Alien: Covenant Drops Into the Pain and Lets the Entrails Rain

Ostensibly, Alien: Covenant is about what happens to the Weyland-Yutani colony ship Covenant after a horrifying accident. But it’s also about David, an android with a skewed definition of helpful, who is one of the two survivors of the Prometheus, the science research vessel that met with unspeakable chthonic horror on a distant planetoid in the 2012 progenitor to this film. We know David is a part of this story because it is he who dominates the prologue — an echo of scenes between creators and subjects that have recurred in Ridley Scott’s films for almost as long as he has been making them.

And while we’re on the subject of Michael Fassbender’s David, this time Fassbender also plays a newer model synthetic named Walter. Given an American accent and stripped of the capacity to create, Walter is a fascinating character who allows viewers to have more Fassbender in one film than ever before. The scenes between these brother robots are great theater and great science fiction, with at least two triumphant surprises that should delight even the most jaded fan of the series.

Alien: Covenant is simultaneously Fassbender’s Frankenstein and his Island of Doctor Moreau, and this film is batshit crazy — but more like an absinthe bender mixed with that accursed Sight that Nix the Puritan doles out in Clive Barker’s film Lord of Illusions, where you can see living things only as rotting meat. Alien: Covenant is shockingly gory, in a way that unnerves. This is the best reasoning I can come up with as to why there’s no 3-D release for it: Some of what it depicts would be too much for ratings boards to withstand stereoscopically. The Alien films have done a great job, historically, of making viewers doubt the safety and impermeability of their own bodies, and Covenant expands that uncertainty in ways that stick in the back of the neck. 

There is a devotion in Covenant to mining some kind of beauty from the most horrifying of tragedies — whether it’s a severed head slowly turning in a pool of water, the organic way in which a neomorph’s interior jaw slices through a body like a state-of-the-art knife, or a collision between Picasso’s “Guernica” and that “what happened to the old crew” transmission from Event Horizon, which illustrates exactly how much the dynamic of the story has changed. This description may make the film sound over-aestheticized — it is not. But even as it reels back the art history and literature elements that hobbled Prometheus for some viewers (not me), becoming in turn a swift, sleek instrument of death, Covenant is a profound statement of grief.

There are evocations of The Tempest, the Pentateuch and both Shelleys (her Frankenstein, his “Ozymandias”), but only as buttressing for how these characters communicate. The great spark of humanity in this film is the capacity for abstraction. And it is hindered in expressing this by the ragged clip at which stuff happens, the pruning away of anything that could lead a hater to cry “pretentious!” But pretension is not a bad thing; it’s a word invented by people who don’t want to make the effort to engage with material on its own terms.

The issues with the film all reduce to a unifying regret — there’s just not enough room for what’s intriguing and haunting and provocative and revolting. In order to be just a hair over two hours, this beast careens. This is one of the year’s best casts (seriously, Danny McBride deserves some sort of state award for Best Portrayal of a Tennessean, though his Lynchburg-born character does not, sadly, make any reference to Motlow anything), and it feels like we’re barely getting to spend any time with them because so much is happening. 

The marketing for the film even released two prologue shorts to help bolster the filmspace, and they are absolutely essential. Without the “Last Supper” short, we don’t even realize that we actually have gays in space in this movie, which is frustrating but par for the film industry course (thanks for nothing, Russia, China and India — markets known for banning films with depictions of gay characters). Covenant wants to be all things to all viewers, and even when it gets into jumbly action foolishness in the last reel, it still keeps the juggling act going masterfully.

When my screening was over, I was psyched, but cognizant of a lot of the issues that hobble the film. A day later, all I want to do is see it again. If you want to haggle and have it out over its flaws, there will be time for that. But for now, there’s a new Alien film in theaters, and it’s unhinged in a way none of the others ever were.

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