The alien canon is not yet moribund

Rating: 8/10 (13 May 2017)

**MAY CONTAIN NONSENSE**
Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle, if that wasn't the best Alien film since Aliens. Yes, I really mean that. It's definitely my third- favourite film in the 'Alien'franchise. In many cases, that would sound like sarcasm, or at best faint praise. However, Alien and Aliens are hard acts to follow in the sci-fi/action/horror genre. Alien: Covenant treads a careful path between advancing the story arc set in place by Prometheus, but stylistically tuning into Alien. In my view, it does both in sufficient measure to be lauded on both counts. This was never going to be an easy balance to maintain after the relative mis-fire that was Prometheus. So what's the story here? I'm going to assume you've seen Prometheus. You have, haven't you? Very well, then, read on... We left the survivors of Prometheus intending to pilot the 'Engineers'' spaceship, complete with complement of enigmatic bioweapon on board, to destroy the Engineers on their home world. Elizabeth Shaw, one of these survivors (in fact the only human survivor), was hoping to sell some top quality chocolates to them, but David said no. Alien: Covenant, meanwhile, starts off with an expedition 10 years later to a different planet, over 7 years' flight time away from Earth. The ship encounters a destructive neutrino burst en route, resulting in the crew being ejected from hypersleep to deal with the damage. While repairing the solar sails, one of the crew intercepts a garbled signal from space, which it turns out is coming from a nearby planet. Mysteriously, the ship's astronomical data had the target colony world as the nearest habitable planet, yet here they are being informed that this much nearer planet is more promising. The captain died in the accident, the crew don't fancy going into hypersleep again, and the acting captain wants to investigate the source of the signal. The rest, as they say, is history.... There are many things to like about this film, if you're into the genre. If you're not, why are you even bothering to read this review, or any of the others? Anyway, the exposition was nicely handled, and any failure to comprehend the link between Prometheus and Alien is yours, not Ridley Scott's. Similarly the action. My one beef regarding effects would be where CGI was used to update the chestburster scenario - it NEVER looks as good as the original effects when done well; see my review on The Thing (the modern prequel) for more on the same topic. However, it was a minor negative which didn't mar my enjoyment too much. Characterisation was a bit cardboard overall, but when most of the characters are disposable meat (and you just know that they are going to be, so let's not pretend you were hoping for more) it hardly seems to matter. Style over substance, that's my bag. Seriously, though, the characters who matter are the ones who get the chance to show they have one, by surviving longer. Perhaps there were just too many people for us to get to know them all properly, which wasn't a problem in Alien, but was handled to some extent in Aliens with a longer run time and substituting complex story-telling with character interaction and dialogue. If what you really want is not to be able to tell who's going to live and who isn't, then Alien: Covenant isn't going to do that so well. It does tend toward the predictable, but I was having too good a time being carried along by some good old-fashioned action to worry about it. I'm now dying to see where they're going to go with it.