In celebration of Alien Romulus, this week we will be looking back at each film in the Alien franchise. Today, Alien: Covenant.

Alien Covenant is the latest entry in the Alien franchise and the finale to Ridley Scott’s prequel series. Covenant feels like both a sequel and a return to form. The film expands upon ideas and themes introduced in Prometheus, while also hearkening back to the original Alien films. The result is a film that’s entertaining but conflicted.

Alien Covenant takes place eleven years after the events of Prometheus and begins the way many Alien films begin. A spaceship full of stasis sleeping crew is awoken way too early and terror ensues. The ship here is the Covenant, a colonization ship carrying 2,000 humans and over a thousand embryos in search of a new habitable planet. An odd particle wave blast damages the ship and Walter, an android who looks identical to the villain from Prometheus, is forced to wake the crew. The captain of the ship, an oddly cast James Franco, is killed during this ordeal, and the crew weighs their options. The blast that damaged the ship carries with it a soundwave to the tune of Country Road by John Denver. It also appears to be coming from a perfectly safe habitable planet. One that maybe the research missed. The crew decides rather than re-entering their sleep stasis and continuing with the original mission, they are going to do a ground mission to see if this new planet is suitable for colonization.

Prometheus did away with almost all of the horror and action elements of the Alien series, instead focusing on telling a grandiose tale of gods and creation. Alien Covenant tries to right the ship by continuing on with these larger-than-life themes but also telling an alien story that involves, well, aliens. The big universe asking questions about god and man and creation are all here, they are just interspersed between action and horror scenes. The result is something wholly unique but not quite as good as the sum of its parts.

David, the creation turned god from Prometheus is back. He’s on the perfectly inhabitable planet and the audience learns that he came to this planet with the alien creatures and wiped out their entire world. If there is any question about his god complex, he literally at one point stands on a balcony overlooking a sea of corpses and quotes verbatim Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias. “My Name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” Ridley Scott added some fun with this film but he definitely didn’t skimp on the decadence.

Prometheus is a story about creators. The crew searches for their creators. They find them and realize their creators have created something else that could end not only our heroes but also their gods. Alien Covenant continues this theme but this film is much more concerned with the creation than the creator. The crew here is giving life, transporting embryos to a safe planet where they can thrive. Their major conflict is with David’s creations. He’s spent the past eleven years marooned on this planet tinkering and perfecting the alien into what would eventually turn into the iconic face-hugger and xenomorph. David is the main antagonist of the film, but it’s his creations that cause the most terror. He can seemingly control the xenomorphs, the only being in this world we know who’s capable of doing so and the film utilizes this plot point well. It focuses on the creation and shows the love a creator has for their creation, even when they are despicable grotesque-looking creatures.

The film also makes several different allusions to plays and art as a whole. Danny Mcbride’s character is named Tennesse in what I have to imagine is a nod to Tennessee Williams and the crew constantly references different art throughout the film. From the Phantom of the Opera to the music of John Denver, there is a lot of 20th-century art referenced for a film that takes place a hundred years in the future. David is obsessed with art and creating something unique. He’s spent years perfecting this savage deadly species and laments to his android counterpart his programming that limits his ability to create. Ultimately since he cannot create art, only copy music and literature from humans, he decides to create the only thing he can. A group of violent murderous xenomorphs. The idea here is that a life without art, without creation, is one of madness. It leads to resentment from David, an all-powerful being with a world-destroying god complex.

Apart from the grandiose themes of creation and gods rising above their creators is a super fun alien movie. Prometheus lost all of the fun but Covenant brings it back. There are great action sequences, one in particular in the dead of the night with the crew fighting off a small newly birthed alien. They fight for survival against an enemy they know nothing about while their ship, the one they landed on the planet with, is blown to pieces. This scene raises the stakes and hearkens back to the terror that made the original films so powerful. We’ve put our heroes in a new situation, one of isolation, on a strange planet that no one understands. And then we take away their only safety net. Leaving them in an intense situation where their only way out is to fight.

The third act is just as thrilling and brings even more homage to the series. This time referencing Aliens with our strong female lead fighting off an Alien with guns and heavy machinery. It’s thrilling cinema and the kind of action that makes for a fun time at the movies. It’s in between these action set pieces though where we get the long brooding monologues of art and creation. It’s not that either of these storylines fails to work, it’s just that they juxtapose so strongly with each other that the film feels uneven throughout. One moment we get Michael Fassbender as David waxing poetic about his inability to create and his disdain for those who made him and the next we get Katherine Waterston kicking a xenomorph’s ass with a giant claw.

In Aliens, these scenes worked because of the subtly. The second film in the series is a study of motherhood and gender norms but that’s all subtext hiding behind a fun sci-fi thriller. Here, there is no subtly. The themes Covenant is trying to portray are front and center, not left up to interpretation. Is the film supposed to be a movie about creation? Just listen to one of David’s twelve speeches on the matter. Are the crew supposed to represent a savior-type group, mirroring the themes of Christianity? There is a photo of the crew that the camera lingers on for far too long of the crew all standing around the table mimicking the last supper. Right down to James Franco’s long-haired Christlike figure centered in the middle.

None of these things make the film bad, they just keep it from being great. Alien Covenant tries to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to be a continuation of the Prometheus storyline, further realizing the themes of creation and Christianity set out in this world but also be a fun homage to the film series we all love. All of it works. But it works better apart than together. I give Alien Covenant a seven and I’m happy that this is where we leave the prequel series.