Alien: Covenant offers more than you might expect

The crew of the good ship Covenant

One of the most interesting things about the futuristic world set up in Alien: Covenant is that the Alien movie franchise has never existed, otherwise the cast wouldn’t do half the stuff they do. Ridley Scott’s original Alien (1979) reinvented the old dark house movie in space in the process transforming the formula into the ‘old dark spaceship’ genre.

Alien: Covenant is a handsomely mounted excursion into old dark spaceship territory. Everything you expect to happen does happen as the crew of the freighter Covenant, carrying 2000 souls to a new future somewhere in the galaxy, run into trouble. Repairs are made, crew members are lost, and then they pick up what appears to be a phantom distress call. Plainly the 1979 movie does not exist anywhere in this universe.

They answer the call and discover a seemingly perfectly habitable planet in a place where no such body should exist. They have barely arrived when they split up into small groups, poke around in dark, creepy caverns and generally expose themselves to everything that they shouldn’t including some especially savage xenomorphs, as we have come to call the real stars of the Alien franchise. These are new and varied forms but all equally voracious. What they are and how they came to be here are questions for another day as the movie quickly descends into a frantic bid to escape with their lives.

So far, so good. This is a perfectly serviceable genre movie. One of the joys of genre however is what you are allowed to do with the subtext. As long as you deliver all of the generic tropes on the surface, you can explore all sorts of things in the background. Neil Blomkamp did it with District 9 (2009), a sci-fi film about apartheid, while Frank Darabont did it with The Mist (2009), a creature feature about religious fundamentalism, and now Ridley Scott gives us an Alien movie about the philosophical battle of science versus faith.

Alien: Covenant isn’t really an Alien film, it’s a Prometheus film and continues some of the notions raised in that 2012 film. The human cast of this film, gamely led by Katherine Waterston in sub-Ripley mode, are eminently disposable. The real star of the film, and the character in which, for me, the real theme of the film resides, is Michael Fassbender reprising his role from Prometheus as the synthetic custodian of the mission.

Fassbender wanders through the film quoting Shelley and doing a fair impression of Ernest Thesiger’s Doctor Pretorius from Bride of Frankenstein (1935). This is not really a monster movie, Alien: Covenant is a 21^st century movie masquerading as a 19^th century Gothic novel.

Through Fassbender the film examines some ethical issues about the nature of life and creation, and – by extension – the nature of God. This might be more than the audience bargained for but it doesn’t matter, if you choose to ignore it you can sit back and enjoy your old dark spaceship flick.

As in all of Ridley Scott’s movies Alien: Covenant is an incredibly well made film. The production design is magnificent and the sound design is especially impressive. But what lingered longest for me were the ideas that Scott is trying to deal with and they led to Alien: Covenant being a much more interesting film than I anticipated.