Alien: Covenant

(Ridley Scott/2017/USA)

The second of Ridley Scott’s prequels to the Alien series following on from 2012’s Prometheus, Alien: Covenant returns to more familiar territory with a crew on a large spaceship responding to a signal on a strange planet and getting eviscerated by the evil incarnate that is the Xenomorph Alien we‘ve come to know and love. Many people felt let down by Prometheus, I wasn’t one of them, but it did exactly what it set out to do and stands as a lyrical starting point to the entire franchise. Covenant attempts to blend that lyricism into the well established deep space horror genre and in the main it succeeds. There’s a plucky female hero, squirm inducing bodily eruptions, face huggers, fights involving industrial machinery and it’s over but it’s not over twists to the end. All the tropes established in the original movies are here but with little kinks as Scott riffs on familiar routines. For example instead of chest bursting baby aliens they come out through the spine or there’s the Xenomorph tail sliding from the shadows into the midst of a sex scene. Some may find this rehashing tedious but if the general reaction to Prometheus was negative due to it not playing to expectations Scott can hardly be blamed for at least trying to satisfy those expectations in a playful way this time round. I think at this stage of milking the cow the cream is long gone and it’s down to personal taste whether you want to drink the milk or not. But back to the lyricism, it’s not just typical Alien suspense and action here. Scott is establishing a creation myth and he uses passages of dialogue to touch on classical reference points like Ozymandis, Wagner’s Ring Cycle and so on. This creates a mood suited to the scale of what’s going on. The original series was episodic but these prequels work as a unified sequence. In David, the rogue android whose sentience has catapulted him into a genocidal superiority complex, we have an evolving villain that binds the prequels with his story arc. So, is Alien: Covenant as good as Alien or Aliens? No. Is it as good as or better than the third and fourth instalments? Yes. Is it worthy of being a prequel to such a classic movie franchise? Definitely and I for one can’t wait to see the next chapter of the story.

(3/5)