It's almost as if Scott had an idea for a movie and a budget in mind and the studio said "no," so he came back with "OK, but what if it was also an 'Alien' movie?" and they just handed over a sack of cash with a dollar sign on it and said, "Hey, go nuts."Īlien: Covenant continues exploring the ideas raised by Prometheus, better synthesizing those questions and the "Alien mythos in the process. And, on top of that, it's glommed on to - for no discernible reason - the Alien mythos that Scott helped give birth to in 1979. This is weighty stuff! Unfortunately, it has to compete with a second film, a body-horror-slash-action picture filled with some of the most unpleasantly dimwitted cinematic creations this side of a Friday the 13th picture. "Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?" David asks, a mixture of quiet desperation and wicked amusement creeping into his robotic eyes. "We made you because we could," Charlie replies, dismissively. "Why do you think your people made me?" David asks scientist Charlie (Logan Marshall-Green).
One exchange helpfully sums up the film's ethos. This is nothing compared with the relationship between the Engineers - the giant, hairless beings who created humanity that Weyland and the crew of the Prometheus discover in an almost-empty alien ship - and humanity as we learn in Prometheus," the Engineers were on their way back to Earth to wipe out mankind, possibly for killing Christ.
The relationship between Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) and his android creation David (Michael Fassbender) is fraught, the robot hoping to both please his creator and also transcend the limitations of his programming. It's a movie that asks a simple question - what if you found your maker and realized he hated you, thought you were a mistake? - and does so in an often compelling fashion. The most frustrating thing about Prometheus is that it felt as if it were two different movies forced to mate before being injected into the gullet of a third, unrelated property.Īt its best, Prometheus feels like a two-hour disquisition into the nature of creation and man's relationship to his maker. Now, Scott's efforts haven't been entirely successful. Whereas the recent spate of Star Wars retreads has spent unseemly gobs of money to aid us in our never-ending quest to wallow in nostalgia and consume "member berries," Sir Ridley Scott has used the combined quarter-billion budgets for Prometheus and Alien: Covenant to explore ideas that he finds interesting and concepts worth discussing. How this is the "anti- Star Wars" escapes me.īut thinking about them in relation to Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Rogue One did help me clarify what I appreciated about Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. After all, Alien: Covenant, like Prometheus before it, mines a nearly-40-year-old mythology in an effort to keep a hugely successful franchise running. It's an unduly complicated formulation for an essay making a rather simple point - specifically, that by keeping its budget closer to $100 million than $200 million, the film's break-even point is much lower - and in some ways the headline is almost the opposite of the truth. Bloomberg published an odd piece earlier in the week suggesting that Alien: Covenant is finding success by being the "anti- Star Wars."