Alien: Covenant

#StokerScore 5/10

As far back as I can remember I have loved horror movies. even as a small child I was constantly nagging my parents to let me watch something or other that was extremely gory and decidedly

unsuitable for my age. As a 10 year old primary school student, I encouraged/coerced/dragged students to join a made up version of Dracula during break times. At an even earlier age I found a book of Northern England myths and legends and read about the Lambton Worm and The Croglin Grange Vampire. Most literature and mainstream tv had brushes with the horror genre: Sherlock Holmes and The Case of the Sussex Vampire was a great yarn or even Starsky and Hutch fighting 70's crime against John Saxon's vampire. Yes vampires were my thing but in 1979 I was shown a whole new kind of terror. This was terror that lurked unseen, around dark corners, much like the vampire, but this terrror didn't feed on the throats of buxom bar wenches, no this one preferred patience in the limitless void of space, where no-one could hear you scream.

Ridley Scott and H.R Geiger created the most terrifying thing I'd ever seen and it has stayed with me. I like the sequel Aliens but in many ways I prefer the less-loved Alien 3 as I see the gung-ho marines of Cameron's sequel in much the same way as I see Verhoeven's grunts in Starship Troopers. But the menu was always being served to the Alien, the apparently unstoppable creation of......well, now I'm confused.

In the first Alien movie we were happy to believe that the creatures existed on the barren planet that was the source of the space jockey's distress call. I have never wanted to look further than the fact that they were just the nastiest things one was ever likely to meet outside of a Galaxy of Terror movie poster or Geiger's own nightmares. But we needed to see more so we got more. six more, and Covenant now takes us to number eight.

My problems with this movie are that we've seen it all before. We've seen alien settlements, we've seen good androids and bad androids, we've seen different versions of the xenomorph, depending on the host and we have seen people running from and dying at the hands of the alien. For pity's sake we've even seen the "hey look guys, it's a woman saving the day" trope that by now shouldn't be so excessively pushed at us rather than occur from the natural storyline.

Prometheus led us along a path, a path to the creators of humanity and the xenomorph. This movie stops that journey dead in its tracks and even seems to forget about it.

I don't want to say any more less I give away bits about the movie that would spoil it for viewers but I was generally disappointed. It's a well made movie but I wonder about the intentions of the people behind it...