It should be taken as read that 1979's Alien did not need any sequels, but this is the world we live in. I'll lay my cards on the table: Alien 3 is better than Aliens, which is better than all the rest.
In 2017, Alien: Covenant is entering an extremely crowded field of sequels, preboots, remakes and everything in between, but it manages a franchise movie's knotted nexus of expectation, invention and nostalgia with a bit of grace and a ton of splatter.
The film opens on billionaire inventor Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) speaking with his android creation David (Michael Fassbender) in an antiseptic white room, dotted with hugely expensive pieces of art and furniture. Both of these characters are from Scott's 2012 misfire Prometheus, which made the mistake of grafting a pretentious mythology onto a series that worked best as Halloween in space.
Scott frames David against Piero della Francesca's The Nativity as he and his creator discuss the nature of existence, immediately setting up the film's Biblical allusions — better integrated here than in Prometheus. David is not content with serving humanity, a frail species on the brink of extinction. He wants to create life.
Cut to: the colony vessel Covenant, headed for a habitable planet far from Earth with its 15 crew members and cargo— 2,000 colonists and nearly as many embryos — onboard. A neutrino burst smashes into the ship, killing the captain (James Franco, RIP) and causing significant structural damage. While the crew (Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Amy Seimetz, Michael Fassbender and others) repair the ship a distress signal comes through; distorted and faint, but with enough data to pinpoint its source.
That source is a conveniently habitable planet much closer than Covenant's planned destination that somehow was missed in the ostensibly meticulous sweep for habitable planets in the galaxy. It's fine, whatever. The new captain, Chris (Crudup), decides to head there over the objections of Daniels (Waterston), who says it's too good to be true.
Reader, she's right! The Covenant heads for the mysterious planet, Scott and his recent DP Dariusz Wolski (The Walk) lay out some gorgeous sci-fi paperback space shots, and the plot begins in earnest. Wolski gives the alien planet a rich, burnished texture full of gold and green and grey, frequently capturing characters in low-angle shots that emphasize their barren surroundings. A few images, like a severed head bobbing pale and serene in a pool of water, resonate with morbid power.
I should pause here to note that Alien: Covenant's dialogue is frequently tin-eared and obvious. While wading through a field of wheat, Lope (Demián Bichir), a character we know nothing about, pauses to inspect a stalk of wheat. "This is wheat," he says. "Believe me, I know wheat." So now we know that he knows wheat. The relationships between the crew (spoiler: they're all couples) are so badly drawn that it sinks the whole Noah's Ark metaphor.
In its grander moments, with Michael Fassbender quoting Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, it's reminiscent of writer John Logan's fitfully entertaining Showtime horror series Penny Dreadful. The reason these grandiose embellishments work is that Alien: Covenant is at its heart a mad scientist movie, never abandoning its core narrative drive. Scott is in his element doling out insanely bloody death scenes and big concept art alien vistas, Michael Fassbender is playing two roles — David and Walter — with relish, and fuck, I hate to say it, but the damn xenomorph shows up!
Not soon after the crew lands, they start putting their faces in clouds of spores, which gestate in record time and explode out of their hosts in a slippery gush of afterbirth. Half of the ground team is slaughtered before David appears, whisking the survivors off to a strange, Gigeresque city.
Fassbender plays David as a fractured version of the character we saw in Prometheus. His prim accent remains, but his hair has grown into an Iggy Pop mop and his megalomania has skyrocketed. David and Walter get a few scenes together, which, amusingly, bristle with the film's only sexual tension as well as its most ornate dialogue.
I won't spoil the particular turns the film takes; they're worth seeing for yourself. Suffice it to say that David has been doing some experimenting, and with new subjects having arrived on his doorstep he ups his game. In one scene he goads the ship's hapless captain into poking his head right into an alien egg, where he is of course assaulted by a facehugger.
David functions as a sort of audience surrogate, the audience who for decades have clamored for more xenomorphs, more action, more gore. He works tirelessly toward the the perfect alien, a creature he can lord over as his own creation. If Prometheus was dragged kicking and screaming toward its dead-obvious endpoint as an Alien prequel, Covenant embraces it. You want more fucking aliens? Here's a ship full of sleeping colonists ripe for implantation.
There is no future for our human protagonists. The film's climax is yet another blast-it-out-the-airlock sequence that Scott enlivens by throwing in a bunch of zero-g broken glass, shimmering like a cloud of diamonds. It's hopeful, for a moment, before the mean-spirited final twist — telegraphed, but the axe doesn't fall until it's too late — reminds us that we're a long way from the celestial, eerie beauty of Alien's ending.
Alien: Covenant is thoroughly cynical and mean, and it's a better look than the faux-wonder of Prometheus. It wrestles with its nature as a craven studio product with a hundred masters to serve, messily butchering a cast of humans it barely bothers to introduce to the audience and putting the franchise's future in the hands of an Aryan android eugenicist who likes Wagner.
This article appears in May 18-25, 2017.