Alien Covenant * *

Alien Covenant is not as bad as Alien Prometheus (not many films are) but it’s still a bit hopeless.

      We’re so used to the slimy little fella now he can no longer shock you, scare you, or amaze and disgust you with his spawning process.  He just is. And any  subsequent film about him is just more of the same. Counting this second "prequel" this is the sixth in the franchise now, and the director of the first Alien, Ridley Scott, is back in the director's seat. It looks like the script writers were happy to plunder the original script as they top and tail Covenant with virtually the same scenario.

Give us a kiss

      A crew on a commercial space ship wake up prematurely (one of  them is a robot) to do repair work. When working they receive signals from an unknown planet.  Some of the crew go check it out in a smaller exploratory craft.   Where they land  looks rather like New Zealand to me. But they always look like some part of Earth don’t they?  Desert or forest usually.  Hopefully one day someone is going to make a Sci Fi movie where everything is different- the sky, the vegetation and all the rest.  Anyway, after poking about they find a crashed horseshoe shaped spaceship.

      “Never seen anything like it” they say.  

       “We have” we reply, because like everything else so far it reminds us of the first Alien film.

      Then things turn very badly with Aliens popping up everywhere with their obligatory chest bursting grand entrance. Good fun but more of the same old.  

        Then “David” turns up. Ah, now we’re getting somewhere.

      “David” is alone on the planet and claims to be a survivor of the Prometheus crash. He’s not human. He's a robot simulant and looks just like the robot simulant who is part of the Covenant ship crew.

      David lives in a place that looks like an Asian temple. It has huge statues. It also has hundreds of dead bodies everywhere, but as they’re all carbonised  he doesn’t bother about cleaning them up. We are given the back story to this.

      As we get to know David we realise Alien Covenant is turning into one of those horror movies where folks seek shelter from the storm only to find their host is a psychopath.  I won’t spoil it for you by explaining how they get away, but there is a lot of action which isn't exactly nail-biting, especially as you’ve seen a rather similar escape in Alien 2.

     Then we’re back to mimicking the first Alien, with the Mother-ship and the stowaway alien, and the long eviction procedure by a sweaty girl in a tight underwear.

     Finally a bit of a twist to set us up for......(God forbid!) ......Aliens 7.