Alien: Covenant Review

Now that the dust has settled and the furious film fans stabbing away at their keyboards making sure that everyone online knows that Prometheus was a terrible, awful, abysmal film, we can look back and say that it's probably not quite as bad as people remember. Ok, Prometheus isn't great, it is riddled with clunky errors and missteps, but there is also a lot of good to take from it, not least the fact that it really is swinging for the fences. Now Ridley Scott brings us Alien: Covenant, on the face of it is a sequel that looks a lot more like an Alien film, but it may not be quite the film people expect.


The Covenant of the films title refers to the colonization ship heading towards a new planet. The ship is being monitored by android Walter (Michael Fassbender), when a neutrino storm hits resulting in the loss of some of the colonists including the ships captain, and waking the rest of the crew out of stasis. The crew come to terms with where they are and after receiving a distress signal from a nearby planet they decide to take a detour to investigate. Needless to say this is an Alien film and it isn't long before things start to go horribly wrong.

It really is an impressive improvement on Prometheus, Scott has returned to a lot of the leaner and intense fear of the earlier films, the slow build of dread the moment they land on this planet escalating to a gloriously violent climax to the first act is peak Scott, a director that people forget that when he operates in his best form, there are genuinely few around as good as him.

It's at the end of that first act where the film completely flips with the re-introduction of Fassbender's android from Prometheus, David. David has been living on this planet for a while and although he seems pleasant to the crew at first, something has changed in him and too much time in his company becomes deeply uncomfortable. It essentially becomes Fassbender's film, and what follows is a series of bizarre, uncomfortable and creepy scenes featuring David talking about life and creation and engaging in conversation with his newer self Walter, playing flute and even kissing. What's amazing about this section of the film is how fascinatingly compelling these scenes are, Fassbender is absolutely extraordinary as the deranged David playing off an equally good performance from himself as Walter. The film doesn't stay in that mode forever, David has been working on something, and that something provides a descent into a traditional gory alien showdown.

There are problems in how Scott approaches this film, the beginning is Alien the middle is Prometheus and the end is the mutated alien offspring of both of them. Whats great is how well those aspects work individually, but when put together there is some tonal jarring that becomes noticeable, its a credit to the film that they work well enough on their own that the jarring never completely compromises the film. Much has been commented about how the crew make some of the stupidest decisions ever, but in the context of the film they make sense, the crew are all paired into couples and its an interesting spin in how this affects their judgement. Also as people operating under intense fear and panic their judgement isn't always going to be at optimum levels, they're also going to have no idea not to look into a facehugger pod, because guess what? These characters don't exist in a world where they have seen the original Alien film, of course you'd be curious.

It is absolutely bewildering to think where this might go next, the ending of this outing could take whatever is next in a very interesting direction. Lord knows how this links up, if it does at all, with Alien, but how amazing it is to see a director like Ridley Scott at his age just turning up and making the films he want's to make, and so long as they have lots of Michael Fassbender in they will always be worth watching.

(High 4 Stars)