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Alien: Covenant
STARRING: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston and Billy Crudup
DIRECTOR: Ridley Scott
Genre: Sci-Fi Horror
Rating: 18
RUNNING TIME: 123 minutes
When the first Alien came out in 1979, promising and delivering screams in space that no one could hear, more than a few critics called it a relentless, hard-driving thrill machine. On reflection, it resembles a movie with the patience of Job, taking its sweet, stealthy time before arriving at one of the great moments in the history of extreme cinematic gore.
You know the scene; if you haven’t seen it then you’ve definitely heard about it. John Hurt is sitting around the spacecraft galley, having a jolly meal with his crew aboard the Nostromo. He’s blissfully unaware that the gestating xenomorph inside him is waiting for the right moment to burst out of his chest and set in motion the wheels of the greatest cinematic cat-and-mouse chase in history.
That monster has been chasing director Ridley Scott ever since. He turned the franchise over to James Cameron, who in turn created another classic on a par with the first, albeit with a shift to the action genre, before two dreadful sequels that shouldn’t be spoken about.
Five years ago, Scott decided to reclaim his property and delivered the ambitious, yet messy, prequel Prometheus, in which Scott went easy on the aliens and heavy on the origin-story mythology.
Fans of the earlier movies couldn’t entirely embrace it and thus Scott acknowledged his folly and produced Alien: Covenant, which in many ways – stylistically, thematically, structurally – sits neatly between the existential ponderings of the previous film and the sumptuous horror of the 1979 original.
While it fails to match the classic in terms of sheer terror and elegance, Scott nevertheless delivers some imaginative takes on familiar sequences and rich, satisfying answers to Prometheus’ lingering mysteries.
Covenant begins, true to form, with a crew emerging from hyper-sleep. They’re pioneers; a mixture of engineers, scientists and pilots transporting colonists in stasis to a distant planet carefully selected to be their new home. But during the long voyage, the crew is lured to what appears to be an even better site for their colony.
From here on, Covenant delivers a focussed, suspense-driven story as various members of the crew play host to a variety of vicious parasites which burst forth in gruesome fashion. Scott even offers up a grisly new rendition of the infamous sequence which is an effective and full-on piece of body horror, though it’s impossible to match the surprise of Hurt’s. It’s an early statement of intent: the sterile musings of Prometheus violently give way to splintering ribs and blood-spattered med bays.
Scott initially holds back the classic xenomorph in favour of a pale, haunting creature – dubbed as the ‘neomorph’– which is no less aggressive and, when fully grown, possesses an eerie quality all of its own.
The classic alien is withheld for good reason, and when it finally makes an appearance, it’s worth the wait, punctuating the most intriguing and disturbing section of the movie. It remains one of the greatest monsters in all of cinema, though it’s still strange and slightly diminished to see the design brought to life with computer animation and moving with such intense ferocity and speed.
It’s not badly done by any means, just at odds with how that creature was originally used. In Covenant, you see it so nakedly, performing a variety of actions outside and in full daylight, when before so much of it was cloaked by the Nostromo’s shadows, leaving your imagination to fill in its sinister mystery. It’s a sad loss.
Covenant’s early action sequences are exciting; even though much of what unfolds has been seen before in the series, it’s testament to Scott that he’s able to find new and visually striking ways of tackling these set pieces. Covenant is the first film in the series to take full advantage of outdoor locations adding novelty to what could’ve otherwise be a staid sequence.
As such, the best scene is a particularly memorable and violent attack in a field at night, with juvenile creatures scurrying between sheaves of wheat by torchlight.
Towards the end of the movie, however, the invention dries up to a degree, with Scott delivering what feels like a compressed version of the original Alien. The outdoor scenes are replaced by claustrophobic corridors and pinging motion-trackers. I’m not sure if it’s knowing self-homage by Scott or a lack of new ideas for how to end this sort of movie. Regardless, it’s still a fun conclusion, though slightly clichéd next to the invention that precedes it.
Ultimately, this feels like Alien: Greatest Hits. It has some fresh new ideas, but too quickly devolves into cherry-picking the best ideas from the previous films. Still, with strong performances, particularly from Michael Fassbender, this is a satisfying addition to the series.
Showing in: Novo, Cineco, Seef II, Wadi Al Sail and Saar.
Rating: 4/5
