Alien: Covenant

Ridley Scott didn't really want to make another Alien movie; he wanted to make a high-budget Gothic tragedy about a blonde android with a God complex who hates his dad. Alien: Covenant is the result of what happens when a legendary director’s philosophical ambitions collide with a studio’s desperate need to put a Xenomorph back on a movie poster. It is a beautiful, frustrating, and occasionally hilarious mess that has spent the last few years aging into a fascinating cult curiosity.

I watched this in a theater where the air conditioning was cranked so high I had to wrap my legs in my own jacket, which oddly added to the cold, sterile dread of the Covenant ship. While the person three seats over was audibly struggling with a bag of sun-dried tomato chips, I was trying to figure out if I was watching a slasher flick or a deep-dive into Milton’s Paradise Lost.

The Fassbender Double Feature

The absolute best reason to watch this film is Michael Fassbender. He pulls double duty as Walter, the loyal and slightly lobotomized "evolved" android, and David, the surviving antagonist from Prometheus who has spent the last decade growing a magnificent head of hair and experimenting on local wildlife.

The scenes between the two of them are the film's backbone. There is a specific moment where David teaches Walter how to play the flute—leading to the legendary, unintentional meme line about David "doing the fingering"—that is so intensely homoerotic and bizarre it feels like it drifted in from a different movie entirely. The film is essentially $100 million gothic fan-fiction about a robot who wants to play God, and Fassbender sells every single second of it with terrifying, icy precision.

High-Art Ambition vs. Slasher Logic

The plot follows the crew of a colony ship diverted to a "perfect" planet after a space mishap. Katherine Waterston steps into the "Ripley" role as Daniels, and while she’s a capable actor, the script doesn't give her half the meat Fassbender gets to chew on. Then there’s Billy Crudup as Oram, a man of faith whose primary character trait is making the worst possible decision in any given room.

This brings me to my biggest gripe: the crew's survival instincts are non-existent. We are talking about a group of scientists who seemingly graduated from the Prometheus School of Running Away from Things in Straight Lines. Within minutes of landing on an alien world, they are sticking their faces into vibrating eggs and walking around without helmets. It’s hard to feel the "horror" when you’re busy yelling at the screen. However, if you view the film as David’s "art project" and the humans as merely his unwilling supplies, the stupidity starts to feel like part of the dark comedy.

Blood, Guts, and Goblin Sharks

When the horror actually hits, it hits hard. The "back-burster" sequence in the med-bay is a masterpiece of tension and practical-leaning effects. It’s frantic, slippery, and genuinely upsetting. Ridley Scott still knows how to frame a kill better than almost anyone in the business. The new creature, the Neomorph, was actually inspired by the Goblin Shark, and its pale, translucent skin makes it look far more ghostly and "wrong" than the classic black Xenomorph.

The cinematography by Dariusz Wolski is breathtaking. He captures the New Zealand landscapes with a moody, overcast palette that makes the planet look like a graveyard even before the monsters show up. It’s a gorgeous film to look at, even when what you’re looking at is a guy's head being bitten off in a shower.

Stuff You Might Not Know

The Franco Cameo: James Franco appears as the ship's original captain, but he’s dead within the first ten minutes. He reportedly filmed more for "viral" marketing videos, but in the actual movie, he’s basically just an expensive piece of toast. The Wheat Field: The crew finds a field of wheat on the planet, which is a major plot point. The production actually planted that wheat in New Zealand specifically for the film, only for it to be nearly destroyed by a storm right before filming. The Original Title: Before it was Covenant, the film was titled Alien: Paradise Lost. You can still feel that DNA in the final product—it’s much more interested in the "Fall of Man" than it is in being a simple space-bug movie. The Neomorph Birth: To get the right "visceral" (sorry, I mean gnarly) reaction from the actors in the med-bay scene, the creature puppets were often hidden or moved unexpectedly to keep the cast on edge. * Fassbender’s Flute: Yes, Michael really learned how to play the flute for the role. Method acting at its most melodic.

Alien: Covenant is the kind of movie that is better discussed over a beer than watched as a serious piece of canon. It’s a gorgeous, mean-spirited, and wildly ambitious bridge between the "smart" sci-fi of Prometheus and the "scary" sci-fi of the 1979 original. While the humans are mostly there to be fodder for David’s ego, the sheer craft on display makes it a trip worth taking. It’s not the masterpiece Alien fans wanted, but it’s the weird, nihilistic experiment we probably deserved.