Alien Covenant - Needs a Credible Plot for the Good Special Effects.

Most of the movies that Ridley Scott helps to make are enjoyable. He has a signature that I like. The camera work with contrast and colour have a unique feel. As does his use of light and shadow. The visual feel gives his movies certain atmospheric credibility. This combined with good actors makes his scenes very compelling indeed. I’m always enticed into his films. This is one of the constant things one always takes for granted. Ridley Scott’s on-screen signature is fantastic.

Because I was gripped by his science fiction film Prometheus. I was keen to watch the follow-up movie called Alien Covenant. With my usual expectation of enjoyment concerning Ridley Scott movies, I decided upon an impulse buy of the DVD while shopping in the local supermarket.

I’m going to say from the start that I was disappointed by the storyline. Despite the very good start of the movie. The scenery was fabulous and the actors were good. My problem was the script. How it progressed from one situation to another as the film progressed. It was something that could have easily been improved with a few small tweaks here and there. I know slight errors can be forgiven sometimes, but on this level and with such superb effects, I feel parts of the story let the great visual look of the film down.

The Plot

The start of the story was good. I was sucked in straight away. The usual Ridley Scott signature was there. The actors were good and convincing. I thought the inside of the spaceship was sensational. It was a vessel full of cryogenically frozen human colonists on their way to a new life in a new world. This was a journey that would take over seven years. Hence the passengers being frozen for the long journey. We enter the story part way into the journey as the ship enters an ion storm or something else to do with bad space weather. I’m not a knowledge box on such things but evidently, these space storms happen. A group of cryogenic crewmembers are woken because of the emergency. The computers click them into wake up mode. All good stuff and very atmospheric. The Ridley Scott thing is plodding along nicely. The crew must repair the minor damage of the ion storm. Once the job is done, everyone can go back to bed for the rest of the journey. All except for the onboard android that is the janitor while the humans get their long lay in.

A faint signal of human singing is picked up from a star system less than a few weeks detour. This happens during the repair work just before the crew can return to their cryogenic beds. The crew of the Covenant decide to investigate and veer off course for a temporary look. They hope to discover the source of the singing beacon. I was still gripped and the continuity of the story was working very well. The whole thing had a claustrophobic feeling of being aboard a giant ship in the middle of space. I enjoyed some more superb scenes. Especially as the landing craft leaves the mother ship with a group of explorers. They descend to the planet to look for the source of the beacon.

The Plot Begins to Deteriorate.

The landing stage of the movie is when everything went bad! The scenery was still grand. The camera work maintained that wonderful Ridley Scott signature and there are some more monumental things to see. But the storyline and the continuity were blown away for me as the film began to lose its way. I was suddenly picking holes with the situation I found the landing party in. I can never understand how the filmmakers can create such a real feel for an alien environment and then mess it up with a storyline that borders on sheer stupidity with a run of silly little misdemeanours.

Issue 1. The crew of the Covenant landing craft can pinpoint the location or source of the signal but opt to land the ship on the edge of a lake. Half in and half out of the water. It made for a splendid scene. The ship looked great and the topography was marvellous. A volcano could look great and real but you don’t land your shuttle in the lava. This landing zone in the lake seemed totally impractical. The away team just come out and down the ramp onto the shingle of the shoreline because the shuttles legs are actually in the water. This crew of explorers need to walk a good few kilometres to the source of their beacon.

Issue 2. I can’t understand why the shuttle pilot did not edge his craft closer to the intended area. A good few kilometres closer. There were loads of places to land the thing. The shuttlecraft can do vertical landing and take-off.

All sorts of dilemmas unfold, as one might well imagine, where aliens are concerned. There are monsters, panic, death and explosions etc. All good stuff. The away team quickly get into trouble and find themselves stranded. They get into this very quickly and did not need to go for the many kilometre hikes.

They get to the source of the beacon. Depleted in numbers and very traumatised. It is a vacated complex where the giant humanoid engineers once lived. The giant engineers are all lying about dead and in a petrified state. Then the usual bad weather syndrome kicks in and cuts their communication off from the Covenant spaceship in orbit. I think this has happened before in other movies. The whole storyline is beginning to look like a Golan Globus production on Prozac. Again, I would like to stress that there are great props and the actors are good. They can only do what they can with their script.

Then it gets worse on the storyline front. On board the orbiting Covenant spaceship, the crew are debating about how risky it would be to take the ship to a lower orbit. It’s dangerous and they must consider the 2,000 cryogenically sleeping colonists on board. They have a duty to them. Well, that all sounds reasonable. Except they decide ‘to Hell with the sleepers.’

I’m now getting a bit miffed with all these scientists sharing a brain cell between them. The Covenant crew, in a bold move of outrageous stupidity, decide to risk it and descend to a lower orbit where the storm is raging. I’m saying to myself, “There are other shuttles on board and they could wake a few more sleeping people.” Surely someone else who can man a shuttlecraft?

Everything to do with the plot becomes unbelievable in the surreal surroundings as the surviving members of the away team are getting into various dilemmas. The horror situation is splendid and the panic is obviously very believable. Then they have this great idea of splitting up. Despite the fact that they have seen these Aliens, munch on some of their late buddies. They still go for the good old ‘let’s split up’ idea at this compound where the giant humanoid engineers once lived. There is a big enough area at the engineer’s ruins to land a shuttle in the first place.

Only the special effects and the horror scenes kept me watching. As the film draws towards its climax and conclusion, there are still lots of nail-biting and gripping scenes. Even a rescue shuttle that can land directly at the source of the trouble where the beacon is. Hey, why did they not do that in the first place?

The Covenant does send a second shuttle in the end. Hey, why did the Covenant go lower into dangerous orbit?

There were so many other reasons to allow our crew to walk into the wilderness. Even if they had landed at the complex first, it would be reasonable to send an exploration team out and the same credible results could have happened. I felt a lot more thought should have been put into the storyline. It could have been so much better. This was great cinematic Ridley Scott visual effects with a pound shop storyline. I would still recommend watching this movie but it falls short of Prometheus.

I watched for a second time the other day. 1st June 2019. It is a great shame because the props and the actors are all good. It is just a few little aspects of continuity that are overlooked. It spoils the entire film.