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Alien: Covenant

Alien: Covenant Sees Ridley Scott’s Series (Almost) Return to its Ferocious Best

  • Billy CrudupKatherine Waterston...
  • HorrorScience Fiction
  • Ridley Scott
reviewed by
Marija Djurovic
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Alien: Covenant Sees Ridley Scott’s Series (Almost) Return to its Ferocious Best

Attempting to expand on the Alien mythology and answer some of the questions left behind by 2012’s Prometheus, Ridley Scott is back in the driving seat for Alien: Covenant: a cleverly-written and a powerfully-executed space thriller that, although a little derivative in structure and narrative, still manages to offer up plenty of thrills.

Set ten years after the events of Prometheus and around seventeen years before the original Alien, the story follows the crew of the ‘Covenant’; a colony ship with thousands of passengers in an induced sleep heading out to a remote planet which they hope they will call their new home. However, on their way, the ship is hit by a massive solar flare which kills numerous people on board. Determined to minimise the damage and proceed with their plan, the members of the ship’s crew, including first mate Oram (Crudup), pilot Tennessee (McBride), synthetic Walter (Fassbender) and the Captain’s wife, Daniels (Waterston), are now faced with the challenge of ensuring that the rest of their journey goes without a glitch.

However, their initial plans soon change when their ship picks up a transmission from a nearby planet – one that is much closer than the one they intended to go to. This new planet appears to have everything they need for a human colonisation and so the crew decides to investigate the habitat further. However, it doesn’t take long for the crew to discover that there is something evil lurking in the background in the form of a blood-thirsty Xenomorphs which is ready to pick his way through crew members one by one.

Scripted by John Logan and Dante Harper, questions of faith, artificial intelligence and man’s creators  is once again apparent throughout the story and while it never really answers ay of the big questions, the journey and the theories offered are interesting enough to ponder over nonetheless. Coming across as a cross-between a classic horror-monster-slasher flick and a dark philosophical sci-fi drama, Covenant is more solid in structure than its talky predecessor. However, although thrilling in terms of action, violence and gore, the film is also guilty of recycling most of Alien’s material and plot beats which ultimately puts something of a dampener on the progress of this strand of prequels.

The performances as a whole are all relatively solid; Waterston, whose Daniels character is essentially a variation of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley,  is convincing enough and watching her transition into an ass-kicking rebel is extremely fun to witness. However, aside from a few other relatively entertaining performances, it’s Fassbender who gets most screen time and steals the show.

Visually striking and meticulously put together, Alien: Covenant is definitely a movie for the big screen. Despite recycling various elements of the series without fully evolving them, the film is thrilling, moving and at times terrifying.

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Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), Prometheus (2012), 

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This movie marks 20 years, since Alien Resurrection (1997), that the original Xenomorphs will be seen exclusively in an Alien film.

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