Alien: Covenant (Ridley Scott US 2017) (review)

Fans of the Alien film series (1979–) have long found much to rejoice and complain about in equal measures, particularly since the franchise’s most recent revival in 2012. Acclaim for Alien (Scott UK/US 1979) and Aliens (Cameron US/UK 1986) preceded an uneven initial reception for Alien 3 (Fincher US 1992) – which has since gained recognition for its reimagining of Ridley Scott’s initial cinematic vision for the first film – and Alien: Resurrection (Jeunet US 1997). Scott’s return to the director’s chair for prequel Prometheus (US 2012) did little to return to the horror-thriller style expected from the franchise, as a dearth of alien figures and over-reliance on philosophy counted as chief among the critiques lobbed by audiences and critics. In 2015, Scott announced that the sequel to Prometheus would be another Alien prequel titled Alien: Covenant, as a nod to the previous Alien films and the connections with the extraterrestrials that had peopled the first films and been missing from Prometheus. This, too, met with disappointing results, as this prequel remained tied to a highly specific mythology within Scott’s imagined universe.

I argue that such slavish consistency to Scott’s creation broke from the franchise’s earlier attempts at reimagining Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver)’s initial story and world, making both prequels regressive from an aesthetic standpoint. Further, Alien: Covenant’s violent gender politics clash with their supposed tributes to Scott’s iconic protagonist Ellen Ripley, long considered a sf feminist icon. This troubling gender dynamic allows for vigorous debate about the direction of the Alien franchise within sf, and proves instructive as a text in need of more progressive gender representations in sf film.

The film begins with a flashback sequence set an unspecified number of years before the events of Prometheus, as evidenced by the creation of synthetic android David (Michael Fassbender) and his creator, a younger Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) of the Weyland Corporation. In a sequence that establishes David’s categorical knowledge of artwork and music, as well as the hierarchy of humans over synthetics, Weyland declares, ‘You are my creation’, establishing a major theme of the film and that of Prometheus: the search for our human origins and faith in a Great Beyond. To that point, David asks, ‘If you created me, who created you?’ which drives much of Prometheus and will in turn fuel David’s own megalomania in Covenant. This interlude ends with a cut to a long shot of the ship Covenant on 5 December 2104, 11 years after the events in Prometheus. Synthetic Walter (again played by Fassbender) sits alone on the ship, while the crew rests in sleeping pods in hypersleep, a nod to the other films’ beginnings. A random accident in space causes damage to the ship and kills several colonists and the crew’s captain, Jake Brandon (a stunt cameo by James Franco). Brandon’s devastated wife, Daniels (Katherine Waterston), is torn between her grief at losing her husband en route to a new colony and duty to the mission for which she has spent over a decade preparing. New captain Chris Oram (Billy Crudup) intercepts a signal in space and discovers a heretofore undiscovered planet that is viable with a water source and plenty of land for the colonists to build upon. He determines that the expedition should forego their destination, Origae-6, and instead visit this unnamed planet, against Daniels’s protestations.

The plot builds slowly in order to develop the horror latent within the planet. While some of the crew discover the ship Prometheus and traces of Dr Elisabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), crew member Ledward (Benjamin Rigby) steps on a spore, familiar to viewers of Prometheus as containing the black matter, and from there, the neomorphs begin to emerge: a vomit sequence and lander explosion set off the alien chest-bursting action that unfolds. The remaining crew members follow a mysterious man to a city centre filled with skeletons, and from there uncover the mystery...