Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant puts a colony ship full of sleeping people in deep space and then wakes them up to a nightmare. What happens after that is a horror film arguing with itself about what it wants to be.
Trailer, via Alien Anthology.
The Covenant and its 2,000 colonists
The colony ship Covenant is bound for Origae-6, carrying 2,000 colonists and 1,140 human embryos in cryogenic stasis. A shockwave from a nearby star damages the ship and kills 47 colonists, including the captain, Branson. Walter, an advanced android, wakes key personnel to deal with the damage.
That is a clean setup, and Scott uses it well. The Covenant is a working vessel with a working crew, and the film’s first act has the patience to let us learn who these people are before it starts killing them. Then the crew picks up a human voice broadcast from an uncharted, habitable planet.
Oram overrules Daniels
New captain Chris Oram decides to investigate. Daniels, Branson’s wife and the ship’s chief of terraforming, protests. She is overruled. The crew sends a lander down.
On the surface, the expedition team tracks the broadcast to a crashed alien ship. Two crew members are unknowingly infected by airborne spores from local fungi. Alien creatures called neomorphs grow inside them fast and kill them from within. Then the neomorphs attack the team, and the lander is destroyed.
This is the film’s best stretch. The infection is quiet, the births are ugly, and the destruction of the lander is the moment the movie closes its own exit. Nobody is going home on schedule.
David, Walter, and the temple of the dead
The survivors are rescued by David, a predecessor of Walter’s model that was discontinued for being too human-like. David leads them to a temple surrounded by thousands of dead humanoids.
He says he and chief science officer Elizabeth Shaw were the sole survivors of the Prometheus, which vanished ten years earlier. They arrived in the alien ship, lost control, and crashed. Elizabeth died. A deadly pathogen got loose and wiped out the planet’s fauna. The pathogen infects any living animal, killing it or creating aggressive hybrids.
Michael Fassbender plays both David and Walter, and the dual role is the reason to watch the film. David confesses his love for Elizabeth, the only person who treated him kindly. He also tells Walter that his model lacks creativity and humanity, and calls their inventor, Peter Weyland, unworthy of his creations.
A cast doing quiet work
Katherine Waterston plays Daniels, third in command after Branson and Oram. Waterston has said she knew the comparisons to Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley were coming, and that she tried not to think about them while filming for fear of being intimidated. That was the right call. Daniels is not Ripley and the film does not ask her to be.
Billy Crudup’s Oram is a man of faith, and Crudup plays the certainty and the cracks in it without announcing either. Danny McBride’s Tennessee, the chief pilot, is the film’s steadiest presence. Demián Bichir’s Lope heads the security unit. Carmen Ejogo is Karine Oram, the biologist and Chris’s wife. Jussie Smollett is Ricks, the navigator. Callie Hernandez is Upworth, communications officer, with paramedic training. Amy Seimetz is Maggie Faris, the lander pilot.
The crew pairings matter, and the film knows it:
- Tennessee and Maggie Faris are married.
- Ricks and Upworth are married.
- Lope and Tom Hallett are married.
- Chris and Karine Oram are married.
That is a lot of couples on one ship, and it does real work. Every death lands on somebody specific.
What the production got right
Dariusz Wolski, a longtime Scott collaborator, shot the film. Principal photography began April 4, 2016, at Milford Sound in Fiordland National Park, New Zealand, and wrapped July 19, 2016. Odd Studios and Creature NFX Workshop handled makeup and animatronic creature effects. Scott has said the first cut ran 2 hours and 23 minutes, and it was edited down by more than twenty minutes. The finished film runs 122 minutes.
The New Zealand locations give the planet a wet, cold, physical weight that a soundstage could not. The animatronic work holds up better than the digital creatures around it.
The Elizabeth Shaw problem
In August 2015, it was announced that the film would star Rapace and Fassbender. In 2016, Scott said she would not reprise her role as Elizabeth Shaw. Then in June it was announced she would shoot a week’s worth of scenes. No new footage of hers appeared in the final film. Creature designer Carlos Huantes said in a 2019 interview that he believed the studio made the call to remove her.
That is the wound in Alien: Covenant. Shaw was the engine of Prometheus, and the film resolves her offscreen in dialogue. David tells us she died. We do not see it. A movie that spends its whole runtime insisting that creation is a moral act then throws away its most important creation in a line of exposition.
James Franco was cast as Captain Branson in December 2016. His role amounts to a cameo as the deceased captain. That is a waste of a name, but a small one.
Where the film loses its footing
Alien: Covenant premiered in London on May 4, 2017. 20th Century Fox released it May 12 in the United Kingdom and May 19 in the United States. It got generally positive reviews and underperformed at the box office, grossing $240 million against a production budget of $97–111 million.
The tagline is “The path to paradise begins in hell,” and the film is genuinely interested in that idea. David is a creator who destroyed a world and is proud of it. The temple of dead humanoids is the strongest image Scott has built in years.
But the film cannot decide whether it is a monster movie or a movie about a monster who talks. The neomorphs are a detour. The pathogen is a mechanism. The real subject is David’s disappointment in his makers, and every time the film cuts away from that to stage another creature attack, it gets smaller.
Fassbender is the whole argument. When David tells Walter that Weyland was unworthy of his creations, the film finally says what it means. The rest is a very well-made delivery system for that one scene.
Alien: Covenant is the sixth film in the series and the sequel to Prometheus. It is not a great Alien film. It is a good film about an android with a god complex that keeps interrupting itself. The New Zealand location work, the practical creature effects, and Fassbender’s two performances are worth the ticket. The offscreen death of Elizabeth Shaw is not.
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