2025-02-23 4:24:52 ¶ ●

followed up my rewatch of Alien and Prometheus with Aliens on Thursday and Alien: Covenant on Saturday. given how closely Prometheus commits to being a straight-reinterpretation of the story of Alien, I felt primed for Covenant to be in some way a deconstruction of the sequel, and the film’s opening act gave me ample reason to hold onto these expectations: where Aliens is an unashamed glorification of American heroes slaughtering communist guerilla monsters against all odds in Vietnam, Covenant is much more understated about its band of colonists landing on an unfamiliar world with slightly more assault weaponry than you think seems necessary for the job. but perhaps my hypothesis was coloured by the still-great theory that Avatar was James Cameron’s apology for the crass implicit racism of Aliens, because Covenant quickly abandons any ideological qualms about colonising a planet which has already been agriculturally developed (don’t worry, someone already killed off the entire indigenous population and the remaining wildlife is hostile enough to justify slaughter on sight - it’s terra nullius!) - and maybe it would have been rude for Ridley Scott to have a go at someone else’s movie like that, anyway.

i do think Covenant has some interesting developments to make on Prometheus’ core theme of creator-versus-creation, though they’re clumsily executed and go hand-in-hand with the franchise’s struggle to come up with a horror prop that comes anywhere near to the effectiveness of the original facehugger. the whole film hinges on the line about humanity finding emotional androids unsettling and creating a more perfect soldier to replace it, and it’s a great exchange, but as a whole the story fails to live up to the premise