Alien:Covenant is a thin, black film (spoilers)

[Donnadogsoth]

It's thin because there's not a lot of meat on the plot. It goes where it goes and does what it does but there isn't much in the way of an ongoing argument or theme. There's no richness of human interaction, no engagement with the future, no debates about the meaning of the world.

It's black because it's beyond dark. We're just used having our eyes adjusted so we don't know how damned dark things really are. Dark is Hellraiser or Dark City but this film starts off black,

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with the captain burning to death in his cryotube, then the new captain even suppresses a memorial that has to take place in secret, then hapless people succumb to alien diseases, or are killed by offspring of said diseases; there is a flashback to an horrifically gruesome, outright planetwide genocide at the hands of the villain, and off-screen the previous film's hero Dr. Shaw is vivisected and murdered, a couple enjoying the relief of intimacy after a deadly adventure are butchered naked in the shower, the disposal of the Alien on board the ship cripples the colonising effort by costing them two (2) huge and irreplaceable dump trucks, and in the end the villain sneaks aboard the ship and takes total control, with plans to use Aliens to experiment on them.

There is ultimately no hope, no argument, no meaning, just relentless downbeat action. Evil wins, and it's all the fault of a single villain.

This film, the mainstream product of 2017 Hollywood, is the relief sculpture of total hopelessness it was advertised with.

Can anyone find any meaning in this movie?

[BWR]

People like seeing humans die horrible deaths in horror movies. Does it need any more meaning than that?

[Aotrs Commander]

Sounds like it's just a slasher B-movie, then, really, only on a presumably A-movie budget.

It's no flesh off my bone, either way; the franchise have never appealed to me even when it was not being that and - and you might find this slightly odd coming from me - I don't find slasher movies appealing, either. Or, come to that, stories where a succession of characters is introduced, only to be killed off over the course of the story in anything, movie or otherwise¹.

(Random fictional people dying in silly ways just doesn't entertainment on screen. If I want to see people die in silly ways, I have a brig full of actual prisoners and I can get my claw attacks proper dirty, ta.)



¹If you don't care whether your characters die, metaphorical author, why should I?

[Millstone85]

I haven't seen Covenant, but it does sound like Prometheus 2.

[Psyren]

There's already a thread on it so I'd check there for my and other forumites' reactions.

As for the specific accusation of being grimdark - I was too busy rooting for David to feel any kind of despair. Seriously, the humans here and in Prometheus are just way too stupid to be populating the cosmos.