There’s good new and bad news regarding Covenant. The bad will go first…you have to see Prometheus for this chapter in the Xenomorph’s origin first, or some parts will leave you baffled. The good news, it made sense of Prometheus which was good to a point yet it disappointed over the long run.
NO SPOILERS so read on.
Covenant takes place about 10 years after Prometheus and it’s about the starship USCSS Covenant making its way to a planet that was checked out earlier for colonization-terraforming. There’s a crew of about 20 with 2000 colonizers and over a thousand embryos slated to be the colony’s second generation. Among the 20 is a synthetic crew member, Walter played by Fassbender, manning the ship while everyone is in stasis. As expected, things don’t go according to plan (neutrino burst, pretty dangerous in real life), otherwise there’s no movie. Much like Alien, the ship receives what it thinks is a distress signal but this time it’s a accidental incident while the crew is making repairs. Due to the original captain being killed, command falls on the shoulders of a less confident, indecisive first officer who decides to investigate because the transmission’s source is a planet more enticing than their planned destination. He has a majority siding with him too. Why? They have another seven years to go before they get to where they’re going and few want to risk the unpredictability of deep space hazards.
Does it explain the Engineers and Xenomorphs better? Yes. Will everyone like it. No.
Is it scary? Yes. It has more in common with Alien than Prometheus even though the Xenomorph isn’t a surprise anymore.
Does it leave the door open for another chapter? Probably. The much loved Aliens may have wiped out the Xenomorphs on LV-426 (Zeta Reticuli, a real solar system) yet we don’t know with certainty if the Engineers didn’t intentionally/accidentally transport them to other planets. I for one am in the camp denying the existence of Alien 3 and Ressurrection and all crossovers with Predator. They sucked plus I doubt the Predator species could keep the lid on the Xenomorphs with their Antarctic hunting grounds. So Ridley Scott and company can keep trying to make good on their dystopian franchise.
Alamo Extras: Daft Punk video with Anime; annoying French song/video; HR Giger slide show; trailers for XTRO, Dark Star, Alien 2 (an Italian knockoff), and Creature; an intermission cartoon of an alien hitting the concession stand; comedy bit/parody of the Nostromo crew voting who to kill off; Japanese comedy bit involving the Xenomorph; Robot Chicken doing a gag involving the Xenomorph’s acidic blood being a problem that never stops; Nedist bit mocking how weird a dad HR Giger might have been; a compilation of alien encounters in film from 1902 to 2016.