Another Alien dud

Rating: 2/10 (12 August 2019)

There has not been a truly successful entry in the Alien franchise since James Cameron's initial sequel Aliens, yet somehow the series chugs on. Covenant is no exception. It is a direct sequel to Prometheus from a few years prior, which was notable for two reasons: 1) it featured the return in the director chair of Ridley Scott and 2) its enigmatic eye-catching trailer was easily the best thing about it. Scott returns again for the sequel.
The action shifts to the title starship, which is carrying an army of married couples in suspended animation on their way to colonize a distant planet. An interstellar accident leaves the captain dead (James Franco, in a nanosecond cameo for reasons unknown) and finds an awakened core crew stunned, especially when they intercept a transmission of a woman singing "Country Roads" from a mysterious heretofore unknown Earth-like planet. Katherine Waterston, as the former captain's grieving widow, is reluctant to go, but Billy Crudup is now in command and decides to check this miraculous planet out. Of course, that proves to be a deadly decision since the seemingly hospitable planet features not only an array of deadly organisms to inflict grisly deaths, but Fassbender's sociopathic android from the prior film.
Ostensibly the fact that the characters are made up of couples is supposed to make them more relatable. It doesn't. There is a male couple acting as security - for the life of me I did not fathom whether they were supposed to be gay or whether they were just along for the ride. One of them is played by the great Oscar-nominated actor Demien Bichir, who literally has nothing to do. Throughout the film, husbands and wives are killed and their surviving partners are oddly ambivalent about the loss. The exception is Waterston who starts the film grieving and proceeds to be teary-eyed through the entire film, until the final moments require her to toughen up and take matters into her own hands.
Part of the problem is that either Scott does not understand what made the first Alien successful or he is so obsessed with the android subplot that he should have instead looked into revisiting the Blade Runner franchise instead. Fassbender gets to pull double duty as both the malevolent David and the sweet Walter - the Covenant's android. There are myriad of scenes with Fassbender seemingly on the verge of kissing people or hovering near them in an oddly sexual manner that ultimately becomes laughable. At one point, David seductively tries to teach Walter about a flute and howlingly advises that he "will do the fingering". Um, OK. Alas, David is no where near the dynamic character Scott seems to believe he is and he becomes a liability the longer the film dotes on him.
Although I was no fan of Noomi Rapace's bland heroine from Prometheus, it seems more than a tad disrespectful to off her character in between films. She was not the brightest person, but I have a hard time believing that she would have regenerated the duplicitous David and allowed him into a position to murder her. Then again, characters act incredibly stupid from frame one onward. I do not just mean horror movie stupid...I mean catastrophically stupid. The characters land on a strange planet and then just begin waltzing around without protection resulting in one of them getting infected with an organism. He is returned to the shuttle with the doctor and an experienced security person. When he starts into a scene a la the chestbuster, the security woman locks the doctor in with a dangerous alien without having to do so (resulting in the latter's death), runs hysterically through the ship screaming, returns to the scene, allows the creature to escape, has more hysterics and then accidentally blows the entire shuttle up with a stray shot. Her surprisingly stoic husband (Danny McBride) laconically greets the news of her hysterics and demise with "That's not like her." Throughout the film, characters know the danger and go off on their own to wash up or fumble around in the dark. Crudup's character may well be the singularly dumbest in cinema history. Literally every decision he makes is nonsensical and wrong, but he excuses it in every other scene by reminding us that he is a man of faith. Even after discovering that Fassbender's David is a psycho murderer, he laughably follows the android's instruction to stick his head over a hatching alien egg to peek inside.
Worse, every new detail given us to explain the origin of the aliens makes them less scary. There was a certain innate terror in the original films that there were these horrible things lurking in dark places of the universe just waiting to pounce. They now seem diminished with the revelation that they are nothing more than an experiment wrought by a bratty android. At one point, a newly hatched alien literally gives David a Nazi salute that results in audience guffaws.
Acting is mediocre throughout. The effects are also nothing great, with the CGI oddly making the aliens less convincing. There is a ridiculous scene in a shower with a couple and an intrusive alien that comes out of no where. And can someone figure out how to kill these things without using the blowing them out into space routine.
The final moments show how bankrupt Scott and company have become. The film sets up the dynamic of a brewing conflict between the maniacal David and earnest Walter. When one of the android's manages to accompany the witless survivors, Scott delivers the twist of it being the evil one like it was not a cliche that anyone could see coming from miles away. Not only does the film suck, but it does so in predictable ways and does not even realize it.