Alien Covenant.

Alien Covenant had placed itself in the same mental folder as Covenant the band, in my mind. Because a film that centers on the 'synths' of the Alien franchise brought to my mind the themes Covenant (the band) have so magnificently explored.

Dreams of a Cryotank to Dead Stars.

The glorious, intellectual isolation described in the song Babel serves as a perfect backdrop for the moment when David (the synth left to figure out the controls of the alien spacecraft in Prometheus) is hovering above the progenitors...though by then I guess David has figured out that he is closer to the daemons than 'a saint in disguise'.

But despite the glorious Xplus sound and visuals of the cinema screen -  Alien Covenant proved itself to be an unsatisfying film.

No fault of the actors, or the way it was filmed, no.

My chief criticism is this; the characters in the film were less real to me than those in the game, Alien Isolation. 

This is significant because a computer game centers on action and usually game character is minimal or non existent.

So it is truly mark of a bad film when computer game has a richer story-line...

And here is just why Alien Covenant failed to entertain me.

The original alien lurked in dark corners
It probably slept a lot - like a cat - because it was a predator.
It didn't have to be clever, just sneaky.

And its origin was never of any interest to me...

It was scary because I didn't know how bad it really was.
I didn't know what it was...
And it kept getting worse.

I'm not sure it is true to say that alien has lost its power; like Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, Jack the Ripper, and the ware-wolf.

Become almost cuddly?
But not far off...
Alien is familiar, let's leave it at that.

Yet, Alien Isolation - a game -  proves that if a set of audio and visual clues can make me identify with an on-screen character to such an extent that I care about them - though the alien was clunky, familiar, predictable even, but definitely made me feel vulnerable and scared -  hunted...and I was only watching the game, not playing, then Covenant - the film - was not providing the right clues: atmosphere, sound, and simple wrongness (see Office Complex in Half Life) to create unease...disorientation...fear.

Even a semi-nonexistent story can be redeemed by atmosphere.

And a film without atmosphere therefore must have a great story to  qualify as good.

Was there a great story underneath the pretty pictures?

Alas, no.
The true horror in an alien film is human behavior. Duplicitous humans 'screwing each other over for money' is an omnipresent truth. It always will be relevant. In Covenant this is replaced by synth behavior, and the 'superman' motif when carried by a synth fails to access the true potential menace of the synth. For that. I would recommend P K Dick and the Second Variety stories...

Foolishly, instead of keeping human greed as the true focus of the Alien franchise, Covenant tries to shoe-horn as many irrelevant  horror-monster tropes in to the story as possible.

So we get alien as Ripper with an almost obligatory Psycho death in the shower, scene.

Synth as Dracula, when we realise what David has done to Elizabeth - in a room that made me expect to see a preternaturally strong naked woman through the eye of a video camera (Rec).

And ware-wolf when we are supposed to be shocked to see the monster under the skin of the civilized synth.

Mostly though. Covenant focuses on the endlessly boring trope of synthetics wishing that they could create life (Frankenstein's monster). The Manchine longing of a synth for flesh, for soul in conflict with the body, at odds with the desire for perfection.

The films Hardware, Demon Seed, Saturn 5 all do it so much better.

The final nail in Covenant's coffin is if Dan Obannon could make a beach ball sinister, and yes, he did - Dark Star - then surely someone can make a new Alien film that accesses the darkest corner of our memory; to jack us in to the layer of our hominid brains left over from when our ancestors were prayed upon by big cats and swooping birds!

Alas, Ridley Scott is not that man.

And don't get me started on how dumb the crew were...