Monday, May 29, 2017

"Alien: Covenant"

                                      ½                                      

There isn't a single moment of fear or dread in Alien: Covenant, which is just one of the many ways it is barely a distant echo of the original 1979 terror-in-space movie and its 1986 teeth-jangling sequel.  There isn't even a moment of any real surprise or discovery, just a lot of visual references to those original movies and an uncomfortable continuation of a story begun in the plodding Prometheus.

Prometheus, if you forgot, and it would be easy to forget, is a film that finally answers the never-really-asked questions of how the mysterious alien spaceship from that very first film ended up on the planet.  The explanation had to do with a race of giant humanoids who wanted to create things like the gods but ended up creating the alien, or something like that.  It's not flippant to say I don't remember: I don't.  A lot has happened in five years that distracted me from keeping the plot details of a quasi-Alien prequel at the top of my mind.  Frequently, I don't make it to the grocery store without forgetting half of the things I came for, so recalling the names and functions of all the characters from a middling movie made five years ago is beyond my mental capacity.  That's what I get for being middle-aged.

If I didn't much care for Prometheus, then why see Alien: Covenant?  Maybe it's like Barack Obama said: Hope.  One look at that long, sleek black head and those dripping teeth and you think about Ripley fighting off marauding hordes of them while carrying Newt through that about-to-explode building, and you think about how scary that first Alien movie was, and you think, "I've got to give this another chance."

Or, maybe it was just social-media peer pressure, insisting I forget about Prometheus (believe me, I've tried my best) and also the Alien vs. Predator movies, which I've thankfully never seen except in snippets on some FXXXXJr. channel at 4:30 on a Sunday afternoon, and about Alien 3 (which gave us David Fincher, so it's not all bad) and also about the one with Winona Ryder.  Maybe I just got too carried away with the prospect, at long last, of another proper Alien movie directed by Ridley Scott.

Then, even before the first scene finished, most of that goodwill got jettisoned into space just like the Alien always seems to do, and by the end of the first 30 minutes the rest of it was gone, too, but I stayed on to the end, hoping and hoping and hoping something would be different.

The first scene is a joyless one, in which David (Michael Fassbender), the android from Prometheus, talks to his creator in a moment, we come to realize, that takes place many years in the past.  Then we meet the crew of the Covenant, a spaceship that is en route (for reasons never explained or even hinted at) to a distant planet to colonize it with 2,000 humans and 1,200 embryos, and apparently absolutely no training at all in science or exploration.

After the Covenant has a deep-space accident, the ship receives a static-filled distress call that -- really, as much as you may think so, I am not making any of this up to make it sound worse than it is -- the cowboy-hat-wearing Southerner named "Tennessee" instantly interprets as ... wait for it ... John Denver's Take Me Home, Country Roads.  What that means, of course, is that the crew decides right then and there that they've got to investigate, which maybe they might not have done so quickly if it had been a different 1970s artist.  Would Neil Diamond be so fondly remembered in 200 years?  Absent a crew member with big hair and eyeliner, would the Covenant have just floated right by a transmission emitted to the beat of a KISS song?

As any team of highly trained scientists would do, they decide they're going to scrap the mission they've all been training decades for and go ahead and just land on that new planet because, well, they're lazy.  (No, seriously, one of the crew members says something like, "Dang, we don't wanna get back in those sleep pods, we're bored already.")  So, without doing a shred of scouting, without donning any sort of protective gear -- not even the kind eighth-graders have to wear in chemistry labs -- and with absolutely no knowledge of this new planet whatsoever, they pay a visit.

Remember in the first Alien when John Hurt and Veronica Cartwright put on those amazing-looking but cumbersome spacesuits to investigate the source of the beacon?   Remember how the rest of the crew wouldn't let them in after the face-hugger burst out of that egg and latched itself to poor John Hurt?  Yeah, well, none of that happens here.  The crew of the Covenant puts on some L.L. Bean gear and starts walking around the planet they know nothing about.  One of them even -- no, I swear I am not making this up -- stops to pee and have a cigarette.

Bad stuff happens.  It gets worse when the really idiotic pilot of the landing ship decides to one of the blood-spitting, fast-dying crew members back on board, then accidentally blows up the ship when the alien bursts out of him.  So, the rest of the crew, wearing some fleece-lined corduroy outdoor jackets, is left behind.  Another one of them is infected, too, and just when you hope these really stupid people will be trapped on the planet forever, the lights will come up and the credits will roll just to be kind and save everyone from having to sit through the rest of the movie, you realize: This isn't even halfway over.

So, if you're still reading this, let me ask you a question: Have you ever heard the "brick joke," which begins with a guy building a house and realizing he has one too many bricks and throwing the last one over his shoulder, which appears to be the dumbest punchline ever, then the joke-teller tells one or two seemingly unrelated jokes, then the final one has a punchline that is something like: "The brick from the very first joke!"

Well, that's Alien: Covenant.  Because who should pop out of the middle of the wilderness but David, the humanoid robot from Prometheus and this film's prologue, who proceeds to take Alien: Covenant in a most distracting direction as he uncomfortably flirts with himself (in the guise of Walter, the Covenant's shipboard robot, also played by Fassbender) and starts spouting off some philosophies about being able to create life.  He also talks a lot about the lead character of Prometheus, and if you don't remember who that is or why she was important, Alien: Covenant isn't going to help you.

This part of the movie is a direct sequel to Prometheus, giving way, finally, to a third section that deals with the surviving crew's escape from the planet.  But at that point it had lost me.  The sheer stupidity of its main characters coupled with its inscrutable, endless references to Prometheus left me in a state that a science-fiction-horror-thriller should never leave its audience: bored.  I didn't care what happened to the crew, and I didn't care if I never see another Alien movie again.

Except Alien and Aliens.  At least we have those.  Forever.


Viewed May 29, 2017 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

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