Alien: Covenant Gets Psychosexual In a Bloody, Baroque, Deeply Weird Story

The team consists of fearless and bold voyagers from Earth enroute to a new home with two thousand sleeping colonists and frozen embryos onboard the ship aiming to become the Adam and Eves of the new world.

This video does double duty as a prologue to Covenant and an epilogue to Prometheus, featuring its protagonist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and her last companion, the android David (Michael Fassbender).

The crew is revived from hibernation by an accident after their colony ship, The Covenant, was hit by a neutrino burst. Things go south instantly, as the ship is struck by a solar blast, killing its captain. Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, and Danny McBride all stand out and shine on their own, but there are ten other crew members, none of whom make any real impact except as fodder.

When a faint transmission from an apparently habitable planet presents an opportunity to possibly end the mission seven years earlier than planned, Oram makes the decision to divert their course and explore this other planet. Despite everything that they’ve been saying in press releases, promotional materials and interviews, Alien: Covenant is not a prequel to Alien, not really.

Now Ridley Scott is back with Alien: Covenant attempting to right the wrongs of Prometheus and actually do what he said he was going to do, which was bring the xenomorphs back to the big screen. Whatever his reason for promoting Prometheus in that way, at least it’s fully acknowledged this time. A number of scenes featured in some of the trailers were specifically shot for marketing purposes and don’t appear in the final cut of the film.

In the late 1970s, Hollywood films were seeing the resurgence of a genre that since long had lost its sheen – science fiction. “It’s so interesting what he’s proposing and where he’s taking that character”.

Daniels and Ripley are very much women who influence writers to create strong, admirable female heroines. It’s imperative the mothership rescue them quickly as soon there will be no one left to save.

“It’s not just that she’s tough in the movie, but she emerges from the crew”, she says. I really liked that you couldn’t tell if Theron was playing human or android. You get to know the rest of the crew, but not almost enough to care deeply when the deaths begin. Not, however, with sequels-there are only so many ways one can blow an indestructible creature out of an airlock, and Scott flushed his alien down the interstellar drainpipe during the Carter administration. “I’d love to explore where the hell [Elizabeth] goes next and what does she do when she gets there because if it is paradise, paradise can not be what you think it is”.

The movie’s recasting angered fans, particularly in the case of the title character’s older brother, with Charlie Wright subbing for Devon Bostick prompting the hashtag #NotMyRodrick to trend on social media. This film answers that question, but the next two movies should give us more of the how and why with surprising twists and turns along the way.

The impact of the Alien series on mainstream filmmaking is so enormous that, for a second, I forgot that Alien: Covenant was part of the Alien series.

The film does score well when it comes to the frights. Ridley Scott’s original master piece is an wonderful slow burn horror film. Whenever the focus is on the Alien, everything’s on point. That opinion changes when they discover dark and terrible truths about the planet, the life organisms on it, and the real intentions of the entity who created the message that brought them to this world. Covenant, as with Prometheus before it, is all about creation and, boy, is that creation gross.