Movie Review: Alien Covenant

Here's the thing with prequels: I'm actually pretty hard pressed to think of any that I loved more than the original - in fact, it may be fair to say:

You should see any movie that later had a prequel made, as for the prequel, it's kind of up to you.

Now, as my wife quickly pointed out to me, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly are both technically prequels, as they occur before the earlier film that introduced the main character - so maybe take my earlier statement as a guideline rather than a hard and fast rule.

Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant is both a sequel to the 2012 film Prometheus and a prequel to the Alien Franchise. The film follows the crew of the Covenant, a ship bringing two thousand cryosleeping colonists to a new world who, after a solar flare accident, find a signal coming from a nearby world and decide to investigate it. As with more and more genre films these days, the production company released a number of crew videos and even a short bridging film connecting Alien: Covenant directly to Prometheus ahead of the films release. At this point I haven't seen any of those, preferring to watch and review the film on its own merits.

The action is pretty great, the creatures are terrifying and the crew does a nice job of portraying space truckers. I left the film quite impressed with how it was all put together, but a week later, and I'm feeling a little confused as to my current state. On the one hand, as a fan of the original film, I'm happy to revisit a world I've enjoyed a number of times, on the other hand, much of this film felt either like a retread or giving too much backstory to a creature that should remain mysterious. I will say that I was interested enough to see if there was a novelization (there is) and to add it to my used-bookstore wish list.

After all, an examination of the Alien franchise could be an October theme month some year.

Genre Character of the Week: David 8

Last weekend I went to check out the new film Prometheus with my mother, brother, youngest daughter and BFF.  The movie is a prequel to the 1979 Horror/Science Fiction classic, Alien. In structure it was not unlike last years The Thing, in that it wanted to be a frightening film on its own, as well as a set up for the events of the earlier film (Sorry to get a little film-nerdy here, but there’s an interested connection between the two films – The Thing (1982) director John Carpenter and Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon went to film school together and both dreamed of remaking the classic Howard Hawkes 1951 film The Thing from Another Worldand although they went their separate ways before they could do it together, both Alien andThe Thing are very heavily influenced by the earlier film).  Although Prometheus was not a perfect film, it did introduce me to this week’s genre character, David 8.

Played by actor Michael Fassbender, David 8 is an android created by Weyland Industries, which (mild spoiler of Alien, Aliens, Alien3, and Alien Resurrection) means that he should be carefully watched, as androids in these films tend to range from strangely helpful to brutally homicidal.  What I liked best about the character was his very near-human status.  By this I mean that he came across as almost a perfect human being, but sat on just the other side of creepy the whole way through.  Some of this I comes from the script and direction, but honestly it was the acting that blew me away.  For a character that seems very helpful, he’s just got this strange undercurrent of “other” that gave me a serious case of the creeps.

This Is why I’m not a big fan of robots in film– from The Terminator to Data (and no, I haven’t seen every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but I did see the end of one where he KILLS HIS OWN BROTHER!!! – whoops – mild spoiler again - right after the brother says “I love you”), I mean sure, there are some nice robots in film (Terminator 2, WALL-E, That busted up thing from The Black Hole), but generally if you’ve introduced robots into your SF story it’s to have them programmed to kill, or to break their kind programming and kill (I don’t know about you, but for me the military was totally in the right in trying to track down and destroy the laser-armed killbot known as Johnny 5 in Short Circuit).

Wait a second, where was I?  Right – David 8, creepy performance, and also the reason I won’t be buying a Roomba anytime soon.