Like so much in this latest installment of Ridley Scott's prequel to Alien, the quote appears to come from The Bible, but is apparently a coarse translation found in The Living Bible, as the King James translation of Proverbs 16:27 simply says "an ungodly man diggeth up evil," which seems closer to the mark in the case of David.
I should have left well enough alone but watched Alien: Covenant this weekend. We are led to believe that he and Elizabeth ran into some difficulty on this mysterious planet. All we see of her is a headstone planted in what David calls the garden, after meeting his doppelganger Walter, who had arrived with the crew of the Covenant to this foreboding planet. This film is largely a showcase for Michael Fassbender, who plays both roles. Humans become incidental or rather incubators for the alien life forms David has been playing with on the planet.
He claims Elizabeth was hit by the virus, one he apparently unleashed on the planet, wiping out its entire race of giants, which were supposed to be the progenitors of the human race. I guess he felt no love for these "Engineers" after one of them ripped off his head in Prometheus only for Elizabeth to stitch him back together on this desolate planet. Besides, the aliens are much more fun to play with. He also harbors a deep grudge for Weyland and the human race in general, which he believes outlived its purpose and doesn't deserve to continue.
The scenario would have been fine if it was treated more like black box theater than a silly action-adventure movie. You just can't imagine a crew being this stupid for the second time around. But, Ridley seems to play on a wry note of humor, toying with the idea of log cabins and Take Me Home Country Roads, a strange musical choice to have survived at least five generations, but it has its roots in the original Star Trek pilot, which I discuss at the end. It's hard to imagine the cold-hearted Weyland Corporation would allow its crew members to indulge in such fantasies when it costs no less than $10,000 per pound of payload at today's NASA rates.
The premise of this inane movie is that the Covenant was heading to colonize Origae-6, with 2000 colonists in sleep mode and drawers full of human embryos, before it got sidetracked when hit by a mysterious solar flare. The awakened crew finds a planet remarkably similar to earth, that even has cultivated wheat fields on its densely mountainous surface, but eerily no sounds of life whatsoever. Only these black little spores that emit microscopic particles, which soon affect the lesser members of the crew, as they would the red shirts on Star Trek. It might have been more fun to watch if this lifeless planet had been illusory as was the case in The Cage, but instead is all too real, as Elon Musk might imagine on his mission to Mars.
As it turns out, all these crew members are bound together through marriage, like some intergalactic Love Boat. There is even a gay couple. I guess it makes sense as this is supposed to be a colonizing mission but it seems a mutinous voyage in the making especially when spouses start to die. Ridley Scott doesn't waste any time. James Franco's character, Jake Branson, was supposed to be the captain of this ill-fated voyage, but is burned up in his hibernation capsule, so the duty falls upon Billy Crudup's Christopher Oram to explore this strange planet. Of course, Jake's wife Danny (the relatively new Katherine Waterston) challenges him on that assumption, but goes down for the ride just the same. You assume Oram and Danny will come together, especially when the new captain loses his wife in a fiery explosion of the landing module, but alas we shouldn't think along Love Boat lines.
The movie isn't as dull and plodding as was Prometheus, but the level of credulity is even less, especially in the way these crew members so easily fall prey to David's devilish schemes. Turns out his fatal flaw is that he is creative, whereas later generation "synthetics" have no such spark. He misses things here and there, like the author of Ozymandias, insisting upon Byron. Common enough mistake, I guess, as Walter points out his error. No one likes a school marm.
David has been playing with aliens, seeing if he can engineer a creature of his own. All he needs are humans to act as incubators for his creations. One by one, David picks off the crew, Captain Oram falling too easily prey to one of David's eggs. We get the pre-climactic battle between David and Walter, both exhibiting a phenomenal amount of strength. You know who is going to win this battle, but Danny allows herself to be just as easily fooled as Captain Oram. So, David gets on board the Covenant as Walter. Two more battles with aliens ensue and a grisly shower love scene (just when you thought there would be no nudity) before David is left to nestle the two surviving crew members in their hibernation capsules before setting to work breeding his whole new generation of aliens. Danny's realization is muted by David putting her quietly to sleep, as if validating his hypothesis on the value of human beings.
I wasn't sure at first, but this seemed more a reference to Aliens than it did the original Alien, which is kind of odd since Ridley Scott had no hand in the sequel to his original movie. The deserted colony had a different name in James Cameron's movie, but one assumes this is the mothership. As you might remember there was a little girl, Newt I believe she was called, who was apparently the only one of the colonists to survive David's macabre experiments. I guess he wanted to recreate Elizabeth Shaw, who he admits his love for to Walter before doing away with him.
The whole thing is a bit too much like The Island of Dr. Moreau with a whole bunch of Biblical references thrown in. So, it seems Ridley really is obsessed with some sort of godhead in his august years. One hopes that he will find it in his concluding saga, although he has a lot of projects on the table at the ripe old age of 83, including The Last Duel due out soon. Hardly any time left for aliens.
The sad part is that his best work is behind him. I don't think he will ever capture the same magic he found in Alien and Blade Runner. He would have been smarter to leave the prequels to Alien to someone with a fresh imagination, as was the case in handing over the sequel to Blade Runner to Denis Villeneuve. Or, at the very least find some writers of good repute, as Covenant was even more derivative than Prometheus.
The log cabin fascination is lifted directly from the pilot episode to the original Star Trek, where Captain Pike recalled the memory of his horse Tango on a ranch he had in Mojave to the ship's doctor, pining for those old country roads. The idea that Franco's character gets torched and a new captain has to take over is similarly reminiscent of the shift from Pike to Kirk in the television series, as apparently Jeffrey Hunter opted out of the series. A shame for him. However, his character was rebooted in the 2009 movie of Star Trek. Ridley has to know that his audience is aware of such things, even his younger audience, as you can binge watch the original series on Netflix, as I have done with my daughter.
Worse, he dangles the log cabin like Rosebud in Citizen Kane as a means for Danny to realize she has been duped. Christ, does he really think we are that stupid, or is this just some sort of elaborate joke. Whatever the case, studios keep bankrolling him, so they must think there is an audience for this claptrap. I'm just glad I didn't pay to watch it.
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