Alien: Covenant's Director's Cut Could Redeem The Maligned Prequel
Here's how a director's cut of Alien: Covenant could improve the maligned prequel's reputation. Despite the original movie being a huge success, director Ridley Scott wasn't asked to return for Aliens and was absent from the franchise until 2012's Prometheus. This was a prequel exploring both the origins of mankind and the Xenomorphs themselves, though Scott made it clear in interviews he didn't include the creatures as he felt they were "cooked" due to overexposure. He later included them in his second prequel Alien: Covenant, seemingly to appease viewer - and likely, studio - expectations than any desire to revisit the monsters.
Scott essentially wanted to eject the Xenomorph from its own franchise and replace it with another "alien" form of life with android David 8 (Michael Fassbender). While an interesting idea, in theory, it's a safe bet that audiences coming to see a movie with Alien in the title would like the titular creatures to be the focus. Alien: Covenant itself suffered from many of the faults that plagued Prometheus, including unlikeable characters who often made illogical decisions just to move the story forward.
Whether their flaws both movies explored ambitious themes such as creator vs created and aimed to be about more than monsters chasing victims around dark corridors. Alien: Covenant has its plus points, including two great performances from Fassbender as David and fellow android Walter, some well-executed setpieces, an eerie score and for expanding the mythology of the Alien movies. One thing it could benefit from is both the removal of scenes that don't work and the addition of sequences that shouldn't have been trimmed in the first place. In this way, it's primed for a famous Ridley Scott director's cut, which in the past has yielded critical reprisals of projects that initially met with mixed reviews like Blade Runner or Kingdom Of Heaven.
One sequence that should never have been cut was The Crossing, an extended flashback involving Noomi Rapace's Shaw and David as they traveled to the Engineer planet. Shaw was the lead of Prometheus but in Covenant is unceremoniously killed offscreen. The Crossing was cut from the movie and repurposed as a promotional short, but it gives vital context to the story, not to mention some closure to Shaw's storyline. Alien: Covenant's Blu-ray features also included various trimmed scenes that should have been included, such as a burial service for Daniels' (Katherine Waterston) husband that further flesh out the movie's protagonists. In April 2022 an extended clip arrived online that showed off a more suspenseful version of the famous shower scene that was more effective than the final edit.
Other scenes shot but left unused include Fassbender's Walter checking the air quality on the planet and making sure it's safe, which the movie skips over for some reason. The cartoonish CGI of the Xenomorphs and Neomorphs robs the impact from some of their scenes, but many of these scenes were actually filmed with performers in practical suits, so a new cut could provide more of a balance between these effects. There are also extended scenes that hit the cutting room floor, such as Rosenthal's death featuring the Neomorph creature picking her up by the neck.
The removal of certain scenes would help Covenant too, including the infamous - but kind of hilarious - flute scene. Given the reception to Alien: Covenant, a director's cut now feels unlikely, but there was a wealth of footage filmed that could help redeem its reception. With some distance from the project, maybe Scott would take a different approach to the prequel, and it does feel like there's a better movie to be shaped from what was shot.
Source: Screenrant
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