Dread reckoning

Whether you can follow Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant will depend on whether you’ve seen Prometheus, to which it’s a sequel. The odds of that are better if you live somewhere besides the United States; Prometheus made two-thirds of its $403 million in foreign markets.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll fess up: I missed out on Prometheus back in 2012, and I can’t say I ever felt the poorer for it until seeing Alien: Covenant sent me scampering to the previous movie’s plot summary on Wikipedia so I could figure out what the hell was going on in this one.

Sometime in the early 22nd century, the colony ship Covenant is on its way to a distant planet with colonists and crew in suspended animation, while a lone android named Walter (Michael Fassbender) and a computer named Mother (voiced by Lorelei King) run the ship. A disastrous ion storm rouses the crew, but too late for the captain, who burns to death in his pod. This elevates the executive officer, Oram (Billy Crudup), to command, a circumstance that appears not to sit well with some of the crew. (Oram makes reference to the fact that he’s “a man of faith” as being the cause of this, but that thread is dropped almost as soon as it’s mentioned.)

When a mysterious transmission is intercepted from a nearby Earth-like planet, Oram makes a controversial decision: Fearing that the storm damage will keep the ship from reaching its original destination, he diverts to this new planet. It’s a decision he will, of course, regret.

Alien: Covenant, like Prometheus before it, is in fact a prequel to Scott’s 1979 breakthrough movie Alien, and if you’ve seen that one, or any of its sequels in the last 38 years, you can guess where things are going. Whatever happens, we know this is not going to end well. We can name the actors in the cast—besides Fassbender and Crudup, we’ve got Katherine Waterston, Danny McBride, Carmen Ejogo, Jussie Smollett and Callie Hernandez, among others—but it hardly matters. This being the Alien universe, we know going in that we can pretty much kiss everybody goodbye the minute they hit the screen. Every time a crew member bends over one of those weird throbbing eggs, it’s the equivalent of a don’t-go-into-that-dark-room-you-idiot moment from less pretentious horror flicks.

And this being a sequel to Prometheus, there are hints of that movie’s themes about human origins—but in John Logan, Dante Harper, Jack Paglen and Michael Green’s script, the hints are so oblique that they tend to get lost in the shuffle of Scott’s otherworldly atmospherics and all the mini-monster chest-hatchings.

Giving credit where it’s due, Alien: Covenant is stylish enough. And if you’ve spent the last five years anxiously wondering where Prometheus was headed, then this is the movie for you. If not, feel free to skip it; unlike most of the Covenant’s crew, you’ll survive.