#like wow that was tremendously terrifying 90 seconds ago when i was stupid

[sathinfection]

alien: covenant sucked and here’s why

I saw Covenant five years ago (so I think closer to 4 weeks) and I hated it a whole bunch. But it was a very instructive hate, so I’m gonna break it down. Putting everything under a readmore bc this is gonna be long and also I don’t want people who liked it to have to see me shredding away. 

The first Alien film was the first horror movie that I liked enough not to care how scary it was. I think I was around 6 when I first saw it. It awakened three things in me: a crush on Sigourney Weaver, a lasting kink for xeno, and a deep love of women using construction equipment for non-conventional purposes. I’m not a hugely dedicated Alien fan, but I think that the films have two very defined qualities:

1) Equal opportunity psychosexual horror. Literally anyone in Alien can be forcefully facefucked and then carry a terrifying alien baby! This is something that’s been commented on to death, so it’s not like I think I’m brilliant for observing this. 

2) Woman-centered. Not just in terms of Sigourney Weaver or other Hollywood-unconventional white brunette terms, but the Alien films are also deeply concerned with reproduction. Ripley’s always off to kill the Queen because she’s gonna lay hundreds of eggs, etc. However, unlike a lot of horror films, women aren’t the subject of particular sexual menace. See above: everyone’s a potential victim of the xenomorphs I think this was why the Alien films weren’t as scary to me as other movies, because I didn’t have to see women singled out for rape or assault in ways that separated them from men. Also, women win. Yeah, the xenomorphs always come back, but there’s a little bit of a break at the end of each film. I also can’t even get that pissed off, because it’s female aliens vs female humans, so again I’m removed from awful gender dynamics. I’m not implying that the Alien films are feminist, but they’re not misogynist. 

Now that you know my two strongest feelings about Alien, let’s move forward to Covenant itself. First off, several people in the audience were laughing at a lot of the dramatic moments (not just me and my wife). If you’ve got people tittering during a moment of tension, your horror movie sucks. It’s failed. Covenant has three main flaws. 

1) Terrible, terrible script. Every single person in the film, other than the robots, is a blithering idiot. The movie starts with a bunch of supposedly professional people waltzing out into a planet that’s broadcasting John Denver without any helmets on, and they’re perfectly fine with having unpredictable communication and dangerous ion storms going on. What the fuck. All of them deserved to die. They go scampering around in the alien water? Christ, you can get all sorts of awful things from water on EARTH let alone on another planet. 

Then, when people start getting disgustingly sick, there’s no immediate panic. No, the person has to start vomiting black bile before they think, wow, this is a scary thing to happen on an unknown planet. Remember when that woman was attending to Victim #1 and decided to hug him as his skin looked ready to pop and he was leaking everywhere? What the fuck. 

Remember when David started talking about his weird experiments while showing Captain Vaguely Christian his cabinet of fetal xenomorphic horrors? Then he creepily tells the captain to go down to his murder basement and stick his face in a weird egg-casing, and the captain just goes ahead and does it? Probably one of the most rage-inducing parts of the film, but he totally deserved to go. That was actually my thought for everyone who died in the film, other than the gay couple, Walter, and Shaw. The gay men weren’t any more or less likable than the other people who were murdered, but they were a nice little bit of representation that probably 90% of the audience didn’t notice.

Every character in the film acts like a lamb going to slaughter. That isn’t suspenseful, it’s just annoying. 

2) Predictability. This could probably just go under the terrible script, but it deserves special attention. My single moment of surprise was seeing David 8 on the planet, and that’s only because I hadn’t looked at any previews. The crew is so tremendously stupid that I know the moment one of them wanders off alone, they will get horribly murdered. When Walter and David fight, I know that Walter will lose the second the camera cuts away from the Fassbender vs Fassbender. This is particularly annoying because the director had established that Walter was ‘improved’ over the David model not 5 minutes ago, and Walter is no fool. He is one of two non-fools in the movie, and since the other one is also played by Michael Fassbender, this is a source of much frustration. 

Covenant could have been made slightly better by playing off the audience expectation that David would win. Honestly: was anyone expecting Walter to have won that fight, particularly since “Walter” was acting so creepy after scampering back to the ship? The movie isn’t creating tension through uncertainty, it’s creating tension because the audience is waiting for the goddamn reveal that it’s not Walter, it’s David. Can you imagine if the reveal at the end was that it actually *was* Walter? That would be a legitimate twist! And it wouldn’t be hard to bring back the xenomorph threat in the next film in a way that didn’t involve Fassbender yartzing out fetuses into a drawer while Wagner plays. This leads me to the third, most vile part of Covenant:

3) Misogyny. Here’s where Covenant goes back and takes a shit on the legacy of the previous films, and I gotta repeat that I don’t even really care about the Alien series that much. Covenant completes what Prometheus started, and that’s shifting the focus from women to men. Now, you could say that this is because it’s a prequel to the Alien series, so you don’t have adult xenomorph queens going around to lay eggs, but uh... really? Do we really need to go through this convoluted process of giant white aliens who look vaguely like Clancy Brown? 

I dare you to unsee this. So we’ve got the aliens reproducing through coaldust and Clancy Browns, and it turns out that they needed a man all along to make them reproductively viable. Yeah, David 8 is an android, not a human, but we know what’s up, since the writers sure as shit aren’t taking a nuanced or current look at gender. He’s a guy with daddy issues who sexually assaults people, rather than, you know, acting like a genderless robot. Obviously a sentient robot commits sexual assault! That’s how you know he’s sentient, because a sex drive is part of humanity! Please picture me rolling my eyes with disgust. 

David explicitly sets himself up as a god in the image of his creator, Weyland. Of course, David thinks he’s doing better than his father, but who doesn’t? We’ve cut women out as free agents, both the humans and the aliens. Alien series? No, it’s the Michael Fassbender being menacing series now! 

First off, let’s look at what happens to Shaw. Noomi Rapace wisely tapped out of the series after the end of Prometheus, so she had to be killed off. Was she killed off in a normal way? Nah. She was killed in one of the most uniquely horrible ways in the series, and it was highly gendered. Shaw repairs David, then he repays her kindness by designing a horrible machine to keep her alive while he scoops everything out of her from the waist down and leaves her as this frightening wax-like figure. Prometheus already put Shaw through a pseudo self-abortion, then David goes for the entire womb. I’m sure that the writers (all male - I checked) knew exactly what they were doing with this, and it’s gender essentialism 101: David takes Shaw’s creative, maternal womb powers and takes it for himself so he can make his own alien babies. There’s no way this was unintentional or me reaching - David’s narrative arc is about male parthenogenesis because his daddy was a really shitty programmer. (He probably forgot to close the brackets on the ‘not evil’ line of David’s code)

Now for Daniels. The audience is ‘treated’ to David trying to force himself on her after she sees his figurative rape of Shaw. Then, instead of rescuing herself from this completely unnecessary, un-Alien, he’s-a-goddamn-robot situation, as Ripley would have done, Daniels is rescued by Walter, because this is a film about Michael Fassbender. Her last moment in the film is her screaming as she’s trapped and put to sleep by David. 

Remember that whole generation of young women who loved Ripley for being unafraid, resourceful, and great at killing xenomorphs? Women are starving for positive depictions of ourselves. Ripley was one of the few we had. Women are still crying in theaters at Wonder Woman because we have so goddamn little. 

Now we’ve got Shaw and Daniels: two women in distress who are sexually threatened and ultimately outwitted by a man. I can forgive Covenant for being a bad film, but the misogyny is disgusting. If the Alien series continues, and who knows since it’s failed to be a moneymaker outside of comics and videogames for a while, it better be a reboot rather than a continuation of Covenant’s storyline, because Alien isn’t about men, damn it. It’s about people dying in space, and women. 

And some of them will eat you. 

#sath reviews