Alien: Covenant

Pete Wright:
I’m Pete Wright.

Andy Nelson:
And I’m Andy Nelson.

Pete Wright:
Welcome to The Next Reel. When the movie ends—

Andy Nelson:
Our conversation begins.

Pete Wright:
Alien: Covenant is over. “To compose something so majestic, one could die happy… if one could die.” That’s a thinker, right? You’re really thinking now about this movie, Alien: Covenant. It had been a long time since I watched this again.

Andy Nelson:
Yeah, I mean I’d only seen it when we talked about it for the Film Board back in 2017. So this is the first time I’ve returned to it. I didn’t like it then. We’ll see if things changed. My goodness. Yeah, we’re returning to our Alien series. We finished our David Mamet Directs return last week, and now we’re back to the Alien series with two more films to cross off the list, Alien: Covenant and Alien: Romulus. And here we are.

Pete Wright:
Yes. Now, Andy, I want to start with an assessment of the setup of this movie. Can I? I think putting us in the context of the colony ship setup is one of the great threatening setups for this franchise. I think it’s great. And I feel like it ends there. My assessment ends there. I was reaching for some other positive words.

Andy Nelson:
I don’t disagree. That’s a really interesting idea. I mean, we’ve seen colonists before, never on a ship, but particularly in the director’s cut of Aliens, we see the people trying to live and to make a living on Hadley’s Hope before the aliens infiltrate and kill everybody. That’s these people trying to terraform a planet and turn it into something livable. Here we have a whole ship full of several thousand colonists in hypersleep on their way to a planet that they have discovered from afar that for all intents and purposes seems like it should be livable. Like they don’t even have to terraform it. They just are gonna plop down and start farming, is what it sounds like is the intended goal. That’s the whole plan. We’ll get to the Prometheus connections in a minute, but then the whole thing kicks off with a deus ex machina, a plot accident.

Pete Wright:
Solar — like a solar flare-ish kind of thing.

Andy Nelson:
It’s like a solar wave, sort of thing that ripples through space —

Pete Wright:
Solar, yeah.

Andy Nelson:
And it’s a neutrino burst. That’s what it is, Pete.

Pete Wright:
I’m glad you got that.

Andy Nelson:
Better than a solar flare.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Andy Nelson:
It hits the ship and of course Walter, the new David, had just unfurled the solar sails to absorb some sun and get some energy. And of course it hits it and knocks them out and they have to stop and wake the crew up to fix everything before they get on their way. So the whole thing starts because of an accident. And there’s already little agency or purpose as to how we’re setting this story up.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, right. And it begins a sort of cascade of weird decisions that are made by the captain and the crew that just feel, over and over and over, as you said, like plot contrivances. Nothing feels particularly lived in or authentic. It all feels in service of a script that doesn’t know what it really wants.

Andy Nelson:
Oh, a hundred percent. And I mean, I was thinking about this a lot as I was kind of trying to process this before our conversation. I’m like, what is this movie trying to say? What are the themes? What’s it reaching for? And the only thing I could really think about — I mean, obviously there’s the drive to kind of create or play God, that is the whole David side of the story — but I think even bigger than that, what I came up with is the story is about decisions getting made for the wrong reasons.

And it’s kind of a weak theme. I mean, because you could argue even David fits that, right? He’s also making decisions for the wrong reasons because he thinks that he is God and wants to prove that he is better than the engineers who made man, who made him, and he wants to prove that he is actually better than all of that. That’s kind of the crux of his decision making. But we also, again, going back to the ship, the colony — it’s a ship designed to colonize a planet. Everybody on the crew included, and so everybody on the crew is a couple.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Andy Nelson:
And so you put a crew full of couples in a situation like this and things start happening where people start dying. You run into a situation where people are making emotional decisions. They’re not making fact-based, reason-based decisions. And that’s kind of where we end up with the story — a lot of it is based on emotions. And while I think there’s an interesting idea there, I don’t know if that is a big enough reason to bring us back into the Alien franchise. It’s just about people making bad decisions. That feels like so many horror movie problems.

Pete Wright:
Well, it is, but this is interesting. In terms of big swings that the movie is trying to make — and I want to heavily caveat that by saying, look, this movie is making big swings for the wrong reasons — I do think that is a different thing than we’ve had in Alien movies past. Putting it — making everybody coupled — is essentially the deleted sequences from Aliens, right? That is an interesting part of the world of colonization in this universe, and I actually think that could have been really compelling. I don’t think the movie actually commits to it enough.

We have two major sequences where the couples matter. The first one where Franco — do we need more Franco? Less Franco? Are we Franco’d out by the time he’s free climbing? So Franco’s stunt cast, he’s gone.

Andy Nelson:
He was in more scenes that were cut.

Pete Wright:
Okay. Did you see them?

Andy Nelson:
I have not seen them. For this, I watched a good number of deleted scenes to try getting a better sense as to what — could they have found a way to make this better?

Pete Wright:
Okay. All right. Well then I stand by my assessment, given only that I haven’t watched any of the deleted scenes, and I am ready for you to disabuse me of this. But I think the entire idea of putting extra strain on the human fallibility that comes from making decisions for the wrong reasons because we’re coupled is interesting. I think that is a new take on this entire story.

And putting them — had they skipped this entire cockamamie nonsense of trying to tie the movie to Prometheus and just gone to the original place and have the original place already colonized by aliens — that’s threatening enough. Like, they’ve already won. And they just snatched it. They snatched a good idea from the jaws of failure and made a movie that’s nonsense to me.

Andy Nelson:
Yeah, that’s a great way to kind of break it down, because I think that’s so much of the problem — the number of ways that this ended up feeling like it was getting shoehorned in, right? I mean, coming from Prometheus, and we should just say this particular script went through maybe not as many iterations as Alien 3, but it certainly went through a number of iterations as they were trying to figure out the story.

Initially, by the time that our crew lands on this world, Shaw is still here. She’s still alive, and she has been hiding in the catacombs underneath the city from David, who is trying to play God and kill her and stuff. And so she is now trying to help these people who have landed. Like, that was the initial premise. And the story idea was always to kind of continue the thread of what happens with Shaw and David. That’s where they were going with that.

Then they had this whole thing where when Shaw and David arrive — the scene that we have where he drops the black goo bombs onto the engineers — the premise was that she had brought his body back into the ship, put him back together, they became friends more out of necessity than actual friends. Because — I mean, we both rewatched Prometheus. I think it’s fair to say that she was probably already a little suspicious of him by the end of that movie, even though she brings him back on board.

But when they arrive, he says everything he’s about to do is for her, out of love. He asks her if she trusts him. She says yes. And then he bombs the planet. She’s horrified. It was his twisted act of vengeance on her behalf against the beings that created the beings that created him. Like, that was his intention of why he did that. And it’s no better than what we have now, but it still is just — okay, I mean, there’s at least some emotional logic in there. I don’t know. But all of that got muddied and everything got changed.

I mean, the studio — I think when Ridley Scott initially wanted to make Prometheus, I don’t think there was nearly as much Alien connective tissue as there ended up being. I think the studio kind of forced that hand. And now because of that, they ended up feeling, well, we really need more of that. And I think it was the studio’s drive to say we really want more aliens. And so we end up getting a lot of this stuff that just feels shoehorned. Clearly Ridley Scott had more interest in David and AI and its evolution and the way that that kind of worked in this world, paired with his interest in the origin and creation of people and where did we come from and all of that. And the studio just wanted monsters. And it all kind of got mashed together and we just get this amalgam where nothing feels connected or logical.

Like, by the time we have the scene where David just arrives and bombs the engineers — I was watching it like, what the hell is this? Like, why? What is going on here? The only thing I could come up with is, okay, it’s again that thread — he wants to prove he’s better than them. Because again, engineers made man, made him, and he wants to, in the whole God complex thing, show that he’s actually better. So it’s just a sloppy story that came together because so many different things were trying to happen here.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Can we just take a beat on Prometheus and maybe even the Prometheus-Covenant pairing that could have been? I don’t know what Ridley Scott wants in his heart of hearts. I really don’t. But I do think that there is a movie inside of Prometheus about creation, origin of life, seeding the planets, that is worthy of a guy like Ridley Scott to tell, right? There is something that is big and beautiful that lives up to the first eight minutes of Prometheus and tells a great story that is totally disconnected from the Alien universe.

Ridley Scott is a director who could manifest that story. He’s a guy who could do that. He is a big enough talent. He could marshal the resources to tell a story, even as a trilogy, that addresses the advent of a sort of evolution across time and even does it in space with AI and androids and all that stuff. He could have done it and pulled it out of the Alien franchise altogether, and it could have maybe even been great.

I can’t start complaining about this movie without leveling that foundation, because I think all of my complaints about this movie and Prometheus start there — that they started on a false premise from a filmmaker who either misguidedly or due to studio coercion tried to shoehorn a new property into an existing property, and made what I think is possibly the greatest example of studio-creator malfeasance. This is a massive, jarring rug pull on fans of an existing franchise from a guy who just wanted to talk about the nature of God. And that is the fundamental problem. Everything starts there for me. Every single problem I have with this movie starts with them trying to make this something that it is not.

Clearly Ridley Scott wanted to talk about David and Walter more than anything else in the world, and he wanted them to have a fingering flute sequence that becomes the emotional anchor of this entire damn movie. And maybe in that other movie, it would have been great. Here, it is a joke. It is a joke. That is my platform statement.

Andy Nelson:
Well, no, and I think that’s a fair place to start, is that — whoever decided that all of this needed to be shoehorned into the Alien franchise — they made a massive mistake. Let Ridley tell an original sci-fi trilogy, quadrilogy, whatever it was he wanted to originally do about AI and its evolution. Clearly he had no interest — and we talked about this plenty on the Film Board — but clearly he had no interest in creating a look that could have led to Alien. Like, none of this even looks like a prequel. It all looks like it was made today. The ships, everything, the design is so far ahead of where Alien was by the time we see that. And I think that’s a big blunder. He just, I don’t think, had interest in doing that. And so I think he was just doing what he wanted to do. And it just made a massive mess of these two movies.

And honestly I’m kind of glad that the whole thing has kind of fallen apart now that Disney purchased it. I mean, I say that — I was not a fan of Alien: Earth either. I know it has its fans, but for me it just was not working. So I don’t know if Disney is the right house either. Anyway, we’ll continue our conversation about all that and where it’s gone next week as we get into Romulus.

But as for this film, I absolutely think you’re right that that’s the main issue — starting there and giving us a setup for something that really just doesn’t make sense in this universe. Because now we have this Black Goo that I don’t even fully understand. Somehow the Black Goo infects people. We see it in Prometheus. We see it here. It infects people, it turns you monstrous, or now that there’s these spores, it creates these neomorphs that burst out of you and run amok. So we’ve got those now. But then David has somehow also engineered from the Black Goo — and I don’t know, perhaps from Shaw, is the impression that I got — facehugger eggs, and has just been sitting idly around waiting for the day that somebody would stop by so that he could try them out. And of course Captain Oram is the one who gets the facehugger, and we get the actual xenomorph that comes out in the last part of the film.

And I guess that’s where it goes from there. But it’s like, to what end? Like, it’s clearly not a direct lead-in to Alien. He’s off to this other world with all the colonists and he’s just gonna experiment on them and play God and do God only knows what. But it’s definitely not LV-426 from Alien because the Engineer ship is there, right? And none of it — it’s a world that has to be terraformed. It’s not one that’s already livable. So it just, in the scope of what they’re trying to even set up, doesn’t make sense. It just feels like a random story to nowhere.

Pete Wright:
So we’ve talked about our frustrations — I should ask you this. Is one of your central frustrations that Noomi’s gone?

Andy Nelson:
You know, it would have been nice to continue that story. I don’t know if I needed it. Honestly, I was kind of — I mean, I liked how in the original Alien quadrilogy we had the Ripley thread running through it. Like, I do like that. I think I was bothered enough by Noomi when I rewatched Prometheus that I was okay that she wasn’t back. It just didn’t feel like it was a story I needed to see continued. So that’s not a central problem for me. And in fact, when the movie came out, there wasn’t an uproar like there was when Alien 3 came out and people found out that Hicks and Newt had just been written off — oh, they died in the crash.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Andy Nelson:
Like, there was none of that. There was no “Oh my god, you killed Shaw, how dare you?” So I think that says a lot.

Pete Wright:
I think you’re right. I think my only criticism of it is I like Noomi Rapace as an actor, and given the material that she is dealt with — there are some horrific moments that are paced terribly in Prometheus, there is very little sense of threat — but we do have some major action beats that involve her that I think she does fine, even as the movie falls apart around her.

It is frustrating to me that she is gone because if you’re gonna try and connect these two things, maybe you should try to connect them by way of your central character from the last movie. And I think Ridley Scott decided between these two movies, you know what, our central character is now going to be the android. That’s going to be how we’re going to do this, and we’re not going to connect it with humanity, which is a fundamental problem of our characters. Because I didn’t come away from Prometheus thinking, god, I wish I could see part two of the Fassbender story. That was just not the story I wanted. He was in two pieces. He was being dragged around the desert. That is not a character I’m really interested in following.

And so we get The Empire Strikes Back ending, right? It’s like, oh, we’re gonna fly off and find vengeance and figure out why the engineers are such jerks. And then that story, we’re just done with it. So that was a fundamental challenge. But then let’s talk about the Fassbender thing, because clearly — well, you have a question?

Andy Nelson:
No, no. It wasn’t a question, but I’m glad you’re going into this because I want to talk about Fassbender and protagonists and the nature of who the intent of our characters in this story. So go ahead.

Pete Wright:
Yes. Who is the damned protagonist in this story that we’re supposed to follow? Because it feels like the protagonist changes from act to act in the cross — Prometheus and Covenant. Who does Ridley Scott love the most and want us to be our avatar? Who does Ridley love the most?

Andy Nelson:
Is that what it’s about? Who do I love the most?

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Andy Nelson:
Well, if it was that, it’s David for sure. But here’s the thing — this film is so problematic as it comes to the protagonist, a change character. Like, is there a change character in this film? I mean, ideally, there should be a character who has an arc over the course of the story and changes. The closest we have to that is Oram. Billy Crudup’s character. He becomes the captain after the captain burns up in his cryotube, or whatever it’s called, the hypersleep chamber, and nobody likes him. And so he’s — honestly, he’s in a really unfortunate position. The captain is in the first position, and his wife is in the third position, and he’s sandwiched between the two.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Andy Nelson:
I mean, that’s a little unfair to put him in that position.

Pete Wright:
Yes.

Andy Nelson:
But anyway, he’s not very liked. He makes this stupid decision because he thinks that it’s what the people want and it might help them like him more, by saying, you know what, let’s go to this other planet. It’s only two weeks away. John Denver’s already on the radio. Otherwise we have to get back into our hypersleep chambers for seven years to finish going to this other world. This could be livable. I mean, John Denver is there. It’s worth a shot. And even though we have Daniels saying this is dumb, we need to just move forward — and then over the course of discovering that this world is terrible and everything is trying to kill them, Billy Crudup’s like, I’m sorry, you were right, I’m so dumb. And then of course he gets the chestburster. It’s like, okay, if he was supposed to be our protagonist and our change character, you really screwed that up, guys.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Andy Nelson:
Second, let’s look at Daniels. Daniels already doesn’t want to go to this world. She’s never a change character. It’s a bad decision from jump, and she’s on that train all the way through. She never changes. She’s always like, nope, this is terrible. This is terrible. And then she finally gets off the world. She gets hosed by David. So she’s ideally treated as the protagonist, but —

Pete Wright:
But she’s the worst protagonist, because the worst protagonist is one who is right all along. That’s the lesson. The universe proved me right from jump.

Andy Nelson:
Yeah. I know.

Pete Wright:
Sucks.

Andy Nelson:
I know. It’s terrible. The third option is David. And it’s like David never changes. He already is gung-ho with his mission to prove himself as God, from the start, right? He’s been experimenting for ten years on whatever is left on the planet. He’s made these neomorphs, xenomorphs, the facehuggers, he’s done all of this. He’s gotten what he wanted. No deviation in his life, no reversal. He’s fixed from jump. And yet he is — I would say he’s the character who has the clearest goal, the clearest agency. But he’s not the protagonist. He’s definitely the antagonist of our story.

So that’s what we’re left with, those characters. Now, if they had said, you know what, let’s make Daniels the one — she’s not captain, she’s second in command after her husband dies, right? Let’s say that Oram, the new captain, is the one who’s just like, you guys, I know this world is really close, I know John Denver’s there, but we need to stick with our plan and go to the original world. And Daniels is the one who’s just like, you know what? Everybody thinks that we should at least check this out. It’s only two weeks away. We can get over there and just look at it and just see what’s going on.

And if she had been that character and he had been the one who wanted to follow the original plan, she could have been the one who actually changed and recognized — it ties into the whole theme — I recognized I was making decisions based on my emotion. Based on being hurt because my husband died, and wanting everybody to be happy. And now I’m wrong and I’m sorry. And then we see her all the way through, and she’s fully punished for every decision she made. Every single person dies, including all the colonists. That would have been much more interesting. But do they do that? No. So it’s just a mess.

Pete Wright:
And when Oram gets the chestburster on the new planet — the planet that he didn’t want to go to — that is the best lesson for Daniels to see how much she screwed up. As such, neither character is a change agent in this story at all.

Andy Nelson:
No. No. Just a disaster. Just a total disaster.

Pete Wright:
Okay, so — meanwhile, back to the Fass — the Bender’s Fass.

Andy Nelson:
Hmm, yes. Antagonist. And then Walter with the funny accent. I’m gonna drop my register a little bit for this one and go full American.

Pete Wright:
Oh no.

Andy Nelson:
What do you think, Ridley?

Pete Wright:
Oh no. I have a lot of complaints about this movie. This one doesn’t make the list.

Andy Nelson:
It just stood out as like, how are we gonna tell the two apart? Well, what if I talk like this the whole time? That’ll do it.

Pete Wright:
I don’t need to hear anymore. Say less. I’m ready. Roll tape.

Andy Nelson:
That’s right. Oh, yeah.

Pete Wright:
Oh, God.

Andy Nelson:
But I will say, to your point, Fassbender — while again the antagonist, certainly not the protagonist — I think is still the most interesting character, the most interesting set of characters in the film. Like, I genuinely enjoy spending my time with Walter and with David. I think they make for a fascinating duo, and everything that’s going on with that story, I am actually engaged in. And I think that’s probably because that was what Ridley was most interested in.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. I think that’s the only thing Ridley was interested in.

Andy Nelson:
Yes, yes.

Pete Wright:
I mean, I really think there are two things going on. First of all, we have David as this expansive and curious and creative older version, and Walter the constrained and loyal and capable secondhand. And I think Fassbender plays the distinction — if we take off the voice — through just his attention to physicality and attention, just the way he moves. I think he is a great vessel for this sort of twins role. I do think he showed up for the movie that Ridley wanted to make, and his parts were great. If the story had been better around him, I think that would have been great.

The problem that I have is that I think there is a Fassbender-proof story problem, which is the David-as-Walter substitution. Were we supposed to be tricked?

Andy Nelson:
I can’t remember if we talked about this in the Film Board episode, but it is absolutely one of the least tricky tricks, if that was what their intention was. Because I’m just like, well, of course he swapped. The whole thing just plays that way. He’s got the axe, he looks at the other guy’s hand — yeah, we know what’s happening. I never once suspected that it was actually Walter there.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. I think this is the problem. Fassbender was right for the role, and being right for the role made the script’s trick totally impossible. It just did not play. It was telegraphed so, so early that I think there was no threat involved. And I feel like I’ve said it every single week for the last ever that I do not mind tropes. I want tropes that play well. Play me. I am an emotional raw nerve going into a movie, and I want you to play me. And I was never once played by this movie in particular. And I went into this movie, Andy, thinking I was gonna like it better than Prometheus. And that is just not accurate. That was not my experience.

So, all right, just a quick jump back to the beginning of the movie. Where did you stand on the David-coming-online prologue that we get?

Andy Nelson:
I mean, I think that again is there very specifically because of Ridley Scott’s desires to focus on this story. And I think that is the setup for David’s God complex, right? The whole moment that he has there of like, so God made you, you made me —

Pete Wright:
Why am I making you tea?

Andy Nelson:
But I’m better than you. Yeah. Why am I doing all of this? Why am I the subservient one? We get that from the start. And I think that’s the setup for where David’s head goes after all these ten years lost in space.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Andy Nelson:
But I think that’s it. And did we need it? I don’t know.

Pete Wright:
It feels really shoehorned. I mean, some of the movie feels like a movie. Some of it feels like specifically — we don’t trust you, audience, to recognize the connective tissue between the last movie because it didn’t play well — and so we’re gonna shoehorn in these beats. Because of a lack of trust. Because the relationship we have as filmmakers and as studio with the audience is broken. And we’re gonna try to fix that by just beating you over the damned head with it. And that’s what the prologue felt like to me.

Andy Nelson:
Yeah. This was one of those films — and I think Prometheus was as well — where they released some short films ahead of time as a way to just entice audiences.

Pete Wright:
Yes.

Andy Nelson:
And it felt like the prologue should have just been a separate short film released. It didn’t necessarily need to actually be part of the film.

Pete Wright:
You watched all the short films, right?

Andy Nelson:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Can we do a sidebar? I haven’t watched them, so can you fill me in?

Andy Nelson:
One is a life-on-the-ship scene where we just have a sense of the whole crew. That’s where we have more James Franco as everybody’s just kind of celebrating and drinking and stuff, and you just kind of get a sense of the crew dynamics. You get a sense of the relationship dynamics. You get a better sense of who all the couples are that are on the ship. And I think that’s largely what that one is. It’s just kind of a setup as to who these people are on the ship.

The second one is basically Shaw and David on the alien ship as they’re traveling. She sews him back together, she kind of stitches him up, they agree they’re gonna work together and stuff, and at the end of it he’s putting her in a sleep pod to rest as they fly off to this other world. It’s very short, but it’s the only chance you get of seeing Shaw alive in any of this.

The last one is essentially just a commercial for the new Walter model. It’s just looking at them building a new model, really designed as a commercial — “get yours today” sort of thing.

Pete Wright:
Okay.

Andy Nelson:
So that’s it. It’s not a lot.

Pete Wright:
All right.

Andy Nelson:
Not a lot. And yeah, it doesn’t really add a whole bunch of interesting stuff.

Pete Wright:
I was hoping you were gonna find the sort of Rosetta Stone that would unlock this movie for me.

Andy Nelson:
Yeah, I was hoping with a lot of the stuff I was looking at here. There are interesting bits, but one of the most interesting was just a darker look into when David is talking — I think he’s talking to Walter, but it might be Oram — anyway, he’s talking to somebody in his little laboratory about the work he’s doing, and that’s when you discover Shaw’s body and what had happened to her. And he goes into a lot more gruesome detail, and it sounds like she had been alive for a while while he was doing experiments on her. It’s still vague, but it could have been an interesting bit.

Pete Wright:
Okay. All right. We should probably take a break, and then we’re going to talk about alien creatures.

Andy Nelson:
Yes, we should take a break. You can find the show on YouTube. You can join us live when we record. We’ll even take your questions in the post-show chit-chat, and members get the replay and the extended cut. Subscribe to The Next Reel on YouTube. The link to this episode is in the show notes. We’ll be right back.

Pete Wright:
Amy, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, but we do have a request that you do an ad break in your David voice.

Andy Nelson:
All right, we’re going to take a quick break, but first you can find the show on YouTube.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, keep that handy. We’re gonna call back Andy’s David voice. Andy, we need to talk about xenomorphs, neomorphs, protomorphs — all the morphs, all the great morphs.

Andy Nelson:
So many morphs. All the great morphs.

Pete Wright:
So many morphs. So in Alien — let’s go back in time. 1979, the halcyon days of the first, our first glimpses of the franchise. I think that Alien understood that xenomorph horror is almost entirely about the interval, the time between contamination and eruption, right? This is everything in between — there is normal, and we’re just attempting to hold on to normal. The crew tries to process an impossible situation. There’s a lot of research, a lot of not understanding. The audience kinda knows what’s coming, something bad is coming, and the knowledge arrives in the audience before it arrives in the characters, but not much before, right? It’s that anxiety of fear. And the creature’s terrifying because of what it represents in the interval, in the space between, not because of what it does when it finally arrives. We know it’s a horror movie, it’s gonna slash, it’s gonna burst, and it’s all gonna be — ooh, ah. But the intensity comes from what we don’t know.

So Covenant appears to have lost all patience in the interval, right? Our major characters are infected, convulse, and produce creatures in sequences that move so quickly as to register as just an incident rather than any sort of horror at all. The backburster scene — that should be our version of the chestburster. And let me just say this — saying you’re doing something different in the franchise by making the animal come out of the back instead of the front is not a change character. It’s handled so fast that the crew doesn’t even have any time to establish a norm before the film has moved on to the next problem. And that is a major problem. It exists in the pacing of the horror. Everything is rushed. Too fast. Now, if they’re gonna come back and say, well, it’s because they’re different aliens — make a different damn movie. But they never once gave us any indication about why the organisms move so much faster than they do in the movie we already know about.

Andy Nelson:
I had these problems when we talked about it in the Film Board. I still have these problems. And you can tell from the jump because in the opening credits — like, Alien was very patient with the way that the pieces of the letters slowly built to spell Alien on the screen. Here with Alien: Covenant, it’s like — so fast. It’s like, okay, you clearly are in a rush, Ridley. You’ve lost all interest in taking some deep breaths and kind of moving at a nice pace. And that said everything, because exactly what you said is such a problem in this film. All of this stuff is happening at such a pace. And this was my problem with Prometheus also. Like, everything is happening so fast.

Like, the scientists — I think the whole thing when I was looking at Prometheus, it’s like, did this all take place in like 24 hours? Or maybe 48? It’s a very tight story. Give them a chance. They’re scientists. Give them a chance to kind of explore and study. There’s time to allow for that. And they don’t. Everything has to happen so fast and it just ruins any tension. I mean, I understand story pacing, you want to keep things moving. You can keep things moving and still say, well, we’ve been here for three weeks now and trying to explore. Like, here you have these people step off a ship on an alien world and instantly — oh, I’m just gonna light up my cigarette and start smoking and walk around and not pay any attention to the thing. Same thing in Prometheus, they’re like, oh, the air’s fine. You know what? Screw this. I’m gonna take my helmet off and I’m gonna be fine.

Pete Wright:
Oh my god. Oh my god.

Andy Nelson:
Like —

Pete Wright:
Don’t — that’s triggering.

Andy Nelson:
Oh, it’s all of this is becoming more and more triggering for me in any of these movies where you theoretically have smart science people doing stuff that are so stupid. It’s like my same problem in the Jurassic Park and World movies. These are ostensibly really, really smart people who all make the stupidest decisions constantly in these movies. Same thing with these. It’s like, you can make a smart science fiction movie with smart characters that’s also a horror movie and still make it work. You don’t have to force them to make stupid decisions to have things happen to them. It just is infuriating and it’s constant. And the speed thing is just one more thing that goes along with all of those issues.

Pete Wright:
I have to take a deep breath before my next, because I have complaints about the handling of this. But all of that builds up to what I think is the worst xenomorph infraction that this movie could possibly make.

Andy Nelson:
I’m excited to hear what this is.

Pete Wright:
The newly hatched creature is somehow standing on the open chest, facing David. The neomorph faces David. And David raises his hands in the air, and the neomorph raises its hands — its teeny tiny hands — in the air, like it just don’t care. And I almost was like, screw it, I’m turning it off. This is the stupidest thing. It’s still the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. I understand the intention — meaning, we’re gonna demonstrate David’s relationship to his creation. And there was zero awe. It was once again a joke. And I feel like Ridley Scott owes Michael Fassbender an incredible apology and probably a car.

Andy Nelson:
And let’s just also add the digital fact that it’s a chestburster, as opposed to what we have had before, where at least it looked like a puppet.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Andy Nelson:
Like, even — we’ll talk about this next week — even Fede Álvarez handles it better than how Ridley handled it here. It was the worst looking chestburster that we have had. It was just awful. Just awful.

Pete Wright:
And you know, it’s actually funny. So, Spirit Halloween, Andy — I’ll bet you didn’t see it going this way.

Andy Nelson:
I’m glad we’re going to Spirit Halloween though. This is great.

Pete Wright:
As we record this, Spirit Halloween has just launched. You know how they have like the 12-foot skeletons that you could put in your yard?

Andy Nelson:
Oh yeah, yep.

Pete Wright:
Right. They now have a xenomorph. A full-size xenomorph.

Andy Nelson:
Oh.

Pete Wright:
It’s $450, and you can stick it in your yard.

Andy Nelson:
Now that Disney owns the franchise, no surprise.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, expect your merch, y’all. So it’s $450. You put it in, it has some animatronic features, and it’s like the mouth comes out, it does all the stuff. And when you look at it just standing there — I know this is sacrilegious — it looks really stupid. It’s just stupid, right? It’s got its big hands and it’s kinda like, come on.

What was so great about Aliens — we never saw really the whole thing. Like, it was always in dark, and it was greasy and wet, and steam all over, and it just — all the stuff you couldn’t see was really terrifying. It was whipping tail and big head. Whip tail, big head. Showing us the whole thing in brightly lit, glassy CG just really reinforces that the alien xenomorph has some incredibly threatening pieces on it, and the rest of it is super dumb. And I know that’s a hot, controversial take, but it’s a dumb looking alien when you look at the whole thing. And I say this as a fan.

So this movie takes all of the dumb and levels it up. There is nothing about the creature here that could be any less frightening, right? The digital versions are somehow kinetically correct and vastly less real than anything we’ve seen before.

Andy Nelson:
Well, I think it speaks to horror films and the nature of Alien. I mean, yeah, it looked like a man in a suit. There’s the one shot where Dallas turns around in the pipes and the alien is right behind him and just — and it reaches its arms out at him. It’s like, okay, that is the moment where it looks most like a guy in a suit. But you know what? They cut out of it super fast. Every time we see it, it’s short bursts. It’s always dark. We’re not really getting a full sense of what it actually is as a threat.

Same thing in Aliens. We have a sense of them in the shadows and everything. And I think also the fact that the way James Cameron shot it — with the gymnastic people jumping through the hallways and stuff — made them much more terrifying. So yeah, their bodies when static might look kind of dumb, but when in motion in the dark, it can be incredibly frightening.

And you could argue where it goes from there as far as Fincher’s and Jeunet’s versions. But I think by the time we get to these ones and it’s just all digital creations running amok, it’s just like, yeah, we’re not doing a whole lot of work trying to sell it in a way that is scary anymore. Now it’s just a thing that’s there. And I mean, I will say I do celebrate the entire fight on the ship. Like, I like that it’s daylight and we’ve got this xenomorph running around on the ship. It’s a really cool sequence. It plays very well.

But at least throughout the rest of the film, give us some moments in the dark again. Make it — I mean, they’re in these catacombs or whatever, and we’ve got this big white neomorph creeping through the hallways. Like, you should be scary, but it’s so well lit that nothing about this gives me any fright at all.

Pete Wright:
There’s nothing haunting.

Andy Nelson:
No.

Pete Wright:
There’s nothing haunting about this.

Andy Nelson:
Yeah. Big problem. Big problem with it.

Pete Wright:
Big problem. Oh god, it’s exhausting, Andy.

Andy Nelson:
So many issues. So many issues.

I will say I like the score, but at the same time I am frustrated with the score. Because again, the composer — this is Jed Kurzel — he’s bringing in elements of Jerry Goldsmith’s original scores, of the elements from Prometheus, but not doing it in a way where it feels like it’s evolving into where we’re gonna go. Again, like something John Williams did exceptionally with the Star Wars franchise when he went back to one, two, and three — it felt like the themes there were moving toward where we would get with episodes four, five, and six. Like, that takes a lot of work to back-evolve your music and move it forward. And I don’t think we’re quite getting that here. Still, I enjoy it well enough.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, I do too. I actually think that may be my favorite part of the movie — the score. I haven’t just put it on and listened to it because I worry that it’ll make me think about the movie. But I actually do like the score. I have fond feelings about the score, which maybe says a lot, maybe doesn’t say anything at all.

Andy Nelson:
I’m curious if your feelings about the score are because it has those elements that you like so much from Jerry Goldsmith’s bits, from James Horner’s bits, even from — I can’t remember the composer’s name from Prometheus — but even his bits. Like that fantastic theme, which — oh, again — is now incidental music because we have David playing it on his little flute, right?

Pete Wright:
Yes.

Andy Nelson:
It’s actually now — I don’t know. Did he — is it his original composition that backplayed into Prometheus?

Pete Wright:
Jesus, Andy.

Andy Nelson:
I don’t know.

Pete Wright:
It’s a snake eating its own tail.

Andy Nelson:
Oh my goodness.

Pete Wright:
Well, okay, we haven’t — I mean, we’ve talked about Daniels as Daniels and Oram as Oram, but let’s just talk briefly about the characters. And we haven’t yet once mentioned Danny McBride.

Andy Nelson:
Yeah, right, right.

Pete Wright:
Okay. So start with Katherine Waterston.

Andy Nelson:
I have one other actor I also want to bring up, but Katherine Waterston is fine. Like, I have yet to watch a film where I’ve been wowed by her. Nothing has stood out for me. And here, she’s fine. In essentially what we would call the Ripley role — like, it feels like that’s kind of what maybe Scott and his writers were trying to do — oh, let’s make it where we think Oram is the protagonist, but then he dies and it’s really Daniels. I don’t think that’s — if that’s what they were going for, it didn’t work. But anyway, I think she’s fine. It doesn’t wow me, but —

Pete Wright:
It’s interesting. She’s an interesting performer. I think I like her. It sounds like I probably have a greater affinity for her than you do as an actor. I think she was — was she right for the role? The problem I have is that it almost feels like she was instructed to not be the Ripley character, in a cast of characters not trying to stand out in any way. They’re all trying to be uniquely scared or agitated or concerned or curious, whatever.

The only character in the lot that shows any sort of range is probably Billy Crudup in our brief experience with him. And maybe actually Danny McBride as Tennessee, who — I can’t believe I’m saying this — may be one of my favorite performances in the film.

Andy Nelson:
Yeah, I know. Isn’t that weird? I don’t know if I would have expected that.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, what an astonishingly surprising performance that totally holds up. And I say that as a Danny McBride fan in the comedy. And I absolutely believed his role as lived in and solid in this movie.

So, I mean, we’ve already talked about how most of the characters don’t change. I feel like everybody here was instructed to blend in. This is another one of those movies in our long list of movies that is less than the sum of its parts, because every one of these performers is strong in other things, much stronger than they were here. And that’s script and direction, a hundred percent.

They also end up — I think their strong on-screen performances end up completely negated by some of the bonkers action beats. The swinging around on the loader elevator ship felt like it was out of The Lego Movie. Hanging around on ropes as Danny McBride is trying to fly the loader around and get everybody up on the back — it was nonsense. It was a nonsense action sequence. I hated it.

Andy Nelson:
See, I like that sequence. That’s like the one thing I like in this movie. Because it throws it off when the crane goes out and suddenly he can’t control it anymore. So he’s trying to find balance again with this giant arm hanging off that throws everything off. I thought it played.

Pete Wright:
Oh no, I know what it was trying to do. I just didn’t buy it. I struggled with it. It did feel on the nose that Danny McBride had built up his anxiety — like, I’m coming down there, right? I’m gonna come down and get you. I’m gonna fly through the clouds. And that’s gonna be my deal. I’m brave enough. I’m crazy enough. Tennessee’s crazy. So I bought the motivation. I just didn’t buy the sequence.

Andy Nelson:
And then it also goes to the decision making. It’s emotional decision making that he has to bring the entire ship — they’re not in a dropship, they’re in the entire ship full of frozen colonists — down to like 80K above the storm so that they can communicate with people. And then he dips it even lower because he’s crazy because of his emotions. And again, that’s an example where somebody is making emotional decisions, but it ends up being okay. And I was convinced it wasn’t gonna be okay. Because again, this movie really proves that when you make emotional decisions, things go wrong. That’s the one time that things actually don’t go wrong.

Pete Wright:
Right, right. Weird kind of rug pull on you, Andy.

Andy Nelson:
Yes, I know, right? You got me, Ridley.

Pete Wright:
Feels like Ridley’s out to get us.

Andy Nelson:
That’s right. So I have one more question about characters. And it’s Demián Bichir —

Pete Wright:
All right.

Andy Nelson:
— as — I don’t even know what their roles are actually, as science people or as crew. He’s just one of the crew. Actually, two more comments about the crew. One is him, because he and his husband are one of the couples that is part of the crew going to colonize a new world. Now, I am all for gay marriage, gay couples, but I ask you this — in the scope of colonizing a world, does it make sense?

Pete Wright:
I don’t know, man.

Andy Nelson:
I mean, I feel bad at saying that because sure, they should be allowed — like, why couldn’t they go to be colony members of a new world?

Pete Wright:
The problem is it’s not said — like, one of the things that we know is that at the end, Fassbender goes into the colony part and he pulls out and there are a bunch of embryos, right? So they’re gonna need a lot of hands to raise all these children, whether they’re homosexual or heterosexual.

Andy Nelson:
Okay, yeah, I guess that makes sense, because they’re there to farm and to build a community. Sure, they might be having some babies for real, but then they also have tons of lab babies to raise.

Pete Wright:
Yes.

Andy Nelson:
So okay, I retract my statement. I think it all makes sense now.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. But I think that’s the only beat at the end that makes that point. Does it — do they make the point in any other place about the embryos?

Andy Nelson:
That’s a good question. In the opening crawl, did it say embryos or did it just say like 2,000 colonists? I can’t actually remember now.

Pete Wright:
I can’t either. If it’s embryos or colonists, but it is a combination of the two.

Andy Nelson:
Okay, actually — according to the plot on Wikipedia, and again, I don’t know if this is pulled from that or somewhere else, but it says the ship is en route to colonize the planet Origae-6, carrying 2,000 colonists and 1,140 human embryos in cryogenic stasis. So there you go.

Pete Wright:
Wait, say that again? Colonists and two thousand embryos?

Andy Nelson:
Two thousand colonists and one thousand one hundred forty human embryos.

Pete Wright:
Okay. Well, it’s a weird number.

Andy Nelson:
Odd number, but —

Pete Wright:
Maybe they’re sure some of them won’t survive, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Andy Nelson:
We already see one that didn’t, so yeah.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Make room for baby, though, at the end.

Andy Nelson:
Yeah, yeah.

Pete Wright:
Okay, so that was one of your questions. You had a second question.

Andy Nelson:
My last one is just a gripe about our last couple on the ship — just like, you know what, our entire crew has died, but you know what, let’s make love in the shower. All right. I guess Ridley just wanted a sexy alien murder scene, but —

Pete Wright:
Yeah, that’s exactly what he wanted.

Andy Nelson:
Oh god. Oh my god. Yeah. All right. Well I guess that’s it. Shall we move into the back half?

Pete Wright:
I guess.

Andy Nelson:
All right. Let’s first take a quick break.

Pete Wright:
The Next Reel is a production of TruStory FM, engineering by Andy Nelson, music by Tzabutan, Dan Mayo, and Yehezkel Raz, Oriol Novella, and Eli Catlin. Andy usually finds all the stats for the awards and numbers at The-Numbers.com, BoxOfficeMojo.com, IMDb.com, and Wikipedia.org. Find the show and the full archive at trustory.fm. You can follow us from there too and learn about membership. Check out our merch store at thenextreel.com/merch, and if your app allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show.

Sequels and remakes — what did Scott have planned?

Andy Nelson:
Ugh, boy. He had so many plans. So many plans. He talked about a trilogy. He talked about maybe it was four films, he said maybe it’s even six films. Like he clearly wanted to go all Avatar on this and just kind of keep doing this for the rest of his remaining days. Potentially, he even said that we would eventually possibly even return to Sigourney Weaver, bring her back in. He said, somebody has to be her parents. We’re eventually going to get to them. And I was like, oh my god, please. No. Just don’t go that route.

Pete Wright:
Jesus. He’s gone full Skywalker.

Andy Nelson:
Oh, I know, it’s terrible. But really, the long and the short of it is because this was, by the studio, considered a box office failure, paired with the fact that Disney bought Fox — none of that ever got off the ground. And as of 2025, Ridley Scott finally said, “Where it’s going now, I think I’ve done enough, and I just hope it goes further.” And then of course there’s Alien: Romulus, which came out in 2024, which we will talk about next week. I wonder if that’s the “where it’s going now” — that Ridley Scott was just like, no, I’m not interested anymore. You clearly don’t care about AI like I do.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, right. AI and AI God. And so you said you didn’t like Alien: Earth that much.

Andy Nelson:
I couldn’t even get through the first season. I just hated the characters so much. All these grown-ups acting like they were kids. It was so stupid. I was just like, these people — it’s like watching acting class. It’s so dumb.

Pete Wright:
Okay, I liked it more than you.

Andy Nelson:
Yeah. I mean, a lot of people did, and I know they went into a second season, but yeah.

Pete Wright:
Would you say they did get a second season? I haven’t been following it.

Andy Nelson:
I thought they did. Yeah.

Pete Wright:
If that’s great, if they did, I think that’s great. There were some clever aliens in it. I like the fact that there were other aliens. I like that we’re just saying, you know what, the universe is a really scary place and we’re gonna look at some other reasons it’s really scary. I was much more interested in the creatures they were creating than the alien super kids.

Andy Nelson:
Yeah, yeah. The alien super kids were the worst. I did like the aliens. I wish I could have just had more of that.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Andy Nelson:
Season two starts shooting later this year.

Pete Wright:
Okay.

Andy Nelson:
Just confirmed it.

Pete Wright:
All right. I’m fine with that. Okay, so how to do — how to do an awards season.

Andy Nelson:
Okay. Three wins with 18 other nominations. At the Saturn Awards, it was nominated for Best Science Fiction Film, which is weird because it’s terrible, but lost to Blade Runner 2049. At the Satellite Awards, it was nominated for Best Visual Effects, also losing to Blade Runner 2049. At the Golden Schmoes, it was nominated for Biggest Disappointment of the Year and lost to Justice League. I guess they hadn’t seen the director’s cut of that yet. And at the Fright Meter Awards, it was nominated for Best Visual Effects, but lost to something called The Void, which I am not familiar with. But there you go.

Pete Wright:
Huh. Okay, well, it got some attention. How did it do at the box office? Sad trombone.

Andy Nelson:
Well, for Scott’s second return to this franchise, he had a budget of $97 to $111 million, which would be about $143.2 million in today’s dollars. The movie premiered May 4th, 2017 in London before its May 12th opening in the UK and May 19th opening in the US, where it opened opposite Everything Everything, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul, and Baywatch. This landed in the number one spot, but it only held that for a week and only stayed in the top ten for four weeks because it sucks. Still, it did well, going on to earn $74.2 million domestically and $166.6 million internationally for a total gross of $307.7 million. That lands the film with an APPFM of $1.3 million — a drop from Prometheus, but still a profit. But apparently not according to the studio, because they felt that it was a disappointment. So maybe they spent more in prints and advertising that isn’t reflected here.

Pete Wright:
Look, I think that this movie — I know it says it’s in the APPFM column and I would have expected it in the ALPFM column. But it definitely got no more of these movies being made as is, which I call a massive win for humanity.

Andy Nelson:
Yeah, thank goodness. Thank goodness that we shift directions from here. This is really just — I mean, it’s a mess of a prequel sequel that really suffers. We’ve got a visionary director who wanted to go one way with Prometheus and a studio who wanted to go another way, and now everybody’s forced to play in both worlds and kind of create this continuing blend of ideas that just made for a disaster of a film. But a fun one to talk about.

Pete Wright:
A fun one to talk about. This movie is the result of two parties that could not fight about it in a boardroom. They needed to fight about it and settle it long before it reached any of us. It is the result of just sort of Ridley Scott stubbornly wanting to come back to this franchise with something to say and spending two films and like over almost six hours trying to find increasingly indirect ways to say it. And it’s confusing and messy and it’s not the Alien return we deserved.

Andy Nelson:
No. A hundred percent not. All right, well that is it for our conversation about Alien: Covenant. Next week we are looking at Alien: Romulus. Set between Alien and Aliens. It’s Fede Álvarez’s love letter to the franchise that gets a lot right, even if you have to sit through a deeply uncomfortable digital recreation of Ash and more callbacks than you can count. It’s still a great watch. We’ll see you then. For now, let’s do our ratings.

Pete Wright:
Letterboxd.com/thenextreel — that’s where you can find our HQ page over on Letterboxd, our favorite social media site for movie lovers. What are you going to do with Covenant?

Andy Nelson:
Well, you might have seen that last time I watched it, it was at one and a half. I left it sitting at one and a half. But honestly, it’s just a one-star film.

Pete Wright:
Okay.

Andy Nelson:
It’s actually dropped the more that I’ve thought about it.

Pete Wright:
You know what’s weird about it after our conversation? I have been and remain a two-star on this film because of one name we did not drop, which is Dariusz Wolski. I think he shoots it in a lovely way, and I think there are some —

Andy Nelson:
Albeit too bright.

Pete Wright:
Be it too bright. It was too bright, but I don’t necessarily fault — I fault a lot of things for getting there, but I do like the way he handles landscapes. I like the way he handles the location. And I think it leverages some of the same things that he did in Prometheus, especially the opening sequence of Prometheus, which I think is gorgeous. And so I celebrate that stuff. The other star is for what Fassbender was trying to do. I think Fassbender was trying to show up to a movie that did not deserve his twins, and that’s what we get. So two stars, no heart.

Andy Nelson:
Well, that averages out to one and a half stars, no hearts. That will be what we rated over on our account on Letterboxd, which you can find at @thenextreel. You can find me there at @sodacreekfilm and Pete at @petewright. So, what did you think about Alien: Covenant? We would love to hear your thoughts. Hop into the ShowTalk channel over in our Discord community where we will be talking about the film this week.

Pete Wright:
When the movie ends —

Andy Nelson:
Our conversation begins.

Pete Wright:
Letterboxd giveth, Andrew.

Andy Nelson:
As Letterboxd always doeth.

Pete Wright:
Did you go high or low?

Andy Nelson:
I went low-ish. I’m at two stars.

Pete Wright:
Two? Is that two?

Andy Nelson:
Two stars.

Pete Wright:
Okay.

Andy Nelson:
Yeah, right with you.

Pete Wright:
All right, what do you got?

Andy Nelson:
I’ve got two stars, no heart by GrungeGrandpa99, who has this to say. “Michael Fassbender kissing Michael Fassbender was the best part.”

Pete Wright:
Okay. We went with a similar aesthetic in our reviews, and I want to say — sometimes you make a project and you feel really good about something that you write in it, and then that project gets made, and years go by, maybe months, maybe years, maybe just weeks. But it’s not until you hear the line from somebody else that you realize what a horrible mistake you’ve made. And that is what Cora points out with their three-star review. Quote, “You blow, I do the fingering is an actual thing Michael Fassbender said. I am twelve years old, but it hit me so wrong in this movie.” All right, thanks, Letterboxd.