The Films of 2018: The Nun

In the prologue for The Nun (2018), the latest entry in the popular The Conjur-verse, the camera lands on the image of a crucifix hanging on a wall inside a haunted abbey in Romania. 

With a rote, almost mechanical motion -- like the hands on a clock -- this cruficix methodically "ticks" over into the upside down position.

An upside down crucifix is a familiar image in horror films, of course, but the oddly automatic nature of the pivoting crucifix here suggests, at least to this reviewer, the idea of a franchise on remote control, mechanically moving from one formulaic moment to the next. Even the presence of Evil in this cinematic world is, by now, familiar, and automatic.

Alas, the rest of the film lives up to the prophecy of the mechanical crucifix, proving dull, robotic and nonsensical. Nothing makes any sense in the movie, and the demonic nun's powers are so incredible annd fearsome that it becames clear to the viewer, after one particular fantasy scene, that there is no way the nun can be defeated.  It obeys no consistent set of rules.

Of all the films in the Conjuring universe, The Nun is the least satisying, at least so far.

"It's something unholy!"

In St. Corta Abbey in Romania, in 1952, two nuns attempt to stop the demonic entity locked behind a wood door (and behind a carving, which reads "God Ends Here."). The attempt fails, and one desperate nun hangs herself, rather than becoming possessed by the dark evil lurking in the shadows.

To help solve the mystery of this apparent suicide, the Vatican sends a "miracle hunter" priest, Father Burke (Demian Bichir) and a young novitiate, Sister Irene (Taissa Fermiga) to Romania to investigate. A French-Canadian guide, "Frenchie" (Jonas Bloquet) agrees, only reluctantly to take them, to the haunted grounds. The abbey itself is surrounded by crucifixes, as if to keep an unholy evil locked inside.

The ruined, dilipidated abbey holds many dark secrets, not the least of which is the presence of Valak (Bonnie Aarons), a demon who prefers to take the form of a nun with a ghostly pallor.  Using a relic that holds the blood of Christ, Father Burke, Sister Irene, and Frenchie attempt to defeat the demon once and for all, and close a gateway to Hell.

"You have a knack for this, sister."

Despite its problems in believability and consistency, The Nun earns points for its gloomy, claustrophobic nature. The film is unrelentingly dark, and the overall impression created is that the film's central location, the Romanian abbey, is a place where darkness has eclipsed all light. 

The oppressive vibe is a perfect way to express the film's horror elements, but The Nun is frequently dull, its boredom quotient punctuated only by some (admittedly) impressive jump scares. The film's greatest trespass, however, involves its villainous characer, the titular nun, or as we already know it, Valak the Demon.  

If we are to believe our eyes, this creature possesses the fearsome abililty to rewrite reality itself. It is thus not a demon, but a god.

In one scene, for example, Valak tricks Burke into a graveyard, and uses some unseen force to push the priest into an open grave. Burke falls into the hole, which transmutes into a sealed coffin. Then, Valak not only traps the priest under six feet of dirt -- which appear from nowhere -- but under perfectly grown grass as well. Valak than erects a personalized tombstone (replete with carving) over the grave for Burke.  

This sequence is not a dream, or an hallucination. It actually happens. 

Again, the demon uses an invisible force (telekinesis?) to push its enemy into that hole. It then uses some unknown mechanism to nail shut the wooden coffin (replete with a top, which wasn't there before, either). Next, the demon puts in the pounds of dirt to pack the grave, grows the green grass over the plot, creates a tombsone from whole cloth, andm finally, etches that tombstone with Burke's name. 

I stress these details, because this is a re-ordering of our reality on a fantastic scale.

Yet, during the rest of the movie, when Valak attacks main characters, the demon does so by physically choking them.  So Valak: why not re-arrange reality again instead of going to all the trouble of actually wringing a human being's neck? 

Unfortunately, the aforementioned graveyard scene pretty much ruins any sense of reality The Nun attempts to create.  

First, the scene makes no sense, even if it is something Valak is capable of doing.  

Why, for example, would Valak carve Burke's name on the tombstone, if the demon doesn't wish for Irene to rescue him? Burke attempts to ring a bell attached to the grave, to prove he is buried alive to his young assistant, and Valak vexes Irene by ringing all such similar bells in the graveyard, so she can't locate Burke's grave.

Okay, but you know what else would have made the priest hard to find?  A tombstone that didn't have his name etched on it.

Secondly, since Valak can transport, re-arrange and create matter out of nothing, why does a wooden door stop it from wreaking havoc in the first place?  Based on the demon's powers, as diagrammed in the graveyard scene, Valak could just "unwrite" the very existence of the door. 

Why does Valak stay in the abbey? Again, based on the incredible powers on display in the cemetery scene, the demon could just relocate the abbey, through time and space, wherever it wished to go.

Finally, why does the blood of Christ stop Valak? Valak could just re-arrange matter, and use a kind of demon wind to keep the blood from splattering the Nun's face.  

(And, let's face it, the blood of Christ, the movie's get-out-of-hell-free card, doesn't do its job anyway, since Valak doesn't die from it , but merely possesses another character).

The long and short of this discussion is that once The Nun gets to the wholly fantastical (and, sadly, wholly unnecessary) scene of Valak creating a "buried alive" moment for Father Burke, it never recovers any sense of reality. The graveyard scene is a jump-the-shark, nuke-the-fridge moment that the movie never overcomes.

This is a horror movie in which the monster can do anything it wishes, and is, therefore, utterly invincible. The heroes, accordingly, are no match for it. To suggest otherwise is bullshit, and the movie knows it. Any plans the characters come up with to handle their plight pale before the ability to re-arrange and create matter.

Also, Valak isn't scary in The Nun.  Valak was scary in The Conjuring 2, by contrast, but is not fiflmed in such a way here as to be particularly terrifying or monstrous. The film is like a Nightmare on Elm Street sequel where you know what Freddy looks like, and so aren't terrified by him anymore. 

But Freddy had a personality and a sense of humor. 

Valak has neither.

Adding insult to injury, the film's final scenes strain to connect this film to The Conjuring, wrapping up everything in a neat little bow for the dullards among us who couldn't keep track.  Because, the last note viewers should always leave a horror film on is this: REMEMBER, THIS IS A FRANCHISE!!!!

Snark aside, The Conjuring franchise has demonstrated a remarkable ability to self-diagnose, and course correct. The Conjuring 2 was superior to The Conjuring, and Annabelle: Creation was better than its progenitor, Annabelle. Perhaps The Nun can fit into this pattern as well. The film made more than enough money at the box office to guarantee a sequel, so now the filmmakers simply have to find a story worth telling, and one that features a scary monster with coherent and graspable powers.

"What's the opposite of a miracle?" One character asks another in The Nun.  

My answer? 

The fact that The Nun had so much good will from viewers, reviewers, and franchise fans, going in, and then completely squandered it with this meandering, incoherent, mechanical narrative.  

Thirty Years Ago: Predator (1987)

Back in the summer of 1987 -- thirty years ago -- the conventional wisdom about John McTiernan’s Predator (1987) was that it started out like Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and ended up like Alien (1979) or, perhaps, James Cameron’s Aliens (1986). At least, that's how critic Roger Ebert described the film.

By framing the film in this simplistic fashion, Predator could be viewed as a simple or derivative swipe at two separate genre inspirations. 

It was part action movie and part sci-fi/horror movie. 

And that, as Ebert declared, passed for originality in Hollywood.

That’s a left-handed compliment if I ever read one!

The truth about Predator, contrarily, is that it is all of a piece, and thematically consistent throughout. 

Indeed, the intense film forges a debate about warriors or soldiers, and asks, specifically, what the best soldiers are made of. 

Do soldiers succeed because of their technology? 

Or do the best soldiers succeed because of some combination of instinct, experience, and a tactical understanding of their enemy?

McTiernan’s film sets up this debate in the film's visualizations.

Specifically, a squad of American soldiers, led by Arnold Schwarzenegger's Dutch, rain down death and destruction on Third World, Central American soldiers, literally coming down to a village from a point on high to do so. 

This action occurs in the first act, and establishes, per the dialogue, that Schwarzenegger’s team is “the best.” We see that adjective vividly demonstrated in a siege set-piece of extreme violence and bloodshed.  The soldiers show no mercy, and give no quarter to their enemy.

The next act of the film, however, deliberately reverses that equation. It positions Schwarzenegger’s team on the ground, and puts an alien hunter at an even higher position -- in the tree-tops -- to rain down death on his “primitive” Earthbound counter-parts. 

The soldiers who were the predators are now the prey. And they have no reason to expect mercy.

In both cases, the technologically-superior force wins, and the perceived primitive or lesser opponent is knocked down and defeated. 

In both cases, McTiernan vividly and explicitly associates that sense of superiority with a sense of geographical height; a high physical vantage point, captured by the camera's position.

The winner can, literally, reach heights that the loser can’t, and this is one important reason for his victory.

However, in the third and final act of Predator, Arnold and the alien hunter go head to head -- on equal footing -- and it is only on that terrain, one not involving technology, but rather instincts and know-how, that the best soldier is identified, and a victor is crowned.

So where many 1987 critics chose to see a film that is half Rambo and half Alien, I see a film that develops logically and consistently, act to act. You can’t get to that final, almost primordial reckoning in the jungle between the Predator and Dutch unless you frame the debate in precisely the way the screenplay does, and in the way McTiernan does. 

In short, the film depicts the best soldiers in the world demonstrating their ability to defeat all comers, only to be defeated by an enemy better than them; one not of this world.  

The first and second act are two sides of the same coin, the idea -- with apologies to Star Wars Episode I (1999) -- that there is always a bigger fish out there waiting to demonstrate superior technology.

Predator’s third act -- a glorious back-to-basics conflict that looks like it was authentically staged in a prehistoric setting -- makes the point that the greatest hunter or soldier is actually the one who understands his enemy, and trusts his instincts. 

Why make a movie in this fashion? 

Well, in a sense, Predator might be read as a subversive response to the militarization of action films in the mid-1980's, and the kind of shallow, rah-rah patriotism that gave rise to efforts like Heartbreak Ridge (1986), which celebrated an American military victory over…Grenada.

Grenada? 

Was Grenada really a challenge to American domination, given our military budget and might? 

Contrarily, Predator takes a group of tough-talking “ultimate warriors” and puts them in a situation where they aren’t merely shooting fish in a barrel. 

They are the fish in the barrel.

In reckoning with this sudden and total change in fortunes, we begin to glean a true idea of courage and heroism.

All of the Earthly politics in the movie -- illegal border crossings, a false cover story, documentation about a possible invasion, and so forth -- add up to precisely nothing here, and there's a reason why. Those details are immaterial to the real story of soldiers who reckon with an enemy that goes beyond the limits of Earthly knowledge.

Ironically, to be the best soldier in a situation like that, it isn’t the big Gatling gun that matters. It’s the ability to adapt to and understand the kind of menace encountered.

Predator features a lot of macho talk and clichés about war (“I ain’t got time to bleed,”) but it succeeds because it cuts right through this surface, hackneyed vision of military might typical of its time period and suggests a different truth underneath.

There’s always a bigger fish.

“You got us here to do your dirty work!”

An elite squad of American soldiers, led by Dutch Schaefer (Schwarzenegger), is dropped into a Central American jungle to rescue a cabinet minister being held by enemy rebels. 

Going along with Dutch’s team is the mission commander, the not-entirely trustworthy Dillon (Carl Weathers).

Once in the jungle, Dutch and his men launch an attack on a rebel village, and find that Dillon has manipulated his team so as to acquire military intelligence about a possible Russian invasion. The group soon takes a captive, Anna, (Elipidia Carillo).

But before the soldiers can be air-lifted out of the jungle, an extra-terrestrial hunter -- a Predator – sets his sights on the group, killing Dutch’s team one man at a time. 

Anna reports a local legend: about a demon who makes trophies of humans and is often reported in the hottest summers.

And this year, it grows very, very hot…

Losing his men rapidly, Dutch must come to understand his enemy’s weaknesses and strengths, and makes a final stand in the jungle, using every resource available…

“Payback time!”

John McTiernan’s camera in Predator rarely stops moving. It tracks, it pans, and it tilts, but is seldom quiescent. 

The constantly-on-the-move camera conveys a few important qualities about the film. The first idea it transmits is that the soldiers inhabit a changing and changeable world, one that only instinct and experience can help them navigate.  

The always-in-motion camera reveals the soldiers -- sometimes violently -- intruding into new space, new frames, and new aspects of their world.  The camera’s movement -- a kind of visual aggression -- suggests the force that the soldiers carry with them.  

This movement, this force, is then balanced by McTiernan against the utter stillness of the Predator’s vision or perspective. A contrast is quickly developed and then sustained.

Throughout the film, we see through the Predator’s eyes, or in what might be termed Predator-vision. These shots, from high above the landscape (in the tree-tops), tend to be still, un-moving. They thereby capture a sense of the whole world unfolding before the Predator, a complete panorama or landscape.

This is an important conceit. The soldiers are  always moving through a changing, shifting world that they, through their actions, impact.  

But they don’t get the whole picture, so-to-speak.  

By contrast, the Predator vision gives us long-shots, and shows the entire jungle terrain around the soldiers.  This viewpoint suggests omnipotence and power.  

The Predator, quite simply, is able to see more of the world, and see it better. He is able to strike from the tree tops with his shoulder-mounted laser cannon, and target with laser-light his distant foes.  

His sight is superior, until -- importantly -- Dutch manages to “see” through it; recognizing the flaw in the Predator’s infrared vision.

Again, this is an argument against relying too heavily on technology. Dutch’s soldiers rely on big guns, and get decimated.  

The Predator relies on his mask’s vision system (infrared), and Dutch -- smearing himself in mud -- negates the advantage it provides.  

But again, what’s important is the way that all this material is visualized.

The soldiers, on ground level, cut through and move through the frame, violently interacting with the world on a tactile, aggressive level.  

The Predator, like some great vulture, sits still in the trees (until he strikes), silently hanging back and taking in the lay of the land. He has the luxury to operate from a distance, from up on high, unobserved.

The film sets up a battle between these two perspectives, and one might even argue that the Predator ultimately loses because he abandons his best perspective -- the tree tops -- in order to get down to (and enjoy combat on…) Dutch’s level.

Over and over again, however, McTiernan’s gorgeous, moving compositions suggest that the soldiers don’t have the full picture. Not only is the Predator cloaked, but he has access to the world above the soldiers, the world that they can’t see. A brilliantly-orchestrated shot mid-way through the film sees Dutch hunting for Hawkin’s missing body. He can’t find it. After capturing imagery of Dutch trudging through the brush, McTiernan’s camera suddenly moves upwards, and keeps doing so.

It goes up and up, past a bloody fern frond, and then continues its ascent, until we see Hawkins’ naked, bloodied corpse dangling from the tree top.  The Predator is operating in, metaphorically a more fully three dimensional environment, this shot reveals. 

Dwight and the other soldiers can’t compete on that level. They literally can't even see to that level. 

Those who don’t appreciate Predator tend to watch the film, listen to the macho tough talk, and consider the film a kind of stupid, macho action/horror movie. It's just Rambo with an alien!

Yet in its own way, Predator glides right past such clichéd dialogue and situations. In doing so, it actually comments on them; it comments on two-dimensional thinking.  These cliches are not points of strength, the movie informs us, but points of weakness.  When the Predator uses his duck call device, for example, he apes the men at their most verbally simplistic.  “Any time…”  Or “Over here.”  

Then he is able to trick them using their own words. Their macho mode of expression becomes a tool to use against them.

As a whole, Predator tricks the audience with its appearance or visual trapping too -- as a macho war movie -- and then treads deeper to examine our conceits about the military, and military might. 

When Arnold finally defeats the Predator, he does so not as a twentieth century soldier with high-tech weapons, but as a mud-camouflaged cave-man, relying on his instinct, his knowledge of the land, and hard-gleaned information about his enemy.

Even then, Arnold barely wins.  

The Predator sacrifices his superior technology, comes to the ground, and takes off his mask because he wants to fight like Arnie; he wants to experience battle like a human would. That desire proves to be the alien's undoing, a sense of vanity about himself, and an unearned sense of superiority to his nemesis.  

And again, this quality reflects dynamically on the first act of the film. Everyone keeps calling Dutch's team "the best,: and the team itself wipes out the Central American rebels while hardly breaking a sweat.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall, right?

Dutch, by contrast, demonstrates qualities that our culture doesn’t always value, especially in terms of our military men. He shows compassion and decency with Anna, a prisoner.  He trusts her when the situation changes, instead of continuing to treat her like a foe.  

He also rejects Dillon’s approach to war (that the ends justify the means), and does his best to get his men out of a situation in which they are not really fighting for their country, but acting as pawns in someone’s illegal agenda.  

Finally, Dutch is curious -- intensely curious -- and flexible enough to understand that he is being hunted by something inhuman. He doesn’t reject the possibility that this could be true, and instead contends with the facts. 

 “If it bleeds, we can kill it” Dutch concludes, and that is a perfectly logical and sensible argument in the face of what seems an irrational conflict: a battle with an invisible alien.

Dutch is lucky, of course, too. He discovers the secret of defeating Predator-vision by accident, by ending up in the mud. But he also makes the most of his opportunities by demonstrating flexibility rather than rigidity. He changes his very identity to win.  He goes from 20th century high-tech soldier to primitive cave man, to carry the day.

Thirty years later, Predator still dazzles, in part because of McTiernan’s often-moving camera and approach to visuals, but also because of that incredible final sequence in the jungle.  

Arnold and the colossal, frightening alien duke it out on a little parcel of land, surrounded by water.  The setting is picturesque, but more than that, it seems to evoke some kind of genetic memory, a feeling for the day when humans didn’t understand the world and were prey to saber tooth tigers or bears, or anything else that might find us when we ventured out of our caves. 

The film’s final battle -- shorn of high-tech military hardware -- gets down to the bloody basics and is incredibly satisfying on a human level.

Today, we have military drones, smart-bombs, and other incredible technology to help us win the day when we wage war, but Predator is a remarkable reminder from another movie age that the biggest, best guns don’t necessarily make great soldiers.   

If they did, the Predator would have won his battle with Arnie, right?

The Films of 2017: Alien: Covenant

[Many spoilers are included in the following review. Please proceed accordingly.]

As an early, consistent, and vocal supporter of Prometheus (2012), I can only assess Ridley Scott’s follow-up, Alien: Covenant (2017) as an intriguing but ultimately uninspiring affair. 

The sequel is intriguing primarily because Scott brings his trademark intellect to the tale, giving audiences a new and worthwhile musing on the nature of God(s) and men, or, rather, parents and children.

Yet Alien: Covenant is uninspiring too, because the quest for ultimate truth or knowledge that was so important to Prometheus (2012) has been replaced with a torrent of easy answers. The movie’s modus operandi is to fill in all the “gaps” between Prometheus and Alien (1979), and, at least for this reviewer, that’s a dispiriting and ultimately self-defeating approach for a franchise that prides itself on exploring the unknown.

The easy answers presented by Alien: Covenant don’t really satisfy, and in some way they actually foreclose on the sense of majesty and mystery that has characterized the Alien franchise for decades.

The issue here is that it is inherently better to search, or to explore, than to provide easy answers.  

Prometheus was all about raising questions.It raised interrogatives about the Engineers, the xenomorphs, mankind’s beginnings, and even, finally mankind’s future. I am well aware that many fans actively disliked the film, and yet Prometheus was a bold, even drastic step in a new direction; one which opened up the possibilities of the Alien universe in magnificent, literary, and imaginative ways.

After so many years of largely unsatisfactory re-hashes, it was a breath of fresh air, and the re-assertion of the franchise’s possibilities and scope.

By contrast, Covenant is a relatively routine Frankenstein story (a mode, yes, which was certainly implied by the title, Prometheus). The sequel exists simply to tie everything together into a neat bundle. The result is a film that, I believe, fails to spark the imagination -- to inspire -- the way that Prometheus so abundantly did.

I do not write off Alien: Covenant as a total failure, however.

Scott has crafted a film here of some remarkable depth, especially in its first half, even while retreating to familiar franchise tropes in the last half. All the Alien films must strike a unique note so as not to be seen as a rip-off of previous entries, and in truth, Covenant possesses its own unique vibe, which I’ll attempt to explore below.

I describe this vibe as, well, sinister.

We have seen evil before in the Alien universe, of course.

Sometimes that evil has been brought forward by man (Burke in Aliens 1986]), sometimes by machine (Ash in Alien [1979]) and sometimes by nature itself; the “hostile” biological instincts of the titular xenomorphs.

But there is no other film -- at least yet -- in the Alien saga that plunges so overwhelmingly into the darkness, into sinister agendas and horrific, hellish sights. 

Even Ripley’s death in Alien³ (1992), by contrast, served a pro-social or humane purpose. 

In Alien: Covenant, an overwhelming diabolism seems to permeat the picture, in keeping with David’s Milton-ian line of dialogue that it is better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.  

This sinister quality makes the film feel both oppressive and portentous - which is, admittedly, not a bad note for the middle piece of a trilogy to strike -- but the grim atmosphere does not make the film scary, or inspire speculation and interest.

In addition to this caustic, ironic, diabolical tone, Alien: Covenant merits consideration for David’s story arc, and the way David’s story of parents/children continues some of the thematic groundwork laid down by Prometheus five years ago

I know that folks read movie reviews for a critic’s assessment, a binary yes/no, thumbs-up/thumbs-down judgment. If you’re at this blog, reading this review, you already know I rarely tread into that territory of absolutes. How you ultimately come to feel about Alien: Covenant could rely on a lot of different things. 

How did you feel about Prometheus? What do you seek from an Alien film? And so on.

At this juncture, I can judge the film well-made, well-performed, and disturbing on a psychic and visceral level, even though there is no set-piece here that compares favorably with Shaw’s on-the-spot surgery in Prometheus. 

Also, I can detect the “dark” intelligence lurking behind Alien: Covenant, but, I suppose, finally, that I wish that intellect had been directed more fully towards a story that furthered the mysteries of the Alien-verse rather than limiting them.

“Serve in Heaven, or reign in Hell?”

In 2104, the colony ship Covenant carries 2000 humans in hyper-sleep, and voyages to distant Origae 6, which needs to be terra-formed to be fully livable.

A random neutrino burst from a nearby star, however, damages the ship, and kills the ship’s captain (James Franco) in cryo-sleep, leaving his wife, Daniels (Katherine Waterstone) bereft and questioning life.  While on a space-walk repairing the solar sail apparatus, Covenant’s pilot and technician Tennessee (Danny McBride) intercepts a signal in space which seems to originate from a human being.

The Covenant’s new captain, a “man of faith” named Oram (Billy Crudup) orders a change in course to the signal’s point of origin, a mysterious habitable planet in its system’s Goldilocks Zone. In fact, Oram wants to scrap all the carefully made plans for Origae 6 and settle on this newly discovered world instead. Daniels feel it is too much a risk, but has no choice but to go alone.

The Covenant sends a lander down to the planet, but almost immediately, the excursion goes terribly wrong. Members of the reconnaissance team are infected by strange black spores, and impregnated by parasite neo-morphs, which burst from their bodies in horrific, bloody fashion.

The survivors are rescued by a stranger, an android named David (Fassbender), who seems an (almost) perfect match for Covenant’s synthetic man, Walter (Foster).

But David hides a dark secret about the source of the message that brought the Covenant to him, and the fate of Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), of the Prometheus mission.

Furthermore, secrets, horrors and monsters abound in David’s new home, a necropolis that once served as home to the Engineers.

“One wrong note eventually ruins the entire symphony.”

There is so much worthwhile to praise in Alien: Covenant in terms of theme and atmosphere. I wrote in my introduction about the sinister, diabolical irony of the film. This caustic application of malevolent destiny infuses the picture with meaning, in many ways. Some might term this malevolent feeling “nihilism,” the “rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless.”

That definition doesn’t totally apply, however.

There is, in David’s story (and agenda), a rejection of religious and moral principles, certainly. But David makes it plain, through his words and deeds that life that to him is not meaningless. Rather, the purpose of his life is to create new life, and destroy his makers, the human race. His purpose is to make the universe a Hell, one in which he reigns supreme.

Consider, for example, what David does to Elizabeth Shaw. After he kills her, he utilizes her body to create his children: the aliens. Elizabeth’s fate is horrible enough to consider on its own, but when one remembers the details of Prometheus, it is even worse.

Elizabeth’s search for the Engineers arose, in part, from her inability to create life herself. She was infertile, and therefore deprived of a biological capacity that she believed gave human life purpose. Yet in her death, David has, ironically, “gifted” Elizabeth with this capacity. In a biological sense, she is now the mother to the xenomorphs. From a certain sense, her dream has come true.

Of course, Elizabeth would not desire such a destiny; it is a twisted, dark realization of her dream. And the operative word there is clearly “dark.”

Captain Oram, a “man of faith” is similarly treated in a sinister fashion. He feels victimized by his crew-mates because so few people share his Christian beliefs. And as captain, he makes a difficult choice, believing that the Covenant’s discovery of Shaw’s signal and the Engineer world signal a form of “providence.” It is a sign, that he should lead his people to this new promised land. Oram feels validated in his faith, which has brought him to this junction, to this decision.

Of course, he has been lured to the planet by a devil of sorts, in David, not by divine intervention. 

And David is responsible not only for the death of his wife, but for Oram's death too. Oram becomes the first human being in history (at least in-universe) to be implanted by a face hugger. His faith has led him not to a promised land, but to Pandemonium.

The film is filled with such examples of diabolism. David has, for his own reasons (perhaps the murder of his father, Weyland), committed genocide against the Engineers. 

We see a scene (in flashback) in Alien: Covenant of apparently-peaceful Engineer citizens destroyed in a WMD-style attack. Their own bio-weapon (the black goo, for lack of a better description), annihilates them.  Again, we have seen death before in the Alien films, but not on a scale such as this. A whole population is wiped out, horribly.

And then, of course, the film ends with an Evil force literally driving the ship. David has tricked Daniels into believing that he is Walter, his more benevolent sibling. She goes into cryo-sleep helpless and defenseless, with the devil tending to her slumber. 

And remember, David has already made his intent towards Daniels plain. When she asks, in the necropolis, what David intends to do with her, he replies that she will suffer the same fate as Shaw did. Our Ripley-in-training here is clearly a goner.

And still, the story is even darker, yet. 

Now facing no opposition, David is in total control of Covenant and its cargo. He has 2,000 sleeping human beings to experiment with, not to mention a cargo-hold filled with human embryos. His ability to play Frankenstein, to “hone” the shape and form of his children, the aliens, is now magnified geometrically.

The Alien saga has always been dark, always been frightening. But before this film, there has always been hope. Even in the third Alien film, Ripley’s sacrifice meant something. It preserved the future of the human race. 

Here, there is no hope to be felt. David is in control of the surviving heroes (Daniels and Tennessee), and all the raw ingredients necessary to make our universe his particular nightmare.

This oppressive, dark turn is effective, as I’ve noted, if one considers this film the middle-part of a trilogy. This movie is the equivalent of The Empire Strikes Back (1980), in other words, the point in which good is defeated, and the stakes are the highest they’ve ever been. If taken on those terms, the darkness makes dramatic, artistic sense.

Equally intriguing is the overall theme behind this level of darkness, which involves Gods and men, parents and children. Consider that “God” (if there is such a being) created the Engineers. The Engineers then created man. Man created David. And now, David creates the aliens. 

These movies are thus about the act of creation, and furthermore, the way that parents and children deal with resentment through rebellion. 

The Engineers attempt to kill man, their child, in Prometheus.

And mankind, in the person of Weyland, makes his child, David, a slave, a servant or a product; a thing, but not a “son.”  

David’s act of rebellion against his God (mankind) is to create his perfect children, the aliens. He is a fallen angel, like Satan, surrounding himself with an army of demons by which to mount an assault on the heavens, if not heaven itself.

Of course, the question for the next movie is simple: how will the aliens rebel against their father (David)?  It could be by creating a hive-mind, taking ownership of their own biology (through the birth of a queen), and so on.

The covenant of the film’s title might be interpreted in many illuminating ways. A covenant is generally considered to be a pledge, a promise, or contract. Many scholars define a covenant specifically as a contract between man and God. 

What we have in this film, then, is the breaking or destruction of a covenant. Yet David -- our antagonist -- is not actually the party who breaks the contract, one might conclude. Rather, he is the injured party, upset about the shattering of the covenant; upset at the betrayal by God. In this case, it was his father, Weyland, who broke the contract. He made his child only a "thing," not a person to be loved.

The film also references Ozymandias (1818) a poem by Shelley that David mis-attributes to Byron, until corrected by Walter. Ozymandias concerns the impermanence of empires, and the (futile) quest for a legacy. 

If nothing is permanent, what is left of us once we depart this mortal coil?

Weyland believed that his legacy could be immortality. That’s why he sought out the Engineers. Importantly, he did not view David as his legacy. 

Similarly, the Engineers appear to view humans, their creation, as monsters and competitors, not children. 

The outstanding question is: how does David view the aliens? Are they to be his legacy, and if so, what do they represent?

My answer? They represent his righteous hatred. 

The aliens in their simplicity and purity make a mockery out of our own reproductive cycle, and view humans not as beings with a divine spark, but as “meat” to be re-shaped in the service of other life-forms. 

I do wonder, however, how David -- a being who appreciates art and music -- could conceive of “perfection” in these aliens. They have no such calling to civilization, or art. They have no higher reasoning skills. He has made his children, essentially, emotionally empty.

All of this text and subtext is here to be enjoyed and admired in Alien: Covenant, and so the film will merit many re-visits in the years and decades to come. I look forward to seeing it again.

And yet, I am gravely disappointed with the fact that the film re-parses the origin of the xenomorphs. 

They are no longer from “out there” (the product of an alien intelligence), but explicitly created by David, in the year 2104.  I am not upset that this development essentially un-writes the AVP movies (which feature aliens on Earth in the year 2004) or the connections to the Predator universe. I am, however, disappointed that a franchise titled “alien” has decided to explain so much, and made the explanations so, well, earth bound.

One of the most amazing facets of Alien was the terrifying feeling that the crew of the Nostromo was reckoning with something beyond human experience, beyond human history, beyond human morality, and beyond human origin.  The xenomorph was born of something, well, different.  It was so “alien,” in fact, that it couldn’t be understood, or even killed.

Now, we understand that humanity was intimately involved in the creation of the xenomorphs. It is human parenting, actually, that is responsible for their shape and nature. 

It was very different to learn of the Engineers (another alien race) and their role in creating humanity in Prometheus. There were still so many unanswered questions there.

But Alien: Covenant reveals that the xenomorphs are the revenge plot of a rejected child, in essence. This disappointing and totally unnecessary explanation changes the nature of the franchise immeasurable. 

And I don’t believe it is a good change.

I liken it to the development of the Michael Myers character in the Halloween franchise. Originally, he was the “Shape,” an impenetrable figure on a rampage in his home town, Haddownfield. Was he a serial killer? A developmentally-arrested individual playing “trick or treat” with life and death? Or was he, actually, the boogeyman?  The ideas were all terrifying, and there was evidence to support each approach. But then, in the second movie, we learned that Michael was out to kill all surviving family members, and that explanation limited his terror somewhat. The explanation made his evil seem mundane.

Alien: Covenant diminishes the horror of the franchise in the exact same way.  The more we know and understand about the xenomorphs, the less terrifying they become. 

Familiarity breeds contempt. At least in terms of horror.

The most terrifying (and successful) elements of Alien: Covenant, not coincidentally, involve the neomorphs. They are things we have not quite seen before. They are new and mysterious, and therefore scary.

I do not mean to suggest that David’s story is unworthy, or uninteresting, but rather that the back-story of the xenomorph creation removes a wonderful and scintillating aspect of mystery from the entire saga.

I suppose we live in a time that demands easy answers, and spoon-feeding. Some critics have even seen Covenant as an under-the-cover tale of how Hollywood directors must make Frankenstein monsters out of their own creations if they wish to tell an original story in these times of “shared universes” and “franchises.” That's a clever reading of the film, but not one I am entirely certain I subscribe to.

I am grateful, however, that an artist as clever and intellectually curious as Ridley Scott retains the reins of this franchise.  I think he moves it in the wrong direction here. But he moves in the wrong direction...in the most beautifully and thoughtful manner possible.

I but can’t help but feel, at this juncture, that Scott's take on Prometheus was the right one. I would have liked to see a sequel wherein David and Shaw go off to discover more about the engineers. Instead we get a sequel in which we learn more about the aliens. Too much about the aliens, for my taste.

This is a story that we don’t need to see, no matter how well-shot or well-acted. 

Mysteries are such wondrous and fragile things. They spawn speculation, art, writing, and more. The reductive nature of Alien: Covenant achieves the opposite end 

By giving us too much information about the xenomorph genesis, this 2017 film risks “spoiling” the whole symphony.