Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel balances brains and chestbursting thrills
REVIEW: Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant deftly blends the big questions raised by Prometheus with the chestbursting scares of his original film.
Leigh Paatsch
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ALIEN: COVENANT (MA15+)
Director: Ridley Scott (Blade Runner)
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Jussie Smollett, Callie Hernandez.
Rating: 3.5 stars
Verdict: Back again to wipe the smile off their space
ON the verge of turning 80, director Ridley Scott has signalled his intention to end his career with a trilogy of Alien pictures.
Which is great news for the millions of fans the seminal sci-fi horror franchise has accumulated since the late 1970s.
The project has started rolling in fine style with Alien: Covenant, a clinically assured deep-space chiller.
Scott deftly combines the obligatory chest-bursting gore of the classic Alien movies with the mind-expanding philosophical questing of 2012’s divisive demi-prequel Prometheus.
That tricky balance between body count and brain food is very sweetly struck indeed.
A desolate, dread-magnetising story picks up a decade after the events of Prometheus.
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The colonist ship Covenant is several years into a journey to the distant planet of Origae-6.
On board are 2000 settlers frozen deep into cryo-sleep, and also a sizeable number of human embryos to guarantee an ongoing population supply at what will be a vital new home for all mankind.
Only one Covenant crew member remains awake to make sure the spaceship stays on its correct course: Walter (Michael Fassbender), an enhanced later model of David, the ‘synthetic’ human Fassbender played in Prometheus.
A galactic pulse wave strikes the Covenant and causes some serious damage, necessitating the immediate awakening of its entire crew. Not everyone makes it out of their sleep pods alive, and a new captain must be appointed.
The next in line for leadership is Oram (Billy Crudup), not the most popular choice among his peers (an intriguingly high percentage of whom are married couples).
The new captain’s first significant move is to make an unscheduled exploratory pit stop on a planet that appears to be a spectacularly habitable match for their needs. Spoiler alert: it is not.
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The only voice of dissent against the change of plans is Daniels (Katherine Waterston), a strong-willed officer who has just lost her husband. In fact, he was the previous captain of the Covenant.
Daniels, in the grand Alien tradition of drawing fiercely female last lines of defence, is destined to become a Ripley-like figure once the climate turns from tense to terrifying to terminal at rapid-fire speed.
While there is a pronounced air of predictability to the high level of carnage fated to transpire in Alien: Covenant, the how, where and why of each compulsory culling of the crew are very shrewdly calibrated by Scott.
Most importantly, the intricate physical design and mercurial psychological makeup of the xenomorphs — those monsters always popping in and out of bodies at will — are meshed together here with great menace.
Performances are ever so slightly uneven, but never to the lasting detriment of the movie.
Fassbender and Waterston have the best-written parts, and the skills to make their roles sing. The others must make do with whatever they get to blurt out before the next onslaught comes.
While not in the same league as the iconic first two Alien outings, Covenant marks a solid return (and promising repositioning) for the long-running saga.
Enough of the right boxes are ticked to suggest that things will only keep getting better for the franchise from here.
Originally published as Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel balances brains and chestbursting thrills
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