Alien prequel all too familiar
If it feels like you’ve seen Covenant before, Chris Knight explains, that’s because you have (sort of).
ALIEN: COVENANT ★★★ 1/2 out of 5 Cast: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup Director: Ridley Scott Duration: 2 h 2 min
There’s been a recent trend for long-awaited, so-called sequels to function as remakes in everything but name. Think of Jurassic World, which hit many of the same beats as Jurassic Park; Terminator Genisys, a do-over of the first Terminator movie, with a new wrinkle in time; or Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which even its most delirious fans ( guilty) admitted was a lot like the original Star Wars.
These movies have tended to receive grudgingly good reviews and generous box-office numbers, which is enough for Hollywood to see the trend as a good thing that must continue. And so here comes Alien: Covenant, which combines a whole lot of DNA from the 1979 original with very little of the Chariots of the Gods mysticism from the most recent chapter, 2012’s Prometheus.
That one featured a vessel of exploration, and a fascinating humanoid robot named David, played by Michael Fassbender. This one opens with a flashback to David’s time with his creator (Guy Pearce), to show us how the statuesque android got his name. We then move forward to AD 2104. That’s about 10 years after the events of Prometheus, but still quite a few years before the original Alien.
Yet another ship, the Covenant, is plying the stars. This one carries terraforming equipment and a hold full of colonists (some adults, others mere embryos) in suspended animation, destined for a world they hope will be habitable.
The ship also features a small crew, conveniently paired off into married couples. (A two-person trip to Mars might be similarly staffed.) Plus Walter, a David lookalike but a newer model with fewer megalomaniacal or messianic tics. It’s as if your next iPhone didn’t do as much on-the-sly downloading and updating as your last one; I know, but this is science-fiction.
When a stellar event knocks the ship for a loop, the crew has a rude awakening — all except the captain (James Franco in cameo), who dies in the disaster. That leaves Oram (Billy Crudup) in charge. He’s a “man of faith,” an intriguing concept given that the screenplay takes the time to point it out, but frustrating in that it never elaborates on it, even to say which faith it is.
Before they can resume course, they intercept a human signal from a planet even nicer than the one they were headed to. Which is how they come to find David, sole survivor of the Prometheus, rambling around in a cavernous home that looks like a mix of a Victorian gentleman scientist’s study, a condemned H.R. Giger bar, and Pompeii circa AD 80.
Each android is fascinated with his newfound “brother,” but before you can say “fratricide is a gas,” the aliens show up, having found yet another way to infect humans, as well as relying on the standard jack-in-the-box egg pods.
Crudup does a fantastic, hesitating performance as a man who clearly wasn’t cut out of captain cloth, and Katherine Waterston excels as the captain’s widow, a kind of nouveau Ripley, even copying Sigourney Weaver’s allbusiness haircut from the Alien sequels. And the rest of the crew — Danny McBride as the cowboyhat-wearing Tennesseen, Carmen Ejogo as Oram’s wife, etc. — have just enough development to register as people, before a number of them register as alien snacks.
I liked Covenant, a lot. Even at a shade over two hours the pacing never drags, and there are some clever nods to the original (one of those drinking bird toys) and some marvellous new touches, such as David’s homemade flute and cabinet of alien curiosities. He’s like an explorer of old whose fascination with the jungle has slowly morphed into a kind of madness.
And yet I couldn’t help but think in the days following the screening that I’d seen 70 per cent of this before. It’s a problem with the Alien franchise, whose design — flashing lights, dark corridors, teeth-within-teeth, moisture everywhere — has so seeped into our collective SF/horror imaginations that it feels like it’s always been in there.
Scott deserves credit for this; Alien and his next film, Blade Runner, have become templates for a certain kind of futuristic dystopia. It’s hardly a criticism to note that he, like so many others, has chosen to crib from that style himself.
IT’S A MONSTER MASH UP ORIGINS STORY
The latest picture is Scott’s third in the Alien series and tends to reference his 1979 original in tone and intention. That means the film has a high body count, lots of splatter, dimly lit kill spaces and a birthplace conceit.
CASTING A WIDE NET AS A DEMOGRAPHIC MENU
The ensemble of actors features a range of performers. Billy Crudup is aboard for the stage and screen folks. Danny McBride and James Franco attract the R-rated hipster doofus crowd. The new millennial maven Katherine Waterston does her Ripley impersonation, with apologies to Sigourney Weaver. Back from Prometheus is Michael Fassbender who’s another synth-fellow with the capacity for sneaking roguish asides into conversation.
STRETCHING A CINEMATIC REFERENCE TO THE BEYOND ZONE
McBride’s talkative Tennessee character wears a cowboy hat. It is supposed to recall Slim Pickins’ B-52 bomber pilot from the antiwar satire, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
THE QUÉBÉCOIS ASSISTANCE
Alien: Covenant filmed for 74 days in Sydney, Australia, and on location in Milford Sound, New Zealand. Some of the movie ship was constructed on Sydney sound stages with the rest filled in with digital effects. Three special effects companies, including Framestore from Montreal, handled the task. The Quebec effects shop recently worked on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and will do some upcoming highprofile films, including Blade Runner 2049.
THE POTENTIAL TAKE FOR THE LATEST ALIEN
While Prometheus managed an OK opening weekend near US$51 million, Alien: Covenant is expected to hit about $40 million, and fall short of the Prometheus global total of $403.4 million. bthompson@postmedia.com