In space, no one can hear you laugh. Ridley Scott’s extraterrestrial adventure “Alien: Covenant” is deadly serious about matters that he takes deadly seriously, and the only things that he derides with any irony—muffled and sardonic though it may be—are the movie’s snippets of art greater than his own, by artists greater than himself—starting with Richard Wagner, whose “Entry of the Gods into Valhalla” is heard in the first and last scene. The movie’s lack of irony is all the more ironic since its subject is the recklessness of mankind in daring to synthesize humans androidally in order to extend our own control over the universe.
The pleasure of classic low-budget science-fiction films—the threadbare apocalypses of the nineteen-fifties—is the fusion of authentic fear with the earnestness inherent in comic-book-like creatures and effects. They were movies that, in their exuberant exaggerations, wore their own absurdity with a fiercely straight face, even as they touched on underlying terrors—largely also focussed on the hubris of recklessly manipulating nature. What Scott delivers in “Alien: Covenant” is the simulacrum of seriousness without the sense of self-conscious silliness, a grim earnestness that’s reinforced by a thudding, grandiose aesthetic that utterly lacks originality. His movie offers no release of laughter or wonder. Rather, Scott is a dour minister who preaches in heavy and sludgy rhetoric, posing commonplace conundrums as grand philosophical ponderings.
“Alien: Covenant” is a story of original sin, of primordial hubris, from which calamity and misery ultimately result—the creation of an android, or “synthetic,” by Weyland (Guy Pearce), a scientist with a British accent, whose creation has a similar accent, sets the disaster in motion. The android (Michael Fassbender) names himself David, after the Michelangelo sculpture, seeing his own perfection in the sculpture’s exquisite form, poise, and proportion. His learning curve is very rapid—he progresses from a virtual infancy to sophisticated adulthood in seconds, and proves his ostensible perfection by sitting down to the piano and playing some Wagner, at Weyland’s request. (The characters are borrowed from Scott’s prior entry in the franchise, “Prometheus,” and the scene underpins its plot as well as that of the new film.)
Covenant is a spaceship, which, in 2104, is on a long trip to a distant planet, Origae-6. There are seven years left in the voyage, during which its crew and more than two thousand colonists—plus another thousand human embryos—are lodged in locked pods, asleep in an unaging suspended animation, as the ship is supervised by the android Walter (Fassbender), who is David’s double but with an American accent. But when a neutrino storm damages the craft and threatens the integrity of its atmosphere, Walter revives the crew—though the captain (James Franco) burns up in the risky procedure. The new captain, Oram (Billy Crudup), successfully oversees the ship’s recovery, but he yields to a terrible temptation. The ship picks up a transmission from a nearby planet and, rather than returning the crew to pod-sleep en route to Origae-6, Oram relies on data suggesting that the new planet is even more hospitable to human life than their original destination and orders a landing.
The captain’s widow, Daniels (Katherine Waterston), is the most vociferous opponent to this change of plans. Oram, known by the others to be a “man of faith,” displays an optimism that borders on credulity, and Daniels’s doubts prove to be well-founded. Though the atmosphere on the planet proves to be breathable and the terrain features water—and wheat is growing there—one crew member, stepping aside in a forest to “take a leak,” steps on a small round plant that unleashes a puff of tiny, nearly invisible spores that make their way into his ear. Soon he takes sick, can’t walk, and vomits blood. The crew puts him in quarantine on the ship’s expedition module. There, in isolation with Karine (Carmen Ejogo), Oram’s wife, and another crew member, Maggie Faris (Amy Seimetz), his back bursts open and he gives birth to a slimy, boneless xenomorph. In a moment of horror that plays like a quick but efficient philosophy essay, the fast, superstrong, and toothy beast attacks Karine. Maggie gets out of the chamber; as Karine is shredded to death, she begs Maggie to open the door of the quarantine chamber to let her out, but Maggie, knowing that it would mean death for the entire crew, refuses. Yet the monster (smashing thick glass with its gooey head) gets out anyway and, when Maggie fires on it, she ignites the entire vessel and causes a mighty conflagration.
But, by this time, most of the life has already left the movie, expelled in a stifled guffaw with a single reveal: while exploring the new planet, the Covenant crew comes upon the hulking remains of a giant serpentine-penile spacecraft left over from “Prometheus.” The oblivious and exaggerated earnestness of this moment suddenly penetrates the eyes and ears of viewers and implants the fatal spore of ridicule. On the planet, after the ship explodes, another xenomorph, spawned from another crew member, gets loose—and, though Walter fights it off (losing a hand in the process), the creature is ultimately tamed and led away by a mysterious cowled figure, who turns out to be David. Soon the virtually identical androids meet (in a gimmick that John Ford bested in 1935, with low-tech optical effects showing Edward G. Robinson meeting himself in “The Whole Town’s Talking,” and that Buster Keaton had already worked wonders with in 1921, with “The Playhouse”).
David, the older model of android, is soon revealed to be not a shipwrecked victim but a genocidal maniac rendered furious by his inability to procreate, to replicate his own kind for posterity. He’s also programmed as a high-culture showoff with a taste for nostalgic kitsch, embodying a repugnant stereotype, the high-culturally effete and seductively evil gay man—he puts the tip of a wood flute into Walter’s mouth (“You have symphonies in you, brother.”) and kisses him on the lips. He also blithely tosses out to Walter a query tweaked from “Paradise Lost,” asking whether he’d rather “serve in Heaven or reign in Hell.” Scott’s David is a stereotypical movie Nazi, from the air of refinement and the insinuating sexuality to the British accent; for that matter, with a tiny twist involving his misidentification of a poet, he’s a walking reference to a Nazi villain in “Schindler’s List.”
Walter and David have a knockdown, drag-out showdown that could be Biblical or Homeric in its intensity and import but instead turns out to be a bland blur, the sole point of which is to set up a not-to-be-spoiled twist, when the surviving crew members get away aboard the Covenant to bring the still-dozing colonists and still-frozen embryos onward to Origae-6. There will be more Wagner, and there will be an extended wrangle on the Covenant, which, in its isolated action, is the movie’s one lively scene (despite also being flecked with overtly portentous touches). Above all, there will be reminiscences of brisker or sparer or simply more beautiful science fiction, whether “Life” (remember that?) or “Mission to Mars” or even “Passengers.”
Scott’s finger-wagging caution about the dangers of creating too far into the unknown, going too far in the presumption of knowledge and control over mysterious nature—his warning that technologies able to deliver good can also bring evil—is a centuries-old commonplace. But his dim view of “synthetics” might ring more authentic if his film weren’t grossly synthetic—if, for instance, he were shooting on 35-mm. film, relying solely on optical effects, cutting negative, and printing on film (as, for instance, Anna Biller did in “The Love Witch”), rather than making a film that is itself created with digital effects. Unless, of course, he’s boasting that his film is, in its entirety, a Walter—a faithful and selfless servant of humanity, a fiction created wholly good and guileless. Scott’s vanity is showing.
Yet there’s another movie lurking within “Alien: Covenant,” one that is not about xenomorphs threatening to burst bloodily out of human bodies but about humans waiting for their chance to merely be, onscreen, as the pomp around them calmly melts away. That movie is there in the casting; Scott brought two exemplary moderns, Waterston and Seimetz, into the ensemble, and they not only improve the film but surpass it, because they essentially bypass it. Seimetz’s role is slighter and briefer; Waterston is present throughout the film, and her calm, plain, yet complex neutrality—her power to hold a closeup uninflected and give it life—doesn’t at all connect with the movie’s drama but exceeds and obviates it.
Scott’s casting of these two actors is his one inspired decision, and although, for much of their screen time, he directs them indistinguishably from the other actors, there are moments when his direction stumbles and stops, particularly around Waterston (whose role is much more prominent). His intentions and his technical control weigh the movie down like rhetorical ballast; Waterston simply sheds them, blows them away. She belongs to another film, and, at moments, she suggests what kind of film it might be—and suggests, even more, that this one, and that most contemporary science-fiction spectacles over all, simply have the wrong directors, which is why their synthetic films are, like this one, misbegotten.
