For day number one thousand three hundred, I went and watched the latest installment of the “Alien” franchise: Alien: Covenant
Now…if you you recall…the last alien movie, Prometheus, made me want to burn Hollywood to the ground. This one wasn’t much better, but it *was* better. Mostly my reaction to this one were some giggles and eye-rolling, not rage grunting or gnashing of teeth.
It’s a fun enough movie. You don’t need to see it, but you’ll be mildly entertained if you do, laughing at these stupid, stupid (and I mean really stupid) people who definitely never should have been given their little space badges and sent out on a space scouts camping trip. That was just a recipe for disaster. They needed some adults in the room. Ther is not a subtle bone in this movie’s body, which would be fine if the movie didn’t take itself seriously…unfortunately it does. The movie is also astonishingly alien-less overall. Seriously. Alien screen-time is disappointingly low.
But, we have some new alien births, we do have a couple fun alien fights, we have a face-hugger in the med bay which is always fun, and we do get to see some old friends from times gone past.
At the end of the day, however…these movies are ruining the franchise. I really mean that. Ruining it. There are some revelations in the movie about where the xenomorph we know and love actually comes from, and I realized tonight that I don’t WANT to know where it comes from. I never did. Ever. It never needed to be explained, and in fact, it was BETTER when I didn’t know. It was just an alien that was stronger, faster, smarter than any animal we’d ever encountered, we didn’t know where the fuck it came from, we just knew it was terrifying. The unknown-ness of it added to our fear of it.
Mystique is a magical and very temperamental thing. It requires the perfect balance of explanation and mystery. If you can find that balance, it’s one of the most incredibly captivating parts of storytelling. We never needed to know where the force came from…it just was. Who it chose and why, we never knew, because it was unknowable. We only knew its power. It didn’t matter where that power came from, it was there.
I don’t care where the aliens came from, and how they came to be. I only care about how they might kill me and how I might kill them. That’s the story-contract the Alien franchise is built on, and they’re breaking that contract now. And I hate it.
So, was Covenant a shit show? Not utterly and completely. But a decent amount of it was. Most notably because of its relentlessly inept and stupid heroes. It was predictable, often to a fault and sometimes to satisfaction; it does deliver some fun that its immediate predecessor never did…but the sum total is nowhere close to a good movie.
Watch it on Netflix or HBO or on BluRay and just have lowered expectations – that is definitely the best way to watch this movie and actually enjoy yourself doing it. Just don’t think to hard about the original first two…which increasingly look like goddamn masterpieces of cinema.