Alien: Covenant

The Alien Saga's now up to it's eighth entry, and like most sagas that long, there's a fair bit of uneven-ness. This one's a sequel to "Prometheus", a prequel to the first 4 and a film that completely ignores the existence of the two "Alien Vs Predator" films, giving us something that, at least at the beginning, feels a bit like a variation on the first film. A small crew is awoken in the middle of deep space and discover a distress signal that entices them onto a distant planet - where nasty things lurk. Body count ensues.

It does pick two of the interesting bits from "Prometheus" up - Michael Fassbinder, and the deeper philosophical question of whether a creative god is required to care about the fate of his creations at all - and applies it in a far more back-to-basics manner, without the crew acting stupid or excessive weird old-man makeup. The drawback of this, of course, is that comparisons to the first "Alien" are not only inevitable but also something where the new film can't quite measure up - in particular, the characters, Fassbinder aside, feel far more noticeably thin - nothing feels particularly lived-in. Katherine Waterston gives it a good shot as the default heroine, and Danny McBride scores pretty well playing mostly a straight role as a pilot, but the rest of the cast barely make it to two dimensions, meaning that, more than usual, this is a bit of a meat-on-the-hoof kinda film where characters just exist to be slaughtered. Oh, some of the slaughter is imaginatively done, but still, it's people we don't much care about failing to survive. There are few plot twists that aren't telegraphed well in advance.

But this is somewhat comfortable watching anyway - if it's not innovating, it's reassuring to be mostly in the hands of a film-maker who can bring good visuals like Ridley Scott (even if he's never been consistently good at picking a script). It's weird to call a film this graphically gory "comfortably familiar" but that's kinda what it is.