11 Reasons Why Alien: Covenant Ruins The Alien Franchise

Something that separates the original Alien films from the rest of that era's science fiction is the visual aesthetic of a "used future," an era that was obviously far away from our present, but seemed like people were actually living in. The look of the first two films weren't of worlds and ships with pristine corridors or clean apartments with robo-butlers, it was constructed into a junk heap architecture that immediately told the audience what kind of world the characters were living in. Covenant undoes much of that visual texture by presenting spaces that are stark and clean. The color white is the most present throughout the film, from the lovingly shot tubular hallways of the ship, to the hypersleep suits the crew wears and never seems to soil. 

Everything in the film, from the ship's control room to David's mountain home on Origae-6 feels put together in a way that suggests a steam punk neat freak did their best to make the sets look Alien-ish, but it's never enough to suggest that Covenant has anything to do with the other films. The wide open spaces presented in Covenant are beautiful, but the original Alien films are not about beauty, they're about the fear of your body turning against you, and the rats in the walls deciding that you are their next meal. How could you be blamed for thinking something is off about the original Alien films if you watched Covenant first and then decided to go back to Scott's original see what all the hype was about?

The main rule of film is "show don't tell," but Ridley Scott seems to have forgotten all about that in his pursuit to reign in a franchise that was never meant to be. Prometheus, Covenant's predecessor, explains Xenomorphs (the titular alien) are nothing more than a hybridization of a collection of spores that bond with whatever they come in contact with to form an eating and killing machine. "Fine," audiences said. "That's already too much exposition, but whatever."

But Ridley Scott wasn't done explaining in explicit detail how the Xenomorphs came to be created by an evil robot who was set on wiping out humanity. The middle third of Covenant gives the audience an almost step by step walkthrough on how the Fassbender's David created the Xenomorph we would meet in the original film, stripping away the terror and mystery of the creature. 

Do you remember the first time you saw the Xenomorph? You probably didn't even know it had a name, it was just a squirming black creature coming out of the dark to rip some poor ancillary character to shreds. Seeing the beast rise out of a small body of water where Newt is helplessly standing can still send a shudder through your spine. Did you need to know the Xenomorph began as a series of spores invented by giant grey aliens as a way to mutate life? And they were weaponized after a sad robot realized their potential for quickly wiping out humans? And it took a decade of research and hybridizations to get the creature that we meet in the original film? Does that make the creature more frightening, or do you only think of inane questions when you see the alien queen squirting out eggs as Ripley blasts it with a flame thrower?

That question seems silly because the main hero in Alien - Scott's opening salvo into the world of science fiction - is Ripley, a character played by Sigourney Weaver. She's smart, she cares about people, and she puts up with a lot of sh*t from the men in her life (across four films) while saving their lives on a consistent basis, but was that an accident? The script for the original film was written by Dan O'Bannon (a frequent collaborator of John Carpenter and Alejandro Jodorowsky), and the sequel was written by James Cameron, so it's entirely possible Scott viewed Weaver's character as a secondary necessity rather a character who was creating an important archetypal role. Ripley is more than just the quintessential "final girl," she's a figure that begins that way, and over the course of her four films in the series becomes a god-like leader.

Scott knows one of the tropes of the Alien series is having a short-haired female protagonist. It seems like that's as far as Scott went with the character. Katherine Waterston's Dany is just a woman with short hair, and while she's definitely the main character, and she sort of defeats the Xenomorph, it doesn't seem like any work is done on Scott's part to imbue her with the essence of a hero. She just kind of rolls with stuff until the film ends. Doing this to your main character makes it seem like Ridley was just a fluke, which is disappointing because you want to think that the people making the films you love care about inspiring people to be the best versions of themselves no matter how they identify, instead it seems like Scott was just trying to get the job done.

You wouldn't know it from Alien: Covenant, but the first two films in the franchise are interesting character studies showing people from different backgrounds trying to grapple with the terrifying realities of the unknown. Covenant sort of does that, but without giving any of the ancillary characters any kind of personality beyond "pilot," "lady in spaceship," or "guy from Empire who is also a pilot maybe."

The original films gave the audience characters they could care about, and even Aliens - a film with 15 characters who aren't named Ripley - gives you side characters who you can root for. But when you put those films in the new context of Covenant it's hard to watch them without realizing Scott was just trying to give people more of what they wanted. It feels like he thought, "People like space marines? I'll give them space marines." And that was that.

Normally complication in a sequel is a good thing. It provides tension, and gives the next film a reason to hit the ground running. But when you're making prequels for a film released in 1979 that has a very tight story, it makes the entire franchise look messy. You're not wrong if you're confused about how Covenant ties into Alien. The original film has Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo setting down on LV-426 and finding a spaceship with a huge suit that's known as the "space jockey" with a burst chest and later the space miners enter an area full of Xenomorph eggs. At the end of Covenant David vomits up some Xenomorph embryos and stows them away on a spaceship full of human settlers. So how do we get from the end of Covenant to the beginning of Alien?

Even if Scott films the third and fourth prequels he's been threatening to make, there's so much work to make it so a space jockey lands the ship from Prometheus on LV-426. Not only will two movies full of gymnastic exposition be boring for the audience to watch, but they'll be boring for Ridley to make, and none of the answers that the audience is given will make the original film any better. If anything, you'll regret knowing so much about how the Xenomorphs landed and what the space jockey had for lunch. Alien and Aliens form a cohesive vision so rarely seen in films and their sequels that it's now obvious, thanks to the subsequent features and prequels, they were two happy accidents, and audiences should have never asked for more.

If Covenant felt familiar to you, that's because most of the film was spent retelling the stories of the first two in a kind of mash up that failed to deliver any of their respective highs. He made a movie essentially about a small, sassy crew that hangs out with some space marines. It also features a landing scene where people talk about how they hate space, a rescue scene where someone lands a ship to rescue our heroes, and an alien breach that ends with a chase through a spaceship. Topped off with a metal claw machine and the alien being thrown out into space.

Scott showed the audience that there's nothing left to do with the Alien franchise. It's as if he was specifically trying to erase Aliens by saying that space marines make everything worse. This mishandling of the mashup almost makes you appreciate the first two films more, but it also makes you never want to watch them again.