Director Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’ follow-up creates terror on a towering scale, though the full implications of the final sequence are so purely horrific that I left the cinema feeling physically sick, writes Robbie Collin

WRITING in 1980, the influential film critic Pauline Kael described Ridley Scott’s Alien as “a haunted-house-with-gorilla picture set in outer space”.

The line appeared at the end of a 10-page diatribe titled “Why are movies so bad?”, and wasn’t meant as a compliment. But it’s now often cited as a pithy summation of what makes the film great: ominous creeping and creaking down corridors, while the interplanetary equivalent of a silverback on heat dribbles down the heroine’s neck.

In the same sense Scott’s Alien: Covenant , which opens in East London tomorrow, is a mad scientist film – arguably, one of the maddest.

It’s grandiose, exhilarating, vertiginously cynical and symphonically perverse, and around a million miles from the crowd-pleasing Alien retread Twentieth Century Fox have presumably been begging the 79year-old director to make.

It certainly has its Alien-like moments: this is a series that feeds off our subliminally churning fears of penetration, pregnancy and childbirth, and there are some birth trauma set-pieces here to rival John Hurt’s classic cafeteria-table writheand-pop, as well as a new-but-related and sickeningly effective strand of horror that plays on the sanctity of human foetuses.

But it’s also very much a sequel to Scott’s previous 2012 Alien “origin story” Prometheus – and every cryptic, half-explored creation metaphor from that unfairly scorned film comes lurching into focus here.

As in Prometheus, the story is quietly located in the run-up to Christmas – an early caption sets the start date as December 5, 2104 – although the particular heavenly arrival on the way doesn’t exactly turn out to be a goodwill-to-all-men kind of occasion. An eerie prologue reintroduces the android David (Michael Fassbender), one of Prometheus’s few survivors, whom we see talking to his creator Weyland (Guy Pearce) in flashback. Piero della Francesco’s Nativity hangs on the wall beside them, and David regards the painting quizzically: something about the notion that the most enduring gods are born rather than just invented seems to seep into his circuits. (This is the first of the film’s near-countless allusions to devotional and gothic art.)

From there, the story cuts to the Covenant itself, a colonist ship slicing through deepest space towards a habitable planet. Inexplicably, David seems to be a member of its skeleton crew – except this is actually Walter (Fassbender again), a newer, safer model whose programming has been stripped of the impulses to create and experiment that made David an unnerving wild card.

Other actors might strive to make an android character creepily unreadable, but Fassbender’s control of body language is so total, so supreme, that entire tracts of his work here – in both roles – can be read in two incompatible ways.

He doesn’t make you doubt the character, but yourself.

Walter’s human crew-mates include Daniels (Katherine Waterston), a cautious pragmatist with the film’s richest arc, and Tennessee (Danny McBride), the brashly convivial chief pilot.

It’s he who notices that a strange radio communication the ship picks up during a maintenance stop sounds oddly like John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads – and the ship’s devoutly Christian captain Oram (Billy Crudup) goes into three wise men mode, and suggests making the week-long detour to the celestial signal’s source, just in case what’s there turns out to be a more pleasant destination than their planned one.

They touch down on a lush, alpine mountainscape where every lake seems to mirror heaven itself.

From the moment on the initial reconnaissance mission that one crew member announces they need to relieve themselves and a colleague shoots back “Don’t be long,” you know this bunch are dead meat.

But after an initial Jurassic Parklike ambush – Jed Kurzel’s consistently electrifying score even weaves in some pensive flutework in the classic John Williams style – the film turns mythic, soaring off into a towering, sepulchral register that makes you feel smaller just watching it, and perhaps only Scott operating at the peak of his powers can reach.

Skirting spoilers, what the crew discover involves David, a dark acropolis with a horrible secret, and more Frankenstein and Ozymandias parallels than my pen could track.

Is it science-fiction or horror? The fundamental difference between those two genres has always lain in their attitude towards the unknown – the former creeps unbidden through the door that swings ajar, the latter bars it with the heaviest furniture to hand – which means it’s both, at least initially.

Though the full implications of its final sequence are so purely horrific that I left the cinema feeling (and I mean this in the best possible way) physically sick.

Clips in the trailers that had the greasy shine of fan-service feel in context like fresh approaches to resilient ideas. The tone of “the egg scene”, as we should call it, is very different to its 1979 equivalent, with its creeping dread replaced by a ghoulish elation that’s horribly appropriate to the parties involved.

To want more Alien after this – specifically, this ending – would be to want to see something very odd indeed. But Covenant leaves the mythos feeling riper and more vitalised than ever. The second instalment continues the team’s adventures as they unravel the mystery of Peter Quill’s true parentage. 10-12 PGL. Action/ Sci-Fi. Starring: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista. Director: James Gunn.

When a mysterious woman seduces Dom into the world of terrorism and a betrayal of those closest to him, the crew face trials that will test them as never before. 10-12 PGLV. Action/Adventure. Starring: Vin Diesel, Jason Statham, Dwayne Johnson. Director: F Gary Gray.

Desperate to pay the bills and come through for their loved ones, three lifelong pals risk it all by embarking on a daring bid to knock off the very bank that absconded with their money. 10-12 PGL. Crime/Comedy. Starring: Joey King, Morgan Freeman, Peter Serafinowicz. Director: Zach Braff.