The Alien franchise has lived and died many times over the years. Currently, it’s in a particularly prolific era, with last year’s theatrical hit Alien: Romulus becoming the biggest entry in years and the hotly anticipated release of Alien: Earth, the series’ first TV series, from prestige adapter Noah Hawley. There’s even some sort of Alien connection teased in the trailer for Predator: Badlands. The xenomorphs are running wild thanks to their new queen (Disney owning Fox). And as it happens, the reason the Alien series needed a boost to begin with is occupying the HBO Max charts. Eight years ago, the theatrical release of Alien: Covenant more or less left the series for dead.
It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Covenant was the follow-up to the much-seen, if widely divisive, 2012 prequel Prometheus, which began a dark and spiritually questing origin story for the famous beasts, from original Alien director Ridley Scott. Covenant, with Alien back in the title, promised to evolve these proto-xenomorphs further, while also continuing the story of David (Michael Fassbender), the malevolent android whose experimentations caused the creatures to mutate into a more horrifying and familiar form. But a five-year gap, the mixed reception to Prometheus, and, yeah, probably the movie itself all caused Covenant to open softer than its predecessor and collapse faster. It ultimately grossed just $74 million in the U.S. In other words, it was roughly the equivalent of what similarly franchise-pausing Alien Resurrection did in 1997. But like almost every Alien movie, Covenant has enjoyed a robust afterlife. If you were among the many who skipped it in theaters, it’s now available to watch at even more convenience.
Why Watch Alien: Covenant Tonight?
Even if you don’t subscribe to my personal belief that just about any Alien movie is a good Alien movie (special exception for Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem), there’s a lot to like about Covenant. It picks up some time after Prometheus ended with android David and scientist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) flying off together in a spaceship, with an unrelated ship full of cryogenically frozen colonists diverted to another potentially habitable planet. This makes Prometheus more of an expanded backstory for the movie, rather than an absolutely required first installment; like many of the Alien sequels, this stands alone reasonably well as a pure monster movie with some cool sci-fi ideas.
Anyway, once landed, Daniels (Katherine Waterston) and the ship’s android Walter (also Fassbender), among others, discover a series of mutated, hostile species and the surviving android David. Billy Crudup and Danny McBride, among others, play other ship officers, meaning this is (to date) the only Alien movie featuring the guy who played Kenny Powers.
As if reacting to complaints that Prometheus was too woo-woo philosophical and overpopulated with unlikable and/or stupid characters, Alien: Covenant has plenty of creatures exacting gnarly kills upon the hapless humans. It also half-spitefully continues the xenomorph origin story, revealing it as the result of David’s relentlessly tinkering and his eventually revealed conviction about what humanity deserves. (Hint: It’s not a hearty handshake and congratulations for a species well done.) While the movie doesn’t necessarily share his point of view, and indeed has a lot of fun when it comes time for one Fassbenderbot to meet another, there is an unmistakable nastiness to the movie’s stalk-and-kill sequences. There’s a late sequence involving an alien and a couple in a shower that’s more flat-out slasher-movie than anything the franchise has done before or since.
At the center of it are the dueting/dueling Fassbenders; David and Walter are easily two of the most interesting characters in the series, and at times it feels like Scott and his writers are mocking the serious-minded Daniels by styling her as sort of a poor man’s proto-Ripley to barely match up against the proto-xenomorphs. This decision does Waterston no favors, yet it’s a more thought-provoking use of that iconography than the more straightforward homage that Cailee Spaeny gets to do (and, admittedly, pulls off swimmingly) in Romulus. Throughout Covenant, it feels like Scott is both reveling in the beast he’s created while at least considering whether humankind has doomed itself to annihilation. The movie is a fascinating and highly watchable combination of creature-feature violence and loftier sci-fi questions. It’s a bit dirtier and less elegant than Prometheus, and a bit more beholden to the whole Alien thing, without quite giving in to pure nostalgia. Basically, it’s as thorny as a good, provocative prequel entry should be.
Alas, it seems like the series has vowed to avoid much of this Prometheus-related business going forward. Though Alien: Romulus wound up linking with Prometheus in a few unexpected ways, it passed on the opportunity to make a version of David the movie’s exposition-dropping android (it would have made more sense than digitally resurrecting Ian Holm!), and of course Scott’s planned Prometheus trilogy is unlikely to ever be completed with a true Covenant follow-up. Yet even that curtailed aspect to the prequels makes them more valuable as more stand-alone creature features that necessarily mix up the Alien formula as they’re nonetheless drawn inexorably toward that first movie. If you’re an older-school Alien fan struggling to picture what a movie or show without Sigourney Weaver could look like, Alien: Covenant provides a satisfyingly weird and gory answer.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.