Alien prequel bursts with ghoulish vitality
Alien: Covenant 15 cert, 121 min
Dir Ridley Scott
Starring Katherine Waterston, Michael Fassbender, Danny Mcbride, Billy Crudup, Demián Bichir, Carmen Ejogo
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 entitled “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: lots of 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 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 20th Century Fox have presumably been begging the 79-year-old director to make. It certainly has its Alienlike 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 unfairly scorned film comes lurching into focus here, with what feels like a maniacal “this’ll show ’em” glint.
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-allmen 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: 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 crewmates 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.
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 mountain-scape where every lake seems to mirror heaven itself. “Oh ye of little faith,” Oram beams.
From the moment on the initial reconnaissance mission that one crew member announces they need to relieve themselves and a colleague idly shoots back “Don’t be long”, you know this bunch are dead meat. But after an initial Jurassic Park-like 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. (The screenplay, which I halfexpected to be credited to Mr and Mrs Shelley, is by John Logan, co-writer of Skyfall and Scott’s Gladiator, and Dante Harper.)
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. This 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 probably 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.