Alien: Covenant (2017)

When Ridley Scott returned to the Alien universe with Prometheus back in 2012, audiences were split pretty sharply between those who welcomed a more philosophical, question-driven science fiction story and those who just wanted the xenomorphs back. Alien: Covenant (2017) arrived as a direct sequel to that film, and also a conscious attempt to reconnect with the horror roots of the original 1979 film Scott directed. The colony ship Covenant is carrying thousands of sleeping settlers and embryos to a distant planet when the crew picks up a mysterious signal and diverts course, landing on a world that appears welcoming but turns out to be anything but. It is a premise that, on paper at least, tries to thread a needle between two quite different films and two quite different sets of audience expectations.

Scott, whose career has ranged from intimate character studies to large-scale historical epics (you can read the blog's thoughts on his 2000 Roman epic Gladiator and his 2001 war film Black Hawk Down elsewhere on the site), produced the film through his own Scott Free Productions alongside the long-running Brandywine Productions, with 20th Century Fox distributing. At 122 minutes it sits at a fairly standard blockbuster runtime, and visually it carries the polished but unremarkable sheen of a major studio science fiction production, with location shooting in New Zealand lending the planet sequences a genuine sense of scale. The screenplay is credited to John Logan and Dante Harper, working from a story by Jack Paglen and Michael Green, and picks up the threads left dangling by Prometheus while also engineering several more traditional creature sequences.

The cast is a mix of recognisable faces and working character actors. Katherine Waterston takes the lead as Daniels, with Billy Crudup, Danny McBride (something of a casting surprise, though he plays it straight) and Demián Bichir among the crew. The real centre of gravity, though, is Michael Fassbender, who appears in a dual role carrying over from Prometheus as the android David, and introducing a new synthetic character, Walter. Fassbender has always had a particular talent for playing characters with something slightly removed or controlled about them, something that has served him well across a range of films, and the dual performance here is by most accounts the element that reviewers tend to single out first.

Just... average. It’s like Ridley Scott couldn’t decide if he wanted to continue Prometheus or reboot Alien, and instead we got this muddled middle-ground of both. There are moments of intrigue, Michael Fassbender is by far the standout, especially when he’s playing off himself, but the rest is meh. The horror beats feel recycled, the characters are thinly written, and despite some solid visuals, it just doesn’t have the suspense or originality to stand out. The mythology stuff gets a bit overcooked too, and honestly, I found myself checking out by the final act. Not the worst in the franchise, but a far cry from the heights it could have reached. Just about lands a pass mark... just.

For me, that sums it up about right. Fassbender genuinely earns his praise here, and the scenes where the two synthetics share the screen are the closest the film gets to doing something genuinely interesting with its ideas about creation and identity. But good as he is, one standout performance cannot carry a script that seems uncertain about what kind of film it wants to be. The horror sequences feel like they are there to reassure one group of viewers while the mythology keeps nudging another, and neither thread gets quite enough room to breathe. There is a version of this story that could have been something, and you can see the outline of it flickering through the murkier moments. As it stands, though, it is the cinematic equivalent of a decent meal that leaves you a bit hungry on the way home.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2017  | Watched: 2025-04-10

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Alien: Covenant (2017) on YouTube

Where to watch

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Ridley Scott: Black Hawk Down (2001) · Gladiator (2000) · Prometheus (2012) · Alien (1979)
More with Michael Fassbender: Assassin's Creed (2016) · X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) · X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) · X-Men: First Class (2011)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
More science fiction: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Fantastic Planet (1973) · Nightmare City (1980) · The Long Walk (2025)