Review: "Alien: Covenant," "Prometheus," and the Duality of Ridley Scott

Movie of the Week #4 is an Alien double feature

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This week marks the return of one of Hollywood’s single most fascinating and compelling long-running franchises with the release of Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus. I am cautiously optimistic, based on the strong marketing and Álvarez’s past horror successes (I continue to bear a torch for his unbelievably gnarly Evil Dead remake), but I will confess some frustration that we have seemingly moved on to another era of Alien without giving the last one, in particular Romulus’ immediate predecessor, its due. Because while I have a laundry list of issues with 2012’s Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s first return to the world he shaped back in 1979, I have nothing but love and fascination for 2017’s Alien: Covenant. It is, simply put, some of the director’s best-ever work, and one of the boldest, most uncompromising Hollywood blockbusters of its decade next to Mad Max: Fury Road. Unlike Miller’s masterpiece, Scott’s film failed to catch on with mainstream audiences, for reasons that aren’t exactly inexplicable – Covenant is as dark a film as has ever carried a $100-million-plus budget – but are disappointing nevertheless. Prometheus and Covenant are unlikely to be followed up on in the 86-year-old Scott’s lifetime, leaving them as an awkward, warring duology that do not sit easily next to each other, but which speak volumes in their many contradictions.  

After all, the difference between the two films is also representative of the chasm separating the halves of Scott’s beguiling filmography: The first is gorgeous but hollow, a film that looks like it should have bigger ideas but, when poked at, tumbles to dust like a sandcastle. The second is equally gorgeous, but hauntingly so, dauntingly so, and it is filled with the kinds of ideas that, when poked at, poke back at the viewer – that challenge our preconceived notions of sequels and prequels, that assault our expectations of narrative payoff, that reorients the scale and positionality of our human perspective and who on screen we empathize with. Prometheus is a mystery box stuffed with vague questions, that ends without having told a story while promising to maybe get around to one next time; Covenant is a fire-and-brimstone peek into a mind full of interests and ideas – on the futility of faith and the cruelness of fate, on the nature of consciousness and creativity, on the insufferable ego of a species that must always see itself at the center of creation – that swirl before us in furious contemplation. One is a breathtaking cathedral disguising a hollow brand extension, promising answers to mysteries that never needed explaining, and creating new mysteries that could never adequately be addressed, the Hollywood equivalent of a hamster wheel designed to run perfectly in place for all eternity. The other is a ferocious Trojan Horse, smuggling a brutal, darkly funny, productively bitter and oftentimes confrontational personal statement into a movie that is less a direct sequel to its predecessor than a vehement rejection of the prior film’s blithe emptiness – a movie in which the ‘bad guy’ wins and the entire human race is implicitly dammed as unworthy of salvation.

It is possible we do not get one Ridley Scott without the other. It has always been debatable whether Scott is a true ‘auteur’ – a director whose substance, personality, and interests are clearly recognizable from film to film – or ‘merely’ a master Hollywood craftsman; is he an old-style studio director who competently directs the scripts that land on his desk, or someone who transforms the material through his worldview and technique? For every masterpiece under his belt, there is also an anonymous journeyman film like Robin Hood or Body of Lies forgotten to film history, alongside curveballs that challenge everyone’s perception of him as a filmmaker, like Thelma and Louise. He is legitimately difficult to pin down, a director who’s never not making a movie, but only sometimes putting all of himself into his work. Yet if the existence of a Prometheus, beautiful but vapid, is the cost of an Alien: Covenant, terrifying and full-throated, I will happily take that trade every time. Ten unremarkable Ridley Scott movies are worth one of his masterpieces.