


The consensus seems to be that Covenant is better than Prometheus but falls short of the original Alien. Undeniably, that spook house gorilla has its distinctive, addictive history, having been inspired by It, The Terror from Beyond Space, ‘s Planet of the Vampires, and ‘s Dark Star. As is well known, Scott upped the ante of anxiety by not allowing the cast to read the entire Alien script ahead of time. That tension spilled over, making a celluloid model so formidable that it merely inspired imitations.

With Prometheus, Scott escaped the doldrums of vapid ritual and crafted a film so original, so divisive, it became almost a standalone that no one would dare emulate. Although the rampaging rapist xenomorph was nowhere to be seen, Noomi Rapace’s Elizabeth Shaw still manages to be impregnated with something, making for a nail-biting race against birth. Behind it all is ‘s bewitchingly enigmatic David, the most compelling cinematic android since Rutger Hauer’s Roy in Blade Runner and ‘s “Gigolo Joe” in A.I.. Finally, Alien was exciting and fresh again.


Covenant takes place a decade after Prometheus. Briefly, we are introduced to David’s awakening when he chooses his name, after being prompted by creator Peter Weyland (). He settles on David, inspired by Michelangelo’s famous sculpture of the mythological Hebrew shepherd. Later, David plays Wagner’s “Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla” from “Rheingold.” Dullards have slapped these vignettes with “highbrow” labels; unfortunately, it says something when we consider such cultural prerequisites to be elitist. Scott is hardly doing Star Trek here; name dropping “classical” art. Rather, the references serve a thematic purpose, as much as David’s continuing obsession with Peter O’Toole’s portrayal of T.E. Lawrence. Shortly afterwards, we meet Walter, a later, loyal, and ultimately more edifyingly patristic variation of David. Walter mans the spaceship Covenant, taking 2,000 colonists, in cryogenic states, to a distant new home. An exploding star awakens the base crew and unfortunately fries its captain (James Franco), leaving behind traumatized widow, Daniels () and incompetent second-in command Oram (). Many of the crew are married couples, foreshadowing much in the way of self-fulfilling Freudian fears and tragedy. Crewman Tennessee (Danny McBride) picks up a cryptic broadcast of a woman singing John Denver’s “Take Me Home Country Roads” from a nearby planet. Deciding that the inviting beacon may be coming from a closer planet more hospitable to colonize, the Covenant changes course. A flight enthusiast, the late Denver might have appreciated his song floating through space, but he was also a troubled soul whose recklessness resulted in a fatal crash. Eden this ain’t.

Daniels protests Oram’s decision to investigate the planet. Being a religious fanatic, and feeling she compares him unfavorably to her late husband, Oram plays the victim card and proceeds anyway. A skeleton crew remains on the Covenant while on the planet the remaining party discover Shaw’s crashed ship. Soon,spores infect two crew members, wrecking havoc. After several deaths, the crew discovers David, looking a bit like a long-haired, nomadic T.E. Lawrence, who has now taken it upon himself to fulfill the apocalypse of the Engineers. Brutally, Scott has no qualms about producing widows and widowers and dispatches both in one memorably unsettling shower scene. David leads survivors to the stony, desolate city of the Engineers, who are all now dead, along with Shaw. Oram is among those easily manipulated, and Scott revisits themes of divine punishment and shattered sanctuaries (Prometheus, the underrated The Counselor, the failed Exodus, and the acclaimed The Martian). He plays biblical camp with David’s homoerotic, narcissistic, sublime seduction of Walter. David mantles contradictory roles of God, King, Engineer, Dr. Frankenstein, and a Devil who, like Frankenstein’s monster, asks for a little sympathy—and gets it—on his way to creating the xenomorphs, who will rid him of his own fragile creators.

The editing (Pietro Scalia) is unquestionably idiosyncratic , but mostly works until the final vignette, which falters, but not to the point of substantial damage. Scott revels in sci-fi pulp mythology, and crafts it here in a different vein than he did Prometheus. Like all good myths, he intertwines parable, folklore, fantasy, and a sliver of historicity with such relished grandeur that Alien: Covenant is a film demanding to be revisited.


  1. I don’t know…this is an awfully generous review. Perhaps these new Scott movies made a fatal flaw in making the story about the replicants, despite Michael Fassbender’s great performance in both movies. What exactly does Katherine Waterson have to do in this movie? Oddly, the brief scenes in Alien and Aliens allotted to people meant to be xenomorph dinner in Alien and Aliens seem like actual characters compared to the crew here. And Danny McBride seems hopelessly out of place!

    But the biggest flaw of both movies is just the enormous plot holes and the complete arbitrariness of the engineer black liquid – it still hasn’t been explained in any practical way that I or any of my friends can decipher .

  2. Alfred liked this film a lot more than me. I think it’s one of the worst of the Aliens franchise. He talks about other great directors “producing what amounted to rudimentary, even fatigued sketches of previous wonders”, but I’d argue that that is exactly what Alien Covenant is. It doesn’t reconfigure the original Alien films so much as add unnecessary backstory that lessens the originals, takes away their mystery (which makes them less scary) and in places seems to overwrite them (I don’t see how the setup of the first film, where Alien eggs are found in Engineer spaceships can now make sense).

    Cameron’s Aliens I would champion any day as a film which truly does reconfigure the original: taking the horror film setup and expanding it to form the basis of an action film that takes elements from war and siege films but played out on a more grandiose scale in a sci-fi gothic universe; and taking the themes of tokophobia from the original and contrasting them with themes of motherhood.

    By contrast, Alien Covenant takes elements from Alien, Aliens and Prometheus and to tell a story with themes of creation, fatherhood, and rebellion against against God. Themes that were tackled much more effectively in Scott’s Blade Runner (from which this also borrows) and Frankenstein. Along with that, the clumsy dialogue, plot holes, bland non-android characters and telegraphed plot twists result in a film I don’t want to revisit and one which seems to move the Alien franchise further into a rabbit-warren of backstory and explanation.

  3. Among its strengths-for me- was its lack of practicality and ambitiously unanswered questions, but perhaps being in the minority here, I do think “Prometheus” was a more fully satisfying film.
    Still, whatever flaws one may locate in “covenant,” we may think those minimal after seeing “The Mummy,” which has to be one of the most dreadful movies I have seen in a very long time and, hell, I even revisited “Vampire Hookers” a few weeks ago.
    Upcoming Monday-her royal DC highness.

  4. Alfred, when you say that it’s better than “The Mummy”, then it should be obvious that your position is not strong. I liked “Prometheus”, and I really wanted to like “Covenant”, but there was just too much stupid Hollywood bullshit standing in my way. How many bullshits? Let’s count them.

    1. A crew of supposedly highly-trained elite professionals making inexplicably dumb decisions – not once, but over and over. I wouldn’t hire these schmucks to pilot a canoe.

    2. A complicated, CGI-enhanced Big Battle On Top Of A Flying Platform that does absolutely nothing for the plot.

    3. The “big twist” at the end that you can see coming from a mile away.

    4. Hiring a fine actor like Demian Bichir and giving him absolutely nothing to do.

    5. But the shower scene is just a fucking insult. A pseudo-clever nod to Hitchcock that comes off looking like every horrible teenage slasher flick from the 80s.

    And the thing is, all this stuff is only bugging me because this had the potential to be a much better movie. “Alien vs Predator” set its goals low, and achieved the hell out of them. “Covenant” set its goals high, and missed. I’d rather watch “Alien vs Predator”.

    1. Mike B, my comparative comment was clearly tongue-in-cheek and hardly taking a serious position , or even mantling the perspective that it merits a position status. As for people making stupid decisions, even professionally trained people, well that’s been a tradition since the first 1979 film and, I don’t know if you read the daily news, but it’s astute regarding human nature.

      I state what I see are the film’s flaws and strengths, don’t desire anything approaching realism in science fiction, thought it overall a lesser entry than Prometheus, but in the end, still refreshingly ambitious virtuoso filmmaking and I dig the dissonant riff on Psycho.

      That said, for a further opinion, which was recently sent me:

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