Alien: Covenant (2017)

Directed by Ridley Scott. Starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Amy Seimetz, Carmen Ejogo, Demián Bichir, Callie Hernandez, Jussie Smollett, Nathaniel Dean. [R]

Director Scott and screenwriters John Logan and Dante Harper (from a story by Michael Green and Jack Paglen) continue the Prometheus narrative in a pick-and-choose fashion, retaining certain elements surrounding the android David (Fassbender) and the Xenomorph’s makeup (plus a continued fascination with man-made mythology), while dropping the sometimes clunky tie-ins to the original Alien and the all-for-naught heroics of its valiant human component. Here, a colony ship is forced to set down on an uncharted planet after their original mission is compromised by random disaster; the crew goes out to investigate the Earth-like biome, leading to the hostile encounters promised by the franchise. Those promises, however, are sometimes an uneasy fit with the filmmakers’ ambitions to explore the creature’s origins (indeed, the very origins of life on Earth and the entire universe)—Fassbender talks a big game about Ozymandias and Wagnerian opera, but in the end, it still comes down to panicked, desperate survivors trying to kill a malevolent organism before it wipes them all out first. Scott hasn’t forgotten how to deliver on the gruesome body horror angle, and Fassbender is often marvelous in a dual role (David from Prometheus, as well as a different android, Walter, assigned to the colony ship), but it feels like the movie is merely scratching the surface on the scientific/lore aspects while short-changing the title creature as a so-called perfect killing machine operating purely on instinct. And that intimate shower scene near the end is so out of place, it almost feels like Scott is thumbing his nose at the audience for wanting more “slasher thrills” in their Alien sequels. James Franco cameos.

67/100