Starring: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Danny McBride

Directed by Ridley Scott

20th Century Fox, out May 12 (UK), May 19 (US)

The crew of USCSS colony ship Covenant take an unexpected detour in their journey, alighting on an apparently previously uncharted paradise world which appears perfect for their requirements. However, they swiftly realise that all is not as idyllic as it seems.

Picking up ten years after the events of the divisive Prometheus, this film represents something of a balancing act, feeling as though it is attempting to knit the disparate threads and tone of that previous movie with the wider and more accepted Alien franchise.

The opening scene seems to serve mainly as a reminder of certain characters from Prometheus, before we join Walter (Fassbender as a new synthetic sharing David’s face) as he wanders around the empty halls and decks of the pleasingly chunky and solid Covenant. Between the aesthetics and the return of ship’s computer Mother, it all feels reassuringly ‘in-universe’, and the action sequence it builds to is tense, well executed and superbly acted.

Then things slow down. For about the next hour or so, in fact. We have a deliberately paced investigation of the crew’s adaptation to a new situation from various angles. We are introduced to key concepts such as the fact that the crew itself is made up of married couples (including a gay couple who – depending on your point of view – are either pleasingly normalised or simply tacked on as afterthought: your mileage may vary). However, the issue is that although we do get to spend time with most of the characters to some extent or other, we don’t really learn much of note about them beyond basic rote characteristics – the joker, the man of faith, the engineer etc. Nothing is given to us that makes us know – or more importantly care – about the people on the screen.

As a side note, the other issue with these character build-ups is that it is quite clear – from screen time and specifics – which characters are going to make it to the end very early on. Telegraphing is a big issue in this film, of which more later, but in this sense, the tension that should accompany an Alien film – as in who exactly will make it out alive – is robbed very early on.

What this means is that when things finally start moving more than an hour in, when the deaths start happening, it’s difficult to care too much from the point of view of who is dying because we don’t know or empathise enough with any of the characters for their deaths to have impact. This means that the movie must perforce rely on the way in which the deaths occur to try to get that impact, and unfortunately here too, the movie is lacking.

It’s not just the 15 certificate holding it back either – the deaths themselves just tend towards the mundane by the standards of the series. Nothing here compares to the horror and brutality of Kane’s death on the Nostromo, nor the pant-wetting terror of Lambert’s final moments, the shock of the demise of any of the marines on LV-426 or even the snatching of Andrews from the roofspace on Fury 161. It’s all the sort of standard schlock flick fare you’d expect to see in a 1990s teen slasher movie, and when you combine it with characters who are literally walking meat sacks who may as well have countdown timers above their heads, it just doesn’t work the way that it should.

Even the ‘jump-scare’ is beyond this film because of the previously mentioned telegraphing. At times, the movie almost plays as a parody of itself and the genre – you know as soon as someone announces loudly that they are going off on their own somewhere that they are going to die, and when they do, you are underwhelmed by the method of execution and the fact that you didn’t really know or care about them anyway.

But still the movie ploughs on, going through a ticklist of greatest hits of the franchise, each one reminding you that somewhere out there, there are better examples of all this being done, back when it was original. Even the ending, which had the potential to be supremely unsettling and chilling, falls flat because it is so obviously flagged to the viewer a good twenty-five minutes previously.

It’s frustrating because there are decent elements in there. Waterston – fresh off her turn in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them –  is a charming, likeable lead, though she ends up wasted through lack of serious character development beyond ‘scrappy, capable, empathetic’. McBride does what he can, but it speaks volumes that his main distinguishing feature is the cowboy hat that he wears. Fassbender juggles two different characters by way of pitching for an American accent which always feels a little forced for one and reprising his English Butler voice for the other. The issue is, no real clear motivation is ever given for either character, and their interactions feel as if they are loaded with the tension and promise from another story altogether as a result. One scene in particular between the two elicited roars of laughter from the audience that I’m not entirely certain the director was shooting for (though it’s difficult to see how an entire film crew could have missed the potential) and another seems to be there mainly to satisfy the army of Alien slash fiction writers you just know is out there somewhere on the internet.

Aesthetically, the movie nails the universe it’s set in, all functional and chunky spacesuits, lived-in spaceships and rumpled uniforms. Objects and vehicles have heft and weight, and the set design is excellent from the dark corridors of the Covenant to the creepy plains of the planet and the eerie abandoned city thereon. It also does exactly what you expect an Alien movie to do, lining up a bunch of people to get horribly murdered by a deadly xenomorph and lacing it through with explosive set-pieces and a very human level of bantering and bickering. Unfortunately it does it all in ways that feel at once familiar and underdone, as if the director just thinks that by shorthand referring the audience to the previous glory days of the franchise, he doesn’t have to spend too much time on actually recreating them.

Verdict: Clunky, awkward and all-too-familiar. Alien: Covenant feels like too many compromises were made between a sequel for Prometheus and a prequel to the wider Alien franchise. The result is a disappointing halfway house which fails to do very well at either, while telegraphing every ‘surprise’ so blatantly that it is robbed of almost all momentum. 4/10

Greg D. Smith