Last Saturday, it looked like the crew of the Covenant had managed to escape the desolate home planet of the Engineers. But one of the few survivors was carrying an embryo of the notorious xenomorph.

While the poor man was asleep, the xenomorph tore him apart, and now Tennessee and Daniels must save the remaining crew members of the Covenant from yet another alien. They try to track the creature down but are unable to catch it before it kills two more of them.

Then they ask Walter — who is really David — to shut the doors behind them. Daniels and Tennessee’s goal is to steer the creature into the cargo hold of the ship, from which Daniels will lure it into a truck and launch it into space. It’s a pretty good plan, and it works.

Throughout the climax, the audience sees David looking at the alien, half-rooting for it. I’m not sure what the writers were trying to accomplish there. Did they want us to think that “Walter” was slowly coming to sympathize with the alien, or did they think that by confirming over and over again that “Walter” was really David they were building tension? Whatever they were trying to do, it didn’t work.

Only now she realizes…

After the xenomorph is killed, Tennessee and Daniels return to their cryobeds. But before Daniels drifts off to sleep, she suddenly realizes that Walter is really David.

It’s a freaky scene that could’ve worked if it was earned. But surely most of the audience guessed that Walter was David the moment the camera cut away from the robots’ fight.

Then David turns his attention to the embryos

Meanwhile, David assumes Walter’s responsibilities on the ship and goes to check on the human embryos for the colonization mission. These embryos are stored in tiny disks kept in freezers.

David opens one of these freezer drawers and sees several empty slots. He opens his mouth and pulls out two facehugger embryos. He places them in the drawer, then the audience hears David’s voiceover, telling the people of Earth his version of what happened to the crew of the Covenant before the movie ends.

Several flaws in this final sequence drive me crazy. Where did David get the frozen facehugger embryos? Furthermore, where did he get the two disks for these embryos that just so happen to be the exact same size as the disks for the human embryos in the drawers? There is no way he could have had access to the same equipment as in the Covenant. He landed on a ship created by the Engineers, and he’s had zero chance to return to the planet since then. And if he had two embryos that could fit down his mechanical gullet the entire time, why did he act like a melodramatic villain throughout the film?

Provided he behaved as if he were sane, the crew probably would’ve let him on the ship as David. Then he could’ve planted the embryos at his leisure. This makes everything David did in the movie redundant and idiotic. He made his own job harder for no reason that the storyline makes clear.

This movie could’ve been good. It’s weakness is that it is lazy. The writers had five years from the time Prometheus was released to make a well-thought-out script. How in the world did they drop the ball this hard? Every last plot point was the result of either profound stupidity or coincidence.

Dr. Shaw behaved in a way that was totally out of character when she put David back together. Oram may have been a man of faith, but that doesn’t mean he was stupid enough to follow David around and look into the facehugger egg when he didn’t trust the robot anyway. David had no reason to behave like a maniacal sociopath when he already had two embryos ready for storage and just needed to play nice.

Plus, the death of Dr. Shaw really annoyed me. Don’t get me wrong, Prometheus was a terrible film too, so I felt no real attachment to Dr. Shaw. But there was no reason to kill her off-screen. And to make matters worse, the movie goes out of its way to tell you that her death was horrible. To me, that felt really cold. I don’t think she should’ve been the next Ripley.

Weakening the stakes in the next installment

I don’t think she needed to survive this movie, but the problem with killing protagonists of a previous film off-screen is that it weakens the stakes in the next installment. I need to care about Daniels if I’m going to be invested in the plot. But if Dr. Shaw was cast aside to make room for Daniels, then why should I care about the movie’s new protagonist? The chances are she’s not going to be in the next film either. The alien franchise isn’t just dependent on the xenomorph. It depends on Ripley, which is why the fourth film tanked, even though it was much better written than Alien Three—although Alien Resurrection is also terrible, but in a fun way.

Dr. Shaw needed to be seen in this movie, and the infuriating thing is that, originally, she was. There’s a deleted scene where Dr. Shaw is shown putting David back together.

A stupid decision, sure, but she’s there, tying Alien Covenant to the previous film, leaving the audience with the promise that these two movies are connected and that we’re not just wasting our time watching an isolated popcorn flick. The truth is, that’s exactly what we’re watching, but at least the story feels larger, like it’s part of a broader universe, or, dare I say, a franchise. Why they deleted Dr. Shaw’s scene I have no idea, but it was a horrible mistake.

Rewriting the screenplay

Beginning this review series, I wrote a long rant about how a writer should never allow a plot to be driven entirely by coincidence and stupidity. So, to demonstrate what I meant in the first review, I am going to try to fix this film. I’ll go over the bullet points of the plot and show how the story could’ve been altered to make more sense. There’s a decent movie in here, if the writers had just taken the time to find it. We’ll cover that what-if scenario in next Saturday.

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Here are the first five parts of my review: Alien: Covenant (2017): A story driven by stupidity, coincidence. Nothing seems to happen as the natural result of a character’s choices, consistent with personality and motive. It’s exciting but the audience will likely notice the hands of the writers moving the pieces where they want them to go.

Alien Covenant (2017): When the prophet fails. Everybody trudges onto the planet in what amounts to hunting gear and they begin looking for Shaw’s ship… What’s the point of Daniels being the screenwriters’ prophet if the character isn’t going to even try to take any sort of action to prevent a disaster?

Alien Covenant (2017): David the malicious robot… returns! And, just in case we haven’t already suspected, David is lying about what happened to Dr. Shaw. Seeing that the robot is frighteningly apathetic toward the death of one of his crew, Oram demands answers from the faulty machine.

Alien Covenant (2017): Dr. Frankenstein in Space David, the robotic sociopath, turns out to have been breeding deadly aliens all this time. One example of the way stupidity appears to drive the plot is that characters who should not trust David seem to do so, with disastrous results.

and

Alien: Covenant Part 5: Wake up, Daniels! It’s obviously David! The evil robot must board the ship again, and must find a way to make sure the alien boards the ship as well. We begin to learn why the alien xenomorphs take varying amounts of time to develop inside a human body before they erupt and kill.