I'm starting to wonder if there's some sort of
clandestine competition running in Hollywood at the moment to determine who can
deep-six their own franchise the quickest, hardest or in the most irrevocable
fashion. George Lucas decided the legacy of Star Wars was fit only to wipe a
child's snotty nose with (or potentially other, less family friendly ablutions
depending on your opinions), Arnie has been demeaning audiences and himself
alike in the Terminator saga for years and shows no sign of stopping, being reasoned
with or crawling into a hydraulic press; Michael Bay started Transformers in
average fashion but has pile-driven it into the concrete so hard even I'm on
the fence about the Last Knight. It's hard to pick a front runner, especially
if you take into account things like Pirates of the Caribbean which is
apparently back on form or Fast and Furious which is a licence to print money
but have such a reek of horse shit about them I'm surprised you don't get a
nosebag of popcorn free with each ticket. That's actually a fairly awesome
idea, someone needs to get on it.
Ridley Scott is the latest entrant into Celebrity
Franchise Death Match and it's a crying shame because some of his movies are
absolute classics, and by and large he is considered to be one of the better
directors working today. How is it that the man who bought us Bladerunner,
Gladiator and Black Hawk Down also brought us the giant, hulking space-turd
that was Prometheus? And why did he see fit to extend our misery with giant,
hulking, space turd number two, affectionately known as Alien: Covenant?
Perhaps we will never know.
If you've been here before (thanks for sticking
around, kudos to you!) you'll know I don't tend to do spoiler warnings, because
most of the crap I'm spouting is based on movies people have had ample time to
watch. This time though, Covenant is still out in the cinemas so you might not
have got round to it yet. Therefore:
BE YE WARNED!
What follows will undoubtedly contain huge spoilery
nuggets of misery for Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. Go no further weary
traveller, if you don't want to prematurely have all the juicy bits ruined,
scrunched into a sopping wet ball of hatred and slathered liberally about your
monitor. Also note that what follows is not going to be pleasant...
So, Alien: Covenant then.
I think we were all hoping that this would be a bit
of a return to form for both director and franchise after Prometheus. We were expecting
more Xenomorphs to start with and hopefully in my case at least less lazy
reliance on the multi-instrumentalist of the extra-terrestrial bio-weapons
trade, your favourite and mine, on tour for only another four or five films (as
and when the revenue dries up) ladies and gentlemen, puts your hands together
for The Black Goo! Sadly all those hopes are shattered from basically moment
one. The pre-credits sequence seems like it's basically only there to explain
why all the stupidity of Prometheus happened and to assure us there is a point
to all this. Weyland is a power-hungry jerk with a fear of dying, we get it.
David probably ought to have a "rejected" stamp on his forehead and
be covered in dust somewhere in storage. At least it's only brief before we get
to the obligatory title reveal, bar by agonisingly slow bar. At least in Alien
there are only 12 bits of letter to get through, Alien: Covenant takes about a week to
show us the title of the film that I'm pretty sure we all know seeing as we
just bought tickets for it. Or illegally downloaded it you Philistines. It
might seem like a small consideration but it's a microcosm of the real problem
with these sequels; they're relying so heavily on the good will left over from
the originals they almost forget to have an identity of their own. I can only
assume that each new instalment will be named after the main space vessel,
Prometheus, Covenant, some other pretentious metaphorical moniker.
The first third of Covenant is slow. Really slow.
80 year old driving on a Sunday down a country road in light mist slow. It's
also basically the opening to Alien with added colonists and much shinier kit.
It's the exact same stupid retroactive technological upgrades that were the
second dumbest thing about the Star Wars prequels; everything they filmed in
the 70s and 80s was clunky and built out of model tank kits. Everything they do
now is all shiny and CG. Take the hyper sleep chambers. Dot matrix screens in
the originals, touchscreens and dream recording in the prequels. Whoever is
responsible for the continuity on these things needs to take a good long look
at their life choices. So instead of a distress call, the Covenant randomly
picks up a scrambled message that somehow the random Southern hick stereotype
recognises as a song and of they go to what we know is their eventual doom on a
planet that just happens to have the crashed Space Jockey ship Shaw and the
disembodied head of David escaped in last time round. A universe as infinitely
large as it is and they just happen to encounter a random solar flare within
striking distance of a major plot device? Peddle your wares elsewhere my boy,
I'm just not buying it.
It's odd though. This is clearly more Prometheus
sequel than Alien prequel, but it seems pretty determined to apologise for all
the stuff people seemed to hate about Prometheus and add more stuff from Alien
whilst simultaneously doing all the same crap bits. For example, why is
everyone that gets sent into Space an absolute and relentless moron? Ship's
pilot willing to risk the integrity of the ship’s hull after being told
specifically not to by basically everyone? Idiot. Landing crew happy to prod
completely unknown space mushrooms mere inches from their own faces? Idiots.
Ripley clone geologist who thinks it's a great idea to head out onto the deck
of a drop ship to try and physically hunt down a xenomorph which clearly has superior dexterity and agility? Idiot. Not to mention the wailing cretin who
blows up the entire drop ship because aiming a firearm is obviously way much
more hassle than just firing wildly in all directions regardless of
environment. Probably ruptured the cooling system... wait, I've seen that
before somewhere too. Hmm...
I'm still trying to work out which is the worse
film, because there is so much terrible stuff going on in both. Quite aside
from the actual origin of the xenomorphs (which I truly believe ruins the
entire mythos of the franchise) the proto-aliens look like bubble gum creatures
rejected from a Silent Hill game and we're once again riddled with
inconsistencies and plot holes. How did Shaw put David back together again?
Pretty sure she was an archaeologist/anthropologist not a cybernetics expert
working on an alien ship with presumably alien tools and apparently enough
spare synthetic parts to get the job done. Why did David arbitrarily decide to
wipe out an entire population of people and seem upset to do it? The Black Goo
is at it again, now neither impregnating you with a squid, nor mutating you
into a walking dumpster fire, nor breaking down your DNA to start new life, now
if you inhale it, it just gestates and pops a nasty out of your back
within the hour. At least the customer service is good and you don't have to
wait long. Facehuggers make a long awaited return, but now apparently don't
need much more than a few seconds to lay their embryo, which begs the question:
why do they wait so long in the originals? It takes hours for Cain to get his
chestburster groove on, but we get a guy stuck for about ten seconds and
rescued who then later, conveniently for the plot if not for him, unexpectedly
bursts chest. How does a synthetic with self-repairing qualities lose a fight
when he's clearly in top position landing the more effective striking and his
opponent is rocked? On that topic, why are none of the subsequent canonical
synthetics self-repairing? Or less human as Walter himself states when telling
David he was basically a big old mistake. Ash: not self-repairing, very human.
Bishop: not self-repairing, very human. It's like Ridley Scott either didn't
actually direct it or he didn't go back to his own source material. Rookie
error.
I would be remiss, my good friends not to mention
the flute scene at this point. I am however a bit at a loss for words. Suffice
it to say it's the most homo-erotic scene I've ever witnessed in a
non-pornographic movie whilst simultaneously the most awkward. I'm not
unaccustomed to terrible puns and sexual innuendo, but why in the name of all
that's holy do we need to be subjected to this in the middle of an
action/horror movie? Blow gently on the end, let me do the fingering, put your
fingers on the holes, not so much teeth. OK I may have made up that last one.
It's either designed to be oddly sexual (David has become a touch rapey whilst
doing his Robinson Crusoe bit) or it's unintentional and I just have a filthy
mind. It actually had me laughing out loud by the end, mainly in sheer
disbelief.
Such is the denouement that here are bound to be
more of these, but sadly they aren't going to get any better. We still haven't
seen LV-426, we haven't had any real or satisfying answers to any of the
questions we had and frankly I've given up looking for them. They've given us
such an over-worked (but somehow weirdly anaemic) back story for the xenomorphs
that genuinely think they should have left it well alone. Or just taken off and
nuked the site from orbit. Just to be sure.
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