The more I think about Alien: Covenant (2017), the more I find that the movie doesn't fit with the other films in the series. and I feel it would be disingenuous of me to leave that unsaid when I all too hastily added to the end of my review that you might want to give this film a go if you've already seen the other Alien films. While I do stand by the fact that Covenant is a decent film on its own, with a lot of interesting ideas, there are also problems with those ideas when compared to the bulk of the series. These problems mostly relate to the origins of the Alien creature (hereafter referred to as Xenomorph), and how those origins can change fan and audience perception of the creature.
*Warning: Spoilers Ahead*
When audiences first saw Alien in 1979, they were presented with a creature designed by H.R. Giger that can basically be described as a surreal, mechanical, sexual nightmare; everything about is design is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable or horrified, and Giger managed this by evoking an amalgamation of creatures from his own nightmares The phallic head's always pointed to as an example for the sexual nature to its design, but their's also its birthing process, which involves a forceful and unnatural impregnation process. A lot of the features of the creature are almost human in nature, but exaggerated to the point of the grotesque; the rib cage, the skeletal arms, legs, hands and feet, all reminiscent of humanity, which obviously works given the Xenomorph's orgins. The skin of the creature is almost mechanical in nature, blending in with its environment. Part of what makes Alien such an effective horror is that the Xenomorph is never seen until the moment someone dies, but half the time that happens despite the fact that the creature was there the whole time; the character Brett looks up at it and doesn't notice anything out of place, and Ripley manages to get within inches of it without seeing it All of this is intentional in the creature's design too; Giger even went so far as to put a real human skull in to the molding of the Xenomorph's head to give it a more "human but not" quality to it. It's one of the most memorable designs for a horror creature in the history of film. But what helped push the horror of the design further was the mystery of the creature.
The continuation of the Alien series obviously led to an expansion of the lore of the Xenomorph species; sometimes these changes were received well (the Queen in Aliens is one of Stan Winston's greatest works), sometimes they were met with interest, if an otherwise mixed reception (Alien 3 may be a middling mess, but the idea that the Xenomorph changes its physiology based on the creature that it infects is one that should be re-visited) and other ideas most wish they could forget (the Xenomorph-Human hybrid from Alien: Resurrection is haunting for all the wrong reasons). However, none of these expansions dispelled the mystery surrounding the creature's origins (there's an argument that could be made about Aliens ruining the horror of the first by turning the creatures from terror in to fodder and shifting the mystery one step upwards by revealing the Queen, but that's a circumstantial discussion for another time). When we learn more about the Xenomorphs in these movies, we learn about what they can do, not where they come from, and the creatures remain a mysterious, Lovecraftian horror that manages to add another terrifying thing to the list of terrifying things it can do every time we see it.
This brings me to the existence of Alien: Covenant. Everything horrifying and mysterious about these creatures is muted by the end of Covenant. In short: the A.I. David created them. David used the black goo from Prometheus to kill a bunch of Engineers and proceed to genetically build the Xenomorphs from the black goo as it mutated. The reason that the Xenomorphs seem like perfect human killing machines is because they were designed that way, by an A.I. that hates his creator. It seems like a good idea on paper, a bit poetic but it has issues. The most important of these is that it shifts the mystery of the creatures to the black goo; now we know everything about why Xenomorphs exist and what their purpose is, and we're left to wonder about a goo that seems to work purely however the writer intends for it to work. Now the veil of mystery is gone from the creatures themselves; they're artificially cultivated, which makes their intent as killing machines more personal to David, but shrinks the scope of the universe these movies exist in; there is no potential horror in the dark reaches of space, each incident in all of these films is now isolated, and the worry that more Xenomorphs could show up elsewhere is removed. By creating a limit on where these creatures come from, there's an imposed limit on where these creatures can be.
There's more to explore with the philosophy behind the use of the Xenomorph in Covenant; like I said, there's a certain poetry to a creation destroying its creator by creating its own creation, and the film's shift of focus to David rather than expanding on what the Xenomorph is capable of has potential as its own worthwhile story, but I just wanted to put this discussion out to suggest that people who watched the Alien films for the Xenomorphs may be disappointed, while also giving a little history lesson on why the Xenomorph worked in the first place.
Published May 12th, 2017
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