to be a film series, the movies are obliged to contribute to a greater, overarching story. To this end, they have provided unsatisfying answers to some mysteries, and replaced others with plot holes; for one, I sure as hell don't know how the Space Jockey could have ended up in its fossilized state in 'Alien' if the Xenomorphs had been created by David a few decades before. (The rarity of encounters in the vastness of space, personified by the fossil, was jettisoned out of an airlock early in the series.)
The original story never lent itself to a movie series, which require a much bigger scope (like Star Wars or Star Trek). In later films, the producers try to pad the proceedings with half-baked philosophical notions about the origin and meaning of life. It's done clumsily though, with bumbling scientists in Prometheus who go on a mission because they "choose to believe" that they will meet their maker; it is done perhaps a little bit better in this film, which centers around David, an android who finds a gruesome purpose in his existence. But it's just not done nearly well enough compared to a good Star Trek: TNG episode or a film like the Matrix. These aspects are not what made 'Alien' good, so why should they work in its universe's limited context?
When the Covenant's crew finds a derelict alien spacecraft, filled not only with indescribable alien wonders, but with human dog tags, they don't seem all that surprised, or excited. I suppose, since this movie takes place in the future, they will have seen yet more recycled sci-fi films than the audience has, to the point where even the real thing has become somewhat mundane.