More of the same thrills in Alien: Covenant

RIDLEY Scott had a big task: Make amends for the confusing mess that was Prometheus. His approach? Go back to what he knows works.

The latest in robot fashion: a hooded vest.

IN JUST a few minutes, the opening scene of Alien: Covenant did what its predecessor failed to do in two hours.

It compellingly made a case for exploring the idea of creation — a card Prometheus woefully overplayed to the point of utter delirium.

In the stunningly composed scene, we see the “awakening” of synthetic model David (Michael Fassbender) as he meets his creator Weyland (Guy Pearce) and the conversation between them holds the key for all that follows.

And it’s creation that permeates the entire film — where do we come from, who gets to create, the damage those creations do. Specifically, as Ridley Scott promised, it strives to answer who or what created the aliens that have terrorised us since we first encountered the gruesome creatures in 1979.

Picking up 10 years after the events of Prometheus (and about 20 years before Alien) the Covenant is on a colonising mission to a far-off planet, carrying within its bowels 2000 colonists, 1100 embryos, the crew and synthetic model Walter (Fassbender, pulling double duty).

David’s favourite piece of music? Wagner’s ‘Das Reigold’.

When an unexpected event occurs, Walter and the ship’s computer Mother wake the crew from cryosleep seven years before reaching the destination. During repairs outside the ship, Tennessee (Danny McBride) picks up a signal — a human voice transmission coming from a nearby, heretofore unknown planet.

With no one keen to go back into cryosleep, the newly promoted captain, Chris (Billy Crudup), decides to make a beeline for this new human-life-supporting planet and investigate the source of the signal.

You don’t have to be familiar with the Alien franchise to know that choice was a bad one. It’s a familiar cross-genre trope that leaves one screaming “Don’t!!” at the screen, not that one does so aloud because, you know, cinema etiquette.

Worst case of gastro, ever.

It’s not giving anything away to say turmoil and violence follows their every step as the crew desperately try to stay alive. It wouldn’t be an Alien movie without some chest-bursting thrills and alien-stalking chills.

The original title for Alien: Covenant was Alien: Paradise Lost and the Milton allusion is obvious. After their expeditions on the mountainous and lush planet go haywire, one character says, “We should never have come here”. Well, duh.

Milton isn’t the only literary or cultural reference in Alien: Covenant. Among the others, the most prominent is Shelley’s Ozymandis, which David mistakes for Byron. Ozymandis was already teased in the prologue released on YouTube earlier this year and David uses it to make an obvious point about mankind’s hubris and the inevitable decline of empires.

Fassbender’s David was the best part about Prometheus, the enigmatic curiosity behind his every movement and flicker of the eye. Now that David is a more developed character with clearer motivations, the performance loses some of that untouchable allure.

But Fassbender still impresses with his command of two synthetic characters, creating distinction between Walter and David with accents, body language and intonation.

All the more impressive given that as an updated model, Walter was stripped of some of the more self-propelled inclinations David had and is, by design, less human.

The comparisons between Katherine Waterston’s Daniels and Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley were inevitable and Waterston does a fine enough job in pointing the gun and kicking some alien butt. But her character doesn’t have as much opportunity to be fully formed despite the heavy emotional toll she suffers in the film’s opening scenes.

Ripley, the next generation (almost).

Scott has created a much more pared back film in Alien: Covenant after the unnecessarily complicated Prometheus. And there’s no denying that the man can set up a beautiful frame nor can you fault his effectiveness as an action director — those sequences are genuinely heart-in-your-throat tense.

But if you’re looking for non-stop thrills or something you hadn’t seen before, you won’t find them in Alien: Covenant. There is a lot of downtime where not much happens at all — enough downtime, in fact, for you to easily figure out all the predictable “twists”.

Alien: Covenant doesn’t do anything new. It sticks to the formula established all those years ago and it gives you a thumping good time watching humans and slimy aliens kill each other off in brutal ways. But after 38 years, surely that’s not enough?

Rating: 3/5

Alien: Covenant is in cinemas from Thursday, May 11.

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Originally published as More of the same thrills in Alien: Covenant