Little fear is evoked in tiresome retread
ALIEN: COVENANT (15, 122 mins)
IF RIDLEY Scott’s seminal 1979 sci-fi horror Alien and the sequels it spawned teach us anything, it’s that in the inky void of space, everyone can hear your bloodcurdling screams.
Alien: Covenant confirms another disheartening fact – every time the thrice Oscar-nominated director revisits his beautifully stylised universe, he tarnishes the golden lustre of the original film.
Set approximately 10 years after the events of 2012 prequel Prometheus, this battle royale between humanity and cinema’s most perfect killing machine sees Scott and his vast array of technical wizards spend two hours committing an act of plodding recreation.
Covenant labours in the shadow of earlier films and has been crudely bolted together by screenwriters John Logan and Dante Harper with derivative action set-pieces that give birth to a new hybrid alien nasty – the neomorph – with translucent milky skin and a gait more akin to humans.
As one character aptly puts it: “a dying species, grasping for resurrection”.
The action initially unfolds on the space vessel Covenant, which is bound for a remote planet with 15 crew and 2,000 colonists in cryogenic stasis.
Synthetic android Walter (Michael Fassbender) keeps watch until a neutrino burst from a star prematurely wakes the crew, including devoutly religious first mate Christopher Oram (Billy Crudup), his biologist wife Karine (Carmen Ejogo), chief pilot Tennessee (Danny McBride), security chief Lope (Demian Bichir) and the captain’s plucky wife Daniels (Katherine Waterston).
They stumble on a distress signal from a nearby planet that sensors reveal would make an idyllic new home, and a landing party prepares to investigate.
Alien: Covenant joins the dots to the original trilogy with echoes of Sigourney Weaver’s exploits as Ripley, meekly mimicked here by Waterston.
Jump-out-of-your-seat scares have been eradicated from the film’s DNA and the script’s sleight of hand is clumsy.
In the year 2104, characters are evidently none the wiser about the rules of surviving a horror film – don’t have sex, don’t wander off alone and don’t assume the killer is dead – and sign their death warrants with hilarious predictability.