It's all downhill from here for Alien

Rating: 5/10 (24 May 2017)

I feel that I can't review this movie without spoilers, so SPOILERS! "Alien: Covenant" must have been a very difficult movie to write. The film has plenty of flaws despite there being the remnants of one or two good films in there.
The key flaw in the movie is in its characters, of which there are many, of whom very few have a clearly defined purpose or persona. The main character, Daniels, played by Kath Waterston, is a Ripley/Shaw wannabe, who I felt never deserved to become the protagonist through actions she made, unlike those other two. About 2/3 of the way through the film she emerges as one of the remaining crew members and becomes badass all of a sudden. It seems that Ridley Scott feels that one of the defining characteristics of an Alien movie is to have a strong female in the lead role, so here's one! Billy Crudup is also built up to be a main character, and almost makes it as the best character in the movie. He's just killed the gooey alien that decapitated his crew member, delivering one of the best lines of the movie along the way, and then...oh, he for some reason falls for David's trap, despite clearly not trusting him moments earlier and...yeah he's dead now. Well that was a shame. Then there's Tennessee, played by Danny McBride. His wife is dead, so he's the reckless one I guess. A bit like Parker, maybe. Nah he never gets that level of characterisation. I guess he'll be dead at the beginning of the next movie. Oh well. At one point in the film, when they were exploring the planet I thought oh, some of them are scientists and some of them are more like soldiers, that could be a cool dynamic. A day later, I read through the character list and see names like Karine, Ricks, Upworth, Hallett, Ankor and I think who? What? Were they characters in the movie I just watched? I guess one of them was probably the woman who got decapitated and two of them were the ones who were killed in the shower. I guess.
I should mention Michael Fassbender's two characters, David and Walter. David is the only character from "Prometheus" to make it into this movie, and it looks like he'll be the only character from "Covenant" to make it into the next movie. But I remember another character from "Prometheus" who seemed like a bigger deal. Who was that? Noomi Rapace played her, I think. Remember when Ripley was the main character in "Aliens". That made sense, because she was the protagonist from "Alien". The story was a continuation of her journey - in fact "Aliens" symbolically seemed to work as a way of her moving on from the trauma she faced in "Alien". I guess the studio didn't like the fan reaction to "Prometheus" so decided that Scott had to go in a different direction, and he made David the main character. The result is a film that is simultaneously a dissatisfying sequel to "Prometheus" and a dissatisfying prequel to "Alien". That the end of this movie seems to take us narratively further away from the set-up for "Alien" than the end of "Prometheus" is a worrying sign that there's a lot more movies on the way. Scott probably has them all worked out, but Fox will probably insist on a new direction when this movie doesn't make all the money they were hoping for. I'm guessing the result will be an incomprehensible mess that satisfies no-one.
The next key flaw after characters and plot is atmosphere. I actually quite liked "Prometheus" because it was scary. It helped that the characters had motivations that seemed to relate to the plot of the film, but on a basic level I thought that the threat posed by the monster, you know the alien, was real and effective. This was missing from "Covenant". Partly this is because there are several aliens in "Covenant" that follow after one another in the movie. We have 3 separate gestation events (some of which are inexplicably short compared to the other movies) that lead to 3 successive generations of threat. Because they don't get the time to generate any connection to the human characters, like the sole monster of the first movie, the moments when they are inevitably dispatched in a cool action set-piece just fell kind of flat. It doesn't matter that Daniels and Tennessee destroy the monster on the landing craft, there's another one in just a few minutes. "Aliens" doesn't rely on this - the threat there is the sheer number of aliens to fight, but this movie does, and it fails. The aliens kill a bunch of characters whose names I do not remember and then they are killed by the characters whose names I do remember. Tension does not feature.
So what is good about the movie? Well, Ridley Scott knows how to make a movie look good. The production design is predictably good and the film works shot for shot. The performances are pretty decent I guess - Fassbender is the only actor to be given a real character and he does a good job of it.
Much more than "Prometheus" this film heralds the end of any expectation that this series can deliver any more good films. It's not Ridley Scott that is ruining this franchise. It is the fact that Fox simultaneously want to expand the franchise, which requires careful world-building, but clearly won't stick to any long-term vision for it. It is already practically incomprehensible now, and let's be honest - it's going to get worse.