Deep-space terror at its best
Question arises whether it’s science-fiction or horror
(10) ALIEN: COVENANT. Directed by: Ridley Scott. Starring: Katherine Waterston, Michael Fassbender, Danny McBride, Billy Crudup, Demián Bichir, Carmen Ejogo. Reviewed by: 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 wasn’t meant as a compliment.
But it’s now often cited as a pithy summation of what makes the film great: lots of ominous creeping and creaking down corridors, while the interplanetary equivalent of a silverback gorilla on heat dribbles down the heroine’s neck.
In the same sense, Scott’s Alien: Covenant is a mad scientist film – arguably, one of the maddest.
It’s grandiose, exhilarating, vertiginously cynical and symphonically perverse, and about a million miles from the crowd-pleasing Alien retread Twentieth Century Fox have presumably been begging the 79-year-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 writhe-and-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 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.
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: it’s safe to say that if you miss one Milton or Byron reference, another will rumble past in a minute.)
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 in the field.
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, but who’s far from the Ellen Ripley stand-in the posters suggest, and Tennessee (Danny McBride), the brashly convivial chief pilot.
Is the film science-fiction or horror?
The fundamental difference between the 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 physically sick.
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 Telegraph