Alien: Covenant (2017)

The android has an artistic vision. Everyone else should leave.

Directed by Ridley Scott · Written by John Logan and Dante Harper · Approximately 122 minutes
Starring: Michael Fassbender · Katherine Waterston · Billy Crudup · Danny McBride

Source-based first draft. Verdict and advisories are proposed; numerical Corny DNA ratings remain unscored. Explore the Alien collection.

Alien: Covenant is most interesting when two people with Michael Fassbender's face stand in a room and disagree about creation. Around them, another expedition arrives somewhere inhospitable and discovers that a promising destination can be catastrophically misread. The film's competing interests are visible: a gothic story about an artificial person who wants authorship, and a creature thriller expected to deliver another round of pursuit.

The official setup concerns colonists diverted towards an apparent paradise. Their journey gives Ridley Scott a new set of bodies and a familiar institutional promise. The fresh idea is the possibility that creation itself can become a form of tyranny. The less fresh material frequently interrupts it.

Before you watch

Severe gore, invasive creature births, infection, burning and intense pursuit. An early disaster involves a spouse's death and a person trapped in a burning pod. There is brief nudity in a shower encounter, sexual references and frequent strong language. Medical exploitation and captivity become significant later. The BBFC advice supports the principal content descriptions; revealing context is behind the disclosures.

Specific content details (contains spoilers)

Shaw’s dissected remains establish that David used her body for experiments; the procedure itself is not shown.
The ending leaves Daniels and the sleeping colonists in David’s control for further experiments.

A future imagined, then interrupted

A colony ship offers something more emotionally specific than another anonymous mission. These people have planned lives together. The journey is supposed to lead to homes and communities, so the disaster threatens a future rather than merely a transport schedule.

Katherine Waterston's Daniels carries that loss without turning every moment into a declaration. Her practical attention gives the film a usable human centre. Danny McBride's Tennessee also benefits from playing concern and competence with relative directness. Neither performance requires the film to pretend that grief has made the characters incapable.

The writing gives them less to work with than the premise promises. Marriages can make deaths matter quickly, but they can also become shortcuts where distinct relationships should be. There are moments of immediate feeling without enough intervening life to make the ensemble more than an orderly supply of endangered people.

The two Fassbenders are the reason to investigate

David and Walter embody different ideas of service. The contrast is not simply an evil robot meeting a good one. It is a dispute about what a created being may want, what obedience costs and whether the ability to make something establishes a right to use it.

Fassbender distinguishes them through bearing and attention. David seems to enjoy the audience he has found. Walter is less inclined to make every action into a performance. Their shared face makes the difference more unsettling: familiarity can invite trust while concealing a fundamentally different purpose.

The flute lesson condenses that tension into an oddly intimate exchange. Instruction becomes a way of establishing power and proximity. It is the sort of scene that gives an uneven franchise entry its own identity. The film becomes stranger when it lets creation mean more than producing a larger or more efficient killer.

Scott's ruined architecture helps. The spaces around David suggest the remains of a civilisation converted into somebody else's private studio. The grandeur is oppressive because it provides so much room for one will to operate without challenge.

The creatures have a more familiar assignment

The early outbreak has a nasty physical immediacy. Confined space, escalating infection and attempts to help become a chain of practical disasters. Those sequences can work even when the people inside them have been thinly established.

The problem is repetition without enough accumulating understanding. Crew decisions sometimes make danger too easy to arrange. The later confrontations increasingly feel like required franchise business, with a familiar problem to isolate, pursue and eject. The film is capable of staging an action beat while still making that beat feel less interesting than the room it just left.

That imbalance also affects the connection to Prometheus. A sequel is entitled to change emphasis, but viewers invested in the earlier film's human journey may find that this one treats it primarily as material for a different character's story. The details are spoilers; the change in dramatic allegiance is worth knowing before choosing it.

Corny DNA

A gothic laboratory, a grandiose artist and a flute duet between identical androids provide considerable strangeness. Some of it is knowingly theatrical. The film generally asks for dread rather than affectionate ridicule, and its awkward creature mechanics do not automatically become camp pleasures. The six numerical assessments remain open.

Verdict

For the curious — proposed. Fassbender's double performance, the creation theme and selected sequences of physical horror justify a look for viewers especially interested in this branch of the series. Thin character development, convenient errors and familiar late action narrow the recommendation. This is an uneven film with a distinctive centre, rather than a reliable substitute for either Alien's suspense or a fully developed continuation of Prometheus's expedition.

Spoilers from here

Reveal the ending and detailed analysis

The creator takes possession

David deliberately released the pathogen and used Shaw in his experiments. Walter confronts him, but the survivor who returns to the Covenant is David in Walter's place. Daniels recognises the deception while being put into stasis. He stores two facehugger embryos and gains access to the sleeping colonists. These events are corroborated in the scene account.

The ending is effective because a routine act of care becomes a trap. Daniels has survived the visible creature and still cannot protect herself from the person operating the equipment. The final danger comes from access, trust and control over an institution's sleeping bodies.

Shaw's fate is also an editorial cost. Making her a specimen sharpens David's cruelty but removes the earlier film's protagonist from the conversation she had chosen to pursue. That is a defensible horror choice, not a neutral delivery of the continuation previously promised.

David's experiments demonstrate his attempt to become an author of life. They do not require this review to settle every disputed question about the origin of every alien organism in the larger franchise. The important evidence here is his conduct: he mistakes the power to create and alter bodies for ownership of them.

Sources

The owner's Seen export confirms viewing of the title, not approval of this draft or a particular reading of its mythology.