ALIEN COVENANT Review
ALIEN COVENANT barely left anything of an impression on me. Sitting there, drinking my iced tea, I kept thinking why it wasn’t setting me on fire. I mean, it’s Ridley Scott and xenomorphs. This should be a no-brainer. I really enjoyed PROMETHEUS, and COVENANT is a sequel to that film — like ALIENS was a sequel to ALIEN. There’s craftsmanship, and wonderful set dec and a moody atmosphere, some really great action sequences and really nasty ways to die.
But in ALIENS, we care about Ripley. We’re following her as not just as a character, but as a catharsis for any one of us who have lived with personal trauma and are doing our best to regain some kind of peace with it. She and her plight are universal. ALIENS, as a sequel, is a vehicle about a character.
COVENANT (as a sequel) is a vehicle for world-building plot exposition. That’s all. I could mull it over, if I had the time, and make a beat chart on how the themes equate to Frankenstein or Paradise Lost, but you know what? At the end of the day, COVENANT’s primary concern is just in creating a thread-line of plot between other movies. It’s a two-hour fill-in-the-back-story exercise. That’s it. And that, sorry to say, is fucking boring.
