Alien: Covenant Will Not Be Scary

Here is the new trailer for Alien: Covenant.

It is not scary.

It is not scary because Alien: Covenant, the movie, will not be scary. It may be tense, gory and gross, but it will probably not do the most basic thing you can expect of any horror movie, which is to scare you.

The first trailer delivers more of the goods, if only because it refuses to show us the slobbering monster that's skittered around our nightmares for the last 38 years (the one glimpse of that iconic eyeless mug happens in a shower, which put me in mind of the up-close confrontation between Ripley and the alien in Alien 3 - a terrifying moment in a largely fright-free film). The new trailer gives us a view of egg sac, face hugger, xenomorph and even a shot of a neomorph, which is all-new for this movie. My only hope is that it won't resemble the monster baby from Alien Resurrection.

But the trailer's candor is not what neutralizes its power. Instead, it's the discovery of a shaft of wheat on the alien planet.

"This is wheat," says someone, fingering the wheat. "What are the odds of finding human vegetation this far from Earth?" Someone then steps on some kind of spore-bearing pod plant thing, suggesting that wheat coexists nicely with alien murder fungus or whatever that is. "Human vegetation" is an apt phrase, though, because the clumps of wheat look like the stuff we know and love, with long stems and lush heads. It looks like the carefully cultivated product of thousands of years of human tinkering.

What's modern wheat doing on this planet? I'm sure there are answers, but frankly, who cares? Because it means that we've dug our furrow into the world of Prometheus (not scary) instead of Alien (scary). We're wheat-deep in Ridley Scott's absurd Chariots of the Gods-inspired mythology, in which giant humanoids that looked like angry marzipan statues created humanity, possibly sent Jesus down to us* and got so upset when we killed him (which, if Jesus looked an angry marzipan man, is hardly a surprising outcome) that they decided to destroy humanity altogether.

You may recall that in Prometheus, a faith-addled astroarcheologist (?) rockets to the stars to find those big white almond-paste gods, only to discover that they were destroyed by the horrific bio weapon that they had intended to use on the teeming hordes of Earth. The film was visually lush, unpleasant, a bit gruesome, and too ridiculous to enjoy. It also took the horror trope of "dimwitted people enter a spooky house" to ridiculous extremes, letting a gaggle of incompetent scientists loose into a Giger-esque nightmare of snakes and worms and black goo.

Alien, on the other hand, is one of the scariest horror films ever made. There's no grand mythology, no Baby Boomer-catnip cod mythology, no marzipan men smacking Old Man Memento around. There's nothing but a vast, indifferent universe with a monster at its heart. A group of people floating through the galaxy discover that they're just bits of meat in the life cycle of another organism. There are certainly a few mysteries - What was that ship doing on that planet? What's the deal with the Space Jockey? How much does the Weyland-Yutani corporation know about the alien creature? - but they function mostly as a way of deepening the horror, of presenting puzzles and withholding them at the same time. Would you like to know what's really going on here? No, too bad, an alien is chewing on your head.

Alien: Covenant is probably going to billed as a "return to the roots of the franchise". But will it be scary? No.

*In an interview, Ridley Scott said that the alien Jesus idea was a bit too "on the nose" but went to more or less confirm that sure, Jesus was a big dopey guy made of marzipan who came down to complain about the Roman Empire, why the hell not.