Alien: Covenant Review

Needless to say there are major spoilers ahead.

I suppose it’s probably a bit weird to watch a film just because a certain actor/actress you like is in it, but we all do it. I only watched the dire M. Night Shymalan’s Split for my hero and all-time bae, James McAvoy, and I only watched Assassin’s Creed for the chiseled god that is Michael Fassbender. So, naturally, when I saw the trailer for Alien: Covenant featuring the one and only Fassy, I had to go and see it.

Now I watched Prometheus back in 2012 when I was a little fifteen-year-old, and I found it to be the weirdest, most confusing film I’d ever seen. Every single question was left unanswered and Charlize Theron died in the most Scooby-Doo way imaginable, running forwards into the path of a falling ship rather than to the side away from it. I loved the film’s soundtrack, and the acting in it was reasonably good, but the film was so confusing I just got irritated by it (plus the jump scares were so easy to foresee it was embarrassing). But now I know why it was so convoluted; Prometheus basically existed to set up Alien: Covenant.

The film starts with Michael Fassbender as the robot David in a creepy white room with a piano and a pot of tea. Again, confusing, but we can basically figure out that David is a super-intelligent being – this is very important as the film progresses. Change scene to a spaceship containing a covenant of about 2,000 people and a load of embryos being overseen by Michael Fassbender playing another robot called Walter; the ship’s human crew are all in hibernation pods as their journey to a new planet is set to be seven years long. Standard. But they get in some sort of awful space accident and all have to be woken up ahead of schedule, with the exception of crew member James Franco, whose pod wouldn’t open, making him to burn to death as the pod caught fire. This left his wife, Daniels, grieving and mopey for the rest of the film. But she is our main human character, and we know she’s smart because she can do tech-y stuff on the ship and she thinks it’s a silly idea to change the ship’s course.

Why does this matter? The ship’s captain, who was so dislikeable I can’t remember his name, wanted to follow a rogue transmission of ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ (relatable, to be fair) that the ship had picked up. This was obviously a very bad idea – what if the ‘ghost’ they were chasing turned out to be evil? What if they failed their mission to reach the new planet by going off-course? But, for reasons I can only chalk down to ‘plot’, the crew listens to their dreary captain and follows the transmission. They end up at a new, very pretty-looking mountainous planet that just so happens to have terrible weather and violent storms. In literature, we’d call this pathetic fallacy.

So the crew go on an exploration of the planet, which turns out to be the setting of Prometheus as we get a nice little throwback shot of the ship that squashed Charlize Theron. We also see stuff that Doctor Elizabeth Shaw left behind. Very sad. Then one crew member came across some weird plant thing that looked like an egg, prodded it (amateur) and released a load of particles. This is where the action starts, with the sexiest shot ever of this evil particle going down the guy’s ear and burrowing into his body. The particles turn out to be the signature alien – you know, the one that needs a human host in order to develop – as we discovered ten minutes later when the thing burst out of the poor bloke’s body in scenes that made childbirth look like something from a Carry On film. Absolutely harrowing, gross stuff. It was made worse by the two girls stuck with the bloke screaming, crying and running around, convincingly portraying utter terror, even though it was immensely unfair of the blonde girl to lock the other girl in a room with the guy who had the alien exploding out of him. Either way they all died, for in her panic, the blonde girl shot at the alien with a gun, missed, and hit a gas tank that exploded the ship. Luckily hope remained back in space on the Covenant; they had spare ships and a few of their crew had remained behind.

Alas, what’s left of the crew back on the planet (and that really isn’t a lot, the alien goes absolutely crazy on them all) by none other than David, who’s wearing a cape and has long, greasy hair. He takes them all to where he’s been living, aka the Engineers’ (from Prometheus, think of the bald albino people) palace. And this is where all of my dreams came true; Michael Fassbender (as Walter) talking to Michael Fassbender (as David). These scenes are very weird and intense yet absolutely brilliant because they’re so chilling and obviously well-acted, as well as featuring erotically playing a recorder. It was fascinating to see the cold, unfeeling robot talk to the robot that developed feelings and went super evil and calculating. It was just intense. “Wouldn’t it be great if they kissed?” I jokingly asked my friend Kai, who probably thought I was mental for thinking it. And I know people used to go on about Leonardo DiCaprio never getting his Oscar, but seriously, where is Michael Fassbender’s? The man’s a genius!

I’ll sum up the rest of the plot as the aliens keep sprouting and picking off the crew one by one, in scenes that are very predictable and more loud than scary. But why are there so many aliens? Turns out evil David was experimenting with particles and killed every single Engineer by releasing billions of them into the air. He’s been playing with their genetics, trying to create super aliens like some sort of weird God. When Walter discovers this and confronts David, in scenes that are literally perfect, the robots actually kissed (called it) before David stabbed Walter in the throat. I swear my jaw nearly broke because it dropped so violently. It was brilliant.

Walter doesn’t die though, as he is the newer-made, superior robot, and we get to see spectacular Fassbender vs. Fassbender action, with Walter emerging victorious. As the remaining crew members tried to escape the planet there was a great spaceship-rooftop showdown against an alien, in which Daniels finally acts as a tough chick rather than a crying mess. Then there’s another disaster with the alien getting into the spaceship through hosting in someone’s body, and after some intense chasing Daniels manages to blast the ‘son of a bitch’ back into space. I could elaborate, but these are scenes you should watch rather than reading about because they’re genuinely that suspense-filled. And just when you think the film’s over and those remaining will be ok, in the most obvious plot twist literally ever, Daniels realises who she believed to be Walter is actually David, just as he’s shutting her back in her hibernation pod. He infects the embryos with alien eggs, all the while looking pleased as punch, before the film comes to an end on a certainly intriguing cliff-hanger.

This film was definitely not perfect, and still had plot holes in it and misgivings. But overall, I’ll give this film three out of five stars, purely because Fassy raised the calibre of acting immensely and was just fabulous in his performances. Plus, the penultimate scenes of the alien chasing through the spaceship are genuinely quite gripping. If you aren’t an Alien or Fassbender fan though, maybe give this one a miss.

Image accessed at http://collider.com/tag/alien-covenant/