While Prometheus did technically answer the question of the “Space Jockey” first presented in Alien (it was an Engineer, an alien being who created life on Earth), it was clear that the Alien mythos was more of an afterthought for director Ridley Scott, who seemed far more fascinated by the creepy android, David (Michael Fassbender). If you set aside all of the idiotic plotting and moronic characters, Prometheus is about the tragic relationship between creators and creations. Our creators inevitably let us down, and we rebel against them.

Alien: Covenant tries to carry that ball forward, and you can see the circle that Scott was trying to create. The Engineers created man, man created android (specifically David), android kills the engineer, kills man, and creates the xenomorph, which exists to kill everything except David. For Scott, the pull seems to be the relationship between creators and their creations grounded in a fairly strong disdain for mankind. In its broadest strokes, it’s a spin on Paradise Lost with David cast as a Satan figure whose drive is to corrupt and destroy mankind, but done on a physical level (the violence of the xenomorph) as opposed to the spiritual level.

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Image via 20th Century Fox

I suspect that for defenders of Alien: Covenant, the hook of the film will be David’s story and the continuation of the Prometheus mythos, and to be fair, David and his android descendant, Walter (also Fassbender), are the most interesting parts of Alien: Covenant. David is a despicable yet also tragic figure. He’s Frankenstein’s monster who has gone on to create his own monsters. His desire to create has led him down a path to create new monsters, and in that vein, David becomes an engineer of sorts. For Scott, men and xenomorphs are both monsters, but the xenomorphs don’t bother to hide it.

But the Alien franchise now hangs like an albatross around Scott and these prequels, and he lacks the storytelling acumen to effectively translate his theme into a compelling narrative. The result is that everything that’s remotely interesting about Alien: Covenant is buried beneath mind-numbingly stupid characters who make disastrously bad decisions, and everything that’s tied to the Alien mythos is greeted with a shrug because ultimately, the origins of the xenomorph are pointless. They’re not characters; they’re creatures, and Scott can't make them effective symbols.

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Image via 20th Century Fox

One of the main complaints lobbed against Prometheus was that the characters were unforgivably stupid, especially for scientists. Scott hasn’t solved this problem, and instead doubles down on people making obviously bad decisions. When the colony ship Covenant is hit with a neutrino burst that requires repairs, the ship picks up a signal from a nearby planet. With the ship’s original captain is killed in shockwave (watching James Franco burn alive before he’s even had a single line is one of the best things in the film until you think about why a colonization effort is being led by a guy in his 30s), acting captain Oram (Billy Crudup) decides they should investigate the nearby planet rather than go back into hypersleep for 7 years to reach their destination. “No one wants to go back into the pods after what just happened,” he tells a skeptical Daniels (Katherine Waterston), who was in a relationship with the deceased captain and is now second in command.

We’re told that the Covenant has 2,000 colonists and a bunch of embryos as well. We’re also told that their destination, the planet Oregai 6, has been studied and approved for habitation whereas they know nothing about the planet that’s sending out the mysterious signal. The argument of, “I don’t want to go back into my hibernation pod again because something bad could happen,” is pretty weak sauce, especially when faced with the alternative of “Let’s go down to the planet we know nothing about.”

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Image via 20th Century Fox

So naturally, following in the footsteps of the dumb characters from Prometheus, Daniels is outvoted and a majority of the crew goes down to the surface. To be fair, no one gets playful with an obviously dangerous creature like Millburn (Rafe Spall) did in Prometheus, but by the same token, they don’t even bother to wear breathing masks or do any sort of rudimentary tests. They take some guns and some gear and go searching for the signal. We’re supposed to believe that the Weyland Corp is going to fund a massive colonization effort, but when it comes to finding a new planet, the company’s policy is, “Wing it.”

Two crewmembers end up getting infected with deadly spores, and those spores lead to the birth of a new xenomorph that then proceeds to take out more members of the crew until the group is “rescued” by David. Keep in mind that none of this chaos has any stakes. Scott doesn’t really build tension, and he seems to think that the problem people had with Prometheus was that it wasn’t gory enough. So he piles on the gore and chaos, and none of it matters because we don’t care about these characters.

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Image via 20th Century Fox

At this point, I suppose you could argue that the characters’ stupidity is the point—humanity doesn’t deserve to survive, and so our sympathies should lie with David. But that reading doesn’t carry because the surrounding world doesn’t support it. If these 15 people were put in charge of a colonization mission, they wouldn’t be total dummies. And the xenomorph’s ability to kill dumb people makes it less threatening. If the humans have no shot, then they’re no tension and no point. You can’t argue that humanity is unworthy if they’re written that way. There’s no reward for conquering something easily.

After the landing ship is destroyed because one of the crewmembers freaked out and fired a weapon around a bunch of explosives (seriously, were these people hired off Craigslist?), David rounds up the survivors and takes them back to his lair. He lies to them, and we know that David shouldn’t be trusted because we saw Prometheus. And even if you can try and come up with an explanation for why Shaw (Noomi Rapace) would rebuild the android who poisoned her husband and sabotaged the mission, where did she get an android body for David? Were the parts for this highly advanced android just laying around the Engineer ship?

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Now we have dumb characters trusting David, who we know shouldn’t be trusted, and the only one who’s suspicious is Walter, and it’s in these scenes between David and Walter where you can see the weirder, but more interesting movie buried beneath the debris of the Alien franchise. Yes, David telling Walter, “I’ll handle the fingerings,” while teaching him the recorder is bound to illicit some giggles, but there’s at least an emotional pull in this scene. David has rejected humanity (although he pretends he loved Shaw, who he claims died in the crash) but hopes to find some kinship with Walter, and Walter is torn between his connection to David and his duty to the crew.

In these brief scenes, Scott is open to ask some really interesting questions about free will, what makes someone human, and how the act of creation defines both creator and the created. It feels like if Scott could have ditched all of the Alien garbage, this is the film he would have wanted to pursue, but the only way to sell his sci-fi concept was within the body of an Alien movie, and that doesn’t work because xenomorphs don’t require mythology.

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Like a child forced to do chores, Scott keeps dragging us back to the xenomorph picking off idiotic crewmembers. The director doesn’t even seem remotely interested in how these kills go down as long as they’re gory. If you look back at 1979’s Alien, it’s essentially a haunted house film in space, and Scott uses tension to full effect. He’s in a similar situation with Covenant, but the energy is missing. You don’t know who’s getting killed, you don’t care, and there are no stakes beyond trying to figure out what David is up to.

And what he’s up to is using the Covenant crew as lab rats. For all of David’s “intelligence” and ambition, his plan appears to be: send out mysterious signal into the vast expanse of space, hope that someone picks it up, hope that they follow it, hope that they don’t die from xenospores before he can find them, hope that he can lure them back to his lair, hope that he can gain their trust, hope that he can lead them down to a creepy dungeon, and then hope that they’ll lean over a creepy egg so that a facehugger can shove an embryo into the host’s chest. We also know that David is on the Engineer homeworld, and the Engineers discovered space travel, so they probably have the equipment to leave the planet, yet David sits there waiting for his solution to come to him.

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Even if you like the ideas and tone that Scott presents in Alien: Covenant, I don’t know how you reconcile it with such atrocious storytelling. The sheer laziness of writing idiotic characters who never question anything or have much in the way of a personality drags down the entire enterprise. If Scott believes his ideas—half-formed though they are—are worthy of consideration, shouldn’t he build a better vehicle in which to explore them? Shouldn’t Covenant have interesting characters beyond David and Walter, and don’t they deserve a story that makes sense?

Assuming you’re willing to forgive all of the storytelling missteps, you still don’t have cohesive themes to carry you through. There’s a sprinkling of religious subtext, especially with Oram’s faith and the Star of David dangling around Rosenthal’s (Tess Haubrich) neck, but to what end is Scott going for? Even if you cast David in a Satan role, there’s not enough connective tissue to really dig into this revamped version of Paradise Lost. Scott essentially trots out “something, something, Angry Gods, something something, horrific creations,” and hopes you’ll fill in the blanks even tough we have to keep wasting time on a soulless Alien prequel that never develops the core themes.

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Like Prometheus, Alien: Covenant isn't some irredeemable thing.  Scott and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski know how to put together some gorgeous images.  Fassbender continues to knock it out of the park, and Danny McBride, who plays the Covenant's pilot Tennessee, gets to do more than just be the comic relief. The David/Walter stuff hints at a far more interesting movie that never gets a chance to shine. But these brief glimmers of greatness can't outshine the onslaught of bad decisions.

Alien: Covenant tries to split the difference between a Prometheus movie and an Alien movie, and ends up failing at both. There’s not enough Prometheus to carry forward the themes Scott wants to explore, and the Alien material feels perfunctory. If anything, Covenant makes it clear you can’t really divorce Alien from the first four movies. While those four films vary wildly in tone and quality, they share two important aspects—Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and sympathy for working class people who have been made to suffer at the hands of an indifferent power. Prometheus and Alien: Covenant have lost sight of that, instead assuming that what audiences want is a muddled creation myth packed with easily disposable morons.

Rating: D+

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