Despite the admittedly hyperbolic, click-bait title, I want to start by saying that this isn’t going to be a “Worst Movie Ever! Irredeemable!” article. Compared to Ghost in the Shell and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Alien: Covenant isn’t even the worst movie so far this year. (Compared to those two, it’s borderline passable.) However, it does provide a decent checklist of some of the worst trends of the modern blockbusters – faux intelligence, effects over characters, and over reliance on fan service as both prequel and soft reboot. And, as the highly disappointing 71% second weekend drop off shows, I’m not alone in this assessment. (Full spoilers for Alien: Covenant below.)
1) DON’T BE STUPID ABOUT BEING SMART
As I discussed this in my previous article (Don’t Blame the Marketing, Blame The Movie), the problem with “headier” blockbusters isn’t that they’re too smart for the audience, but rather they’re stupid movies masquerading as intelligent. A movie’s intelligence doesn’t come from lofty dialogue and speechifying; it comes from following an internal logic within the narrative. Surprisingly often, audiences can see through the pretentious facade and find this hornswoggling condescending.
Alien and Aliens weren’t smart movies because they had discussions on the nature of humanity and the whole of creation. They were smart movies because the characters acted realistically. Prometheus tried to add an extra layer of depth to this franchise by posing the question of “where do we come from?” It failed at answering it (or by not answering it, to be more accurate), but it deserves some credit for posing it. Unfortunately, an Alien (capital A) movie is not the place to be debating the existence of God; it’s not what the series was set up for and trying to be both a monster movie and metaphysical treatise leads to disaster.
Covenant handled this aspect even worse than Prometheus by considering its slapdash theology to be the biggest problem with the previous film, and awkwardly tried to sweep it under the rug as much as possible. The most interesting concepts of Prometheus – the Engineers and the question of ‘what if the people who made us want to destroy us’ – were wiped out entirely in a 10-second flashback in exchange for yet another retread of Alien.
Covenant’s attempts at deeper concepts were relegated to a Mad Scientist cyborg David (Michael Fassbender, reprising his role from Prometheus) waxing poetic on the nature of creation (and the pleasures of fingering) to a newer, less insane cyborg model, Walter (also played by Michael Fassbender). While Fassbender is a good enough actor to make the dialogue sound significant, the dialogue itself contained little actual substance – as also seen in Ghost in the Shell, Transcendence, The Matrix sequels, and many others. If written well, the David/Walter stuff could have been a movie in and of itself, some . As executed, it feels perfunctory, a poor attempt to pay lip service to the heady stink of Prometheus but keeping it as surface as possible so the film could just get to remaking Alien. If it was meant to be more, then the film wouldn’t have ended in a robot fight and a twist so obvious it could barely be called a twist.
This type of faux intelligence satisfies no one. If filmmakers don’t trust the general audience to wrestle with weighty concepts, dumbing it down for them won’t make it more palatable; it’ll just be the stuff they fast forward through until they can get to the action. Similarly, ‘smarter’ audience members won’t feel engaged by low brow discussions about complex topics; it’ll just be the stuff they fast forward through until they can get to the action.
2) OUR CONNECTION IS CHARACTERS, NOT CGI
The stars (and the leads) of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, another contestant for 2017’s Biggest Bombs
This tired complaint again, but it doesn’t make it any less apt. Going through the most successful movies of the past several years, a major thing that stuck out for me is that most successful franchises live and die by their characters. There are some exceptions (Transformers), but for the most part it’s a constant. Sure, most Marvel leads are rip-offs of Tony Stark now, but it’s a character type many find enjoyable. The poorly edited mess Suicide Squad is probably going to end up doing overall better than the overall mess for many other reasons Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice because people actually like Harley and Deadshot and even Captain Boomerang, over a mass murdering Batman and a Superman who responds to being accused of mass murder with complete apathy followed immediately by bathtub sex For as much mockery as the Fast and Furious movies get for their overuse of the word “family,” it’s obvious that the cast, more than the cars, have become the key to its success.
The Alien movies were no different. Characters like Ripley, Hicks, Dallas, etc. stick with us. Even the crew from Prometheus had a couple of stand-outs, particularly Noomi Rapace’s Dr. Elizabeth Shaw. Disappointingly, Shaw is dead before Covenant starts, but she had way more going on as a character than this movie’s Ripley proxy (Katherine Waterston’s lifeless Daniels) or anyone else on board the Covenant. The viral online prologue material (like The Last Supper) ended up adding nothing to the characters; no one ever felt fleshed out in the film. The gimmick that everyone on board was married was irrelevant. There was a same-sex couple on the ship, but it’s a fool’s errand discerning who they were. With the exception of maybe two relationships, it’s hard to tell who was actually with whom. In the previous film, Shaw’s religion was a key driving force for her (and her reconciling that with meeting the people who actually made mankind would have been a great premise for an actual Prometheus sequel…). We’re told that Billy Crudup’s character is religious, which might have cost him the promotion to ship’s captain, but it has zero baring on the movie or the character’s decisions.
But Alien: Covenant isn’t alone in this. At least it had the remarkable Michael Fassbender (and a decent Danny McBride) to pick up slack that the writing couldn’t provide; other movies are not as lucky. Most of the biggest bombs of the past several years failed in large part because they lack characters with whom we share an emotional connection – the aforementioned Ghost in the Shell and King Arthur, Assassin’s Creed (also starring Fassbender), Pan, Fan4stic, Jupiter Ascending, are just some recent high profile examples. These movies spend millions upon millions of dollars on effects, but when you don’t care about the people standing in front of the green screen, they are falling on blind eyes. July’s Valerian and the City of Thousand Planets is probably going to be among the next ones to fall victim to this.
(Plus, the effects in Covenant were actually not that good. Prometheus is still a fantastic looking film, but Covenant spends most of its time in a dimly lit cave and a dark ship. This makes it a victim of yet another horrible trend – the dark grey color palette to indicate seriousness. Also, the CGI is more miss than hit a lot of the time, particularly during the Alien-infused climax.)
If you’re not bored by this yet, I ramble about the devils on both shoulders of Fan Service – PREQUELS and SOFT REBOOTS – on the next page.
3) FAN SERVICE – THE PREQUEL EFFECT
Prequels have become increasingly popular over the past several years – unfortunately so. The tight little box of the prequel allows studios to play with (capitalize on) imagery and iconography that we already know, which is great for marketing purposes, while also restricting the filmmakers from making too many adjustments to the golden goose.
As prequels, Prometheus/Covenant are particularly strange because it’s an entire planned trilogy plus made to answer a question that no one has ever asked – where did the xenomorph come from? (I mean, I’m sure there are comics and fan-fiction delving into it, but those are mostly irrelevant other than to true die hard fans and rarely considered actual canon.) For the conventional film goer, it doesn’t matter. It never mattered. The ‘origins’ that these movies are presenting adds nothing to – and I’d even argue detracts significantly from – what made the original Alien series so effective. Initially – in space, there are weird things we will never understand but will kill you. Now – a lunatic robot mixed and matched black goo with different lifeforms, including genociding an entire Star Trek-ian planet of sentient beings, to create hundreds of pre-xenomorphs that do practically the same thing as the actual xenomorph, except they can’t be used on the posters. And this adds to the travails of the crew of the Nostromo or the settlers of LV-426 how?
In an attempt to justify a two-hour-plus running time and getting our money, prequels increasingly concentrate on the wrong things. They focus on a popular element from the original films (because that’s what is most marketable) and explain it away with a convoluted backstory to where it becomes virtually incoherent. More often than not prequels become a horrible combination of single-minded fan service, dime store psychology, pat answers, and the needs/expectations of the larger-than-life modern blockbuster, which usually doesn’t mesh with the style of blockbusters from years past. (Needs more space lasers!) Continuity goes in the toilet because it’s more important to give us things we know than to consider how everything lines up. And, because practically none of the characters will appear in the later ‘classic’ films, they need not be written well because they have to die somehow, so who cares if we feel connected? Right, Rogue One?
Once you ‘explain the joke,’ what was once unique and interesting loses its charm and allure, which is the biggest issue with most prequels. Sometimes things just are, and when you try to reveal behind the curtain, all the mystery is lost and you’re left with trope-ridden bad screenwriting for simpletons. Star Wars is getting particularly bad at this (with Rogue One and presumably the Han Solo movie), but really, it’s present everywhere. Even the beloved BBC Sherlock series couldn’t avoid this. Or maybe a backstory involving a supervillain sister, the murder of a childhood friend, and memory erasing is that much more believable than “super smart guy is smug prick.”
4) FAN SERVICE – THE SOFT REBOOT
In addition to suffering from the trappings of the prequel, Covenant also suffers from the trappings of the soft reboot – two horrendous trends for the price of one ticket – as the film ends with an unnecessary (and unwanted) retread of Alien – which is meant to set up Prometheus 3, which will be another, longer form retread of Aliens.
The soft reboot has become increasingly popular over the past several years, and it makes some sort of sense. Much like prequels, you get to capitalize on the nostalgia plus you’re hedging one’s bet by repeating what worked before. Bringing back the original actors squeezes our member berries as they pass the torch onto the new cast, who will likely be poor retreads of the original team. Sometimes this works (The Force Awakens), sometimes it doesn’t (Ghostbusters 2016). Either way, the marketing is pre-made as the studios get to feed off the nostalgia buzz and (hopefully) squeeze out a decent first weekend before the bad word of mouth gets around and people stop caring.
As Alien: Covenant (and many others) shows, the soft reboot brings about severely diminishing returns. Franchises can only excel by providing us with something new, and they can’t provide us with something new if they’re too afraid to try anything different. I liked The Force Awakens, but did it really need another Death Star at the end? Arnold Schwarzenegger indicated that he will return for the next Terminator movie. Why? Among the many reasons why Terminator: Genisys failed horribly was being too beholden to the past. If the studios and the filmmakers want a chance for The Terminator to rise again, it needs to move on from what came before. Easter eggs used to be cute and clever, now they’re used as a substitute for allowing a film to stand on its own.
Before Covenant was announced, director Neill Blomkamp was slated to do an Alien 5, which would have featured the return of Sigourney Weaver as Ripley and even Michael Biehn as Hicks – now it’s officially dead. Sure, Blomkamp hasn’t made a good movie since District 9, and seeing Ripley and Biehn back would have brought its own share of “been there done that” problems. But at least his Alien 5 might have offered something stylistically different to the franchise and moved it into the future where there could be limitless possibilities. Now? Sure, getting Ridley Scott as the director for 2012’s Prometheus was an interesting choice since he started the series with Alien in 1979. But retaining him as the franchise’s sole visionary plus keeping him literally stuck in the past for these movies virtually ensures that this franchise, which desperately needs fresh ideas will, ironically, not evolve.
Faux-intelligence, poor characters, and fan service as both prequel and reboot – Alien: Covenant had all of these problems wrapped in a grey, dull, unoriginal, visually unexciting bow. But these are all issues that many major blockbusters have succumbed to over the past several years. It’s a pattern not likely to go away any time soon, and its constant presence should make one weary of even the most hotly anticipated, well-pedigreed movies like Blade Runner 2049 or The Last Jedi. So before geeking out a new shot of the Millennium Falcon or woo’ing over Rick Deckard appearing again, really wonder – for all the lavish effects and musical cues thrown at us by the trailers, will these sequels actually offer something new, or will they merely be fresh sheens on old ideas?
Leave a Comment