The latest instalment in the long running Alien franchise, from director Ridley Scott is a wildly uneven affair. Set 10 years after the events shown in Prometheus and about 20 years before the original Alien, it follows the fortunes of the crew of The Covenant travelling on a colonisation mission.
Due to a technical fault, the crew are brought out of stasis 7 years early. They discover what seems to be a habitable planet nearby and decide to land and explore it. The crew includes Captain Oram (Billy Crudup), his second in command, Daniels (Katherine Waterston) and pilot Tennessee (Danny McBride). Michael Fassbender plays the synthetic called Walter, and also reprises his role of David from the previous film.
Like Prometheus there is enough to enjoy in Alien Covenant to make it worthwhile seeing, especially on the big screen. Visually it is stunning, both the space craft and the planet are well realised and the creatures themselves are as scary as ever. I enjoyed the early scenes on the spaceship and there is a climatic fight scene that is brilliantly shot.
However, also like Prometheus, there are some major flaws. Firstly, there is a painful and boring prologue that adds nothing to the story. Once the crew are on the planet and hide out in a strange stone structure, the film completely runs out of steam. There are far too many scenes of David pontificating about poetry, spirituality and general pseudo intellectual claptrap and the crew all make stupid decisions over and over again.
These include exploring a completely unknown planet without wearing any sort of protective clothing, prodding around the vegetation without any care, blindly following David into a scary building and the old horror movie trope of splitting up to enable them to be picked off one-by-one. I don’t know how they were selected for the mission, but Daniels and Tennessee aside, they are totally unsuited for it.
Of the cast, McBride was surprisingly good but Waterston is the stand out. After impressing in small roles in Night Moves, Inherent Vice, and Steve Jobs, she shows she can comfortably carry a large franchise movie, invoking the spirit of Ripley as she does.
Rating: 6.5 out of 10