Alien Covenant: L'eggo My Eggo!

These are interesting times. Some of the most anticipated films on the horizon involve filmmakers going back and either reexamining their earlier work, or in the case of this fall's Blade Runner 2049, seeing a new chapter being brought to life by a different director with a new perspective. More and more, as with Star Wars, filmmakers are being tasked with breathing fresh life into a beloved franchise, while making sure it carries the familiar aromas of nostalgia. With Alien: Covenant, legendary director Ridley Scott has already revisited the world of his groundbreaking 1979 Alien with Prometheus, an incredibly divisive film that this reader loved, but which is derided by many. With Covenant, Scott has dunked his Prometheus donut into the original Alien and made a semi-sequel to one, while virtually remaking the first.
Almost 80, Scott remains an incredibly prolific and dynamic filmmaker. A commercial visionary who can still rock the box office with a film like The Martian. I went into Covenant giddy with excitement. What's vexing to me is that while Scott's direction and sense of scope is totally on point and exhilarating, the script (from John Logan and Dante Harper; story by Jack Paglan and Michael Green) goes out of its way to repurpose and restage numerous beats from both Alien and James Cameron's sequel Aliens, that Covenant ends up at times feeling a lot like an Alien remake, made for a 2017 audience presumed to be unfamiliar with the original. Unfortunately, for much of its running time,  Alien: Covenant feels more than a little recycled.
The Covenant is a deep space colony ship, her crew in suspended animation for the long voyage. Like David in Prometheus, a lone synthetic (Michael Fassbender, called Walter here) is tasked with watching over the sleeping voyagers - until an accident unexpectedly wakes the crew early. It turns out there's a nearby planet that may be an even better candidate for colonization than their original destination, so grief stricken crew members Katherine Waterston (of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them) and  Billy Crudup lead a scouting party to explore the planet, while the rest of the crew (including Danny McBride) remains in orbit on the Covenant.
Once on the planet, things start to go wrong very quickly. The first and third acts of the film are full of dread and escalating suspense. I loved the Neomorphs, ghostly pale cousins of the original Alien Xenomorph with blind, distended heads. They're utterly nightmarish and disturbing. Likewise, the newer, seemingly larger Xenomorph is speedy and terrifying. Though the creatures in this outing go from embryonic to full-grown way, way faster then in prior (meaning future) outings. Like Jiffy Pop fast. Though pretty familiar sledding for Alien fans, for the most part I liked Act 1 and Act 3 of this picture, replete with call-backs as they were - the exploding dropship from Aliens stranding everyone; the gutsy protagonist using a large mechanical claw to fight close-quarters with the beast; her triumphant declaration of vanquish! Finally making it back to the ship - sigh of relief - and everything's fine - or is it?! Too many times, scenes in Covenant echo with recognition.
But, boy - that middle part. Act 2 is a lugubrious drag, and when Covenant's Walter meets Prometheus' David, the "Data vs. Lore" dynamic drags on like some kind of dimly lit outtake from Colonel Kurtz's temple hideout in Apocalypse Now. While members of Covenant's crew are dispatched with escalating carnage, Walter and David go from ruminating on Shelley's Ozymandias to knock-down drag-out martial arts mayhem. The cast is uniformly good. I loved Fassbender's work, pulling double-duty as synthetic narcissist. Why David does what he does is pretty inexplicable, however. Waterston and McBride are both extremely engaging, and McBride does a great job inhabiting the kind of working-stiff character Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto embodied in Scott's original.
Beware of the most ham-fisted shower scene since Jolene Blalock slathered on the "decontamination gel" in the Star Trek: Enterprise pilot, and a finale twist that unfortunately, everyone is going to see coming from miles away - except the one character who should have seen it coming. Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski shoots in a nearly colorless monochrome that really gets old after a while. This is one of the grayest, least colorful films in recent memory. I have to say, with a few exceptions, I really think I enjoyed Prometheus a lot more than Alien: Covenant, which surprises the heck out of me. After the engagement and pure fun of the recent Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Alien Covenant just isn't all that enjoyable and feels like a bit of a slog in comparison.
But if the earlier Alien films are kind of fuzzy in your recollection and you're just in the mood for a good space shocker, you could do a heck of a lot worse - though I'm not sure that's much of a recommendation.