The flicks
Those ugly dome heads are back to wipe the smile off their space in ALIEN: COVENANT, while I AM HEATH LEDGER shows how much the star is missed, but misses much of his story
ALIEN: COVENANT (MA15+)
Director: Ridley Scott ( Blade Runner) Starring: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Jussie Smollett, Callie Hernandez. Rating: ON the verge of turning 80, director Ridley Scott has signalled his intention to end his career with a trilogy of Alien pictures. Which is great news for the millions of fans the seminal sci-fi horror franchise has accumulated since the late 1970s.
The project has started rolling in fine style with Alien: Covenant, a clinically assured deepspace chiller. Scott deftly combines the obligatory chest-bursting gore of the classic Alien movies with the mind-expanding philosophical questing of 2012’s divisive demiprequel Prometheus. That tricky balance between body count and brain food is very sweetly struck indeed.
A desolate, dread-magnetising story picks up a decade after the events of Prometheus. The colonist ship Covenant is several years into a journey to the distant planet of Origae-6.
On board are 2000 settlers frozen deep into cryo-sleep, and also a sizeable number of human embryos to guarantee an ongoing population supply at what will be a vital new home for all mankind.
Only one Covenant crew member remains awake to make sure the spaceship stays on its correct course: Walter (Michael Fassbender), an enhanced later model of David, the ‘synthetic’ human Fassbender played in Prometheus.
A galactic pulse wave strikes the Covenant and causes some serious damage, necessitating the immediate awakening of its entire crew. Not everyone makes it out of their sleep pods alive, and a new captain must be appointed.
The next in line for leadership is Oram (Billy Crudup), not the most popular choice among his peers (an intriguingly high percentage of which are married couples).
The new captain’s first significant move is to make an unscheduled exploratory pit stop on a planet that appears to be a spectacularly habitable match for their needs. Spoiler alert: it is not. The only voice of dissent against the change of plans is Daniels (Katherine Waterston), a strong-willed officer who has just lost her husband. Daniels, in the grand Alien tradition of drawing fiercely female last lines of defence, is destined to become a Ripley-like figure once the climate turns from tense to terrifying to terminal at rapidfire speed.
While there is a pronounced air of predictability to the high level of carnage fated to transpire in Alien: Covenant, the how, where and why of each compulsory culling of the crew are very shrewdly calibrated by Scott.
Most importantly, the intricate physical design and mercurial psychological makeup of the xenomorphs — those monsters always popping in and out of bodies at will — are meshed together here with great menace.
While not in the same league as the iconic first two Alien outings, Covenant marks a solid return (and promising repositioning) for the long-running saga.