Ovomorph, facehugger, chestburster and neomorph — Alien life cycle lovingly rendered

REVIEW: Ridley Scott’s reboot of his groundbreaking sci-fi franchise is space-worthy enough to transport mass audiences to the next instalment.

This image released by Twentieth Century Fox shows a scene from "Alien: Covenant." (Twentieth Century Fox via AP)

ALIEN: COVENANT

Three and a half stars

DIRECTOR Ridley Scott

STARRING Katherine Waterston, Michael Fassbender, Billy Crudup

RATING MA 15+

RUNNING TIME 122 minutes

VERDICT Superior creature feature

THE stars of Ridley Scott’s Alien reboot, quite rightly, are the acid-drooling extraterrestrial creatures themselves

Prometheus, Alien: Covenant’s portentous 2012 predecessor, was long on existential riddles and short on parasitic fauna.

Scott rectifies this in the prequel’s sequel (there are two more instalments planned to link up with the director’s groundbreaking 1979 original).

Each stage of the xenomorph’s unusually visceral life cycle — ovomorph, facehugger, chestburster, neomorph and mature, adult queen — is rendered in intimate anatomical detail.

The filmmakers take full advantage of recent advances in visual and special effects technology to capture the viscous creatures in all their erotic grotesquerie.

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The third stage of the Alien life cycle is particularly unpleasant.

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We get up close and personal with every one of the monstrous iterations. Not one of them disappoints.

Augmenting the sense of biological mystery is Scott’s discipline as director. The veteran filmmaker is an expert judge of when less becomes more. The economical shower scene, in which an alien tendril winds its way up the legs of a couple making love, offers a good example of this precision at work.

Michael Fassbender makes a welcome return as the ships regulation synthetic android, now known as Walter.

He’s a slightly warmer, more gentlemanly variation on Prometheus’s fastidious David — perhaps the modification renders him incapable from actually creating anything (while he can master a complicated piece of music in seconds, he can’t compose) means he’s less tortured.

Alien: Covenant also features a mysterious alien whisperer — but that character can’t be described without spoiling the plot.

But the success of the sixth film in the sci-fi franchise was always going to rest on the shoulders of the new Ripley — Katherine Waterston (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them) — who proves herself to be more than able to carry the load.

Katherine Waterston is a reluctant heroine in Alien Covenant.

Scott describes her character, Daniels, as going on a “parallel journey” to Sigourney Weaver’s iconic character.

The terraformist, while similarly resilient, is perhaps more emotionally vulnerable than her much-loved predecessor/successor, partly because the storyline gives her more opportunity to explore this side of herself.

The Covenant is a colony ship carrying 2000 human souls and trays of second generation embryos, bound for a habitable planet in a distant galaxy.

Given the pioneering nature of the mission, the crew is made up entirely of couples.

When a freak accident triggers emergency protocols, Daniels awakes from cryo-sleep to see her husband, and the ship’s captain (James Franco), die a horrible death seemingly due to a pod malfunction.

Billy Crudup’s second-in-command, Oram, orders an exploratory mission to the habitable planet that miraculously appears on their radar.

Scott doesn’t waste much time in unleashing his secret biological weapon.

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Waterston fights back in a scene from the film.

Alien: Covenant is a welcome return to form for the beloved franchise.

The dramatic energy of the action sequences overcomes a somewhat predictable plot that sets out to address some very big questions, but ultimately falls back on a few well-worn answers.

The ending feels strangely rushed — and there’s a twist you can see coming from a galaxy away — but Alien: Covenant is still more than space-worthy enough to transport mass audiences to the next instalment.

Alien: Covenant is now showing

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