‘Alien: Covenant’
Rating: R for “sci-fi violence, bloody images, language and some sexuality/nudity.”Running time: 123 minutes.
Ah, the siren song of John Denver. Who among us can resist it? Certainly, not the crew of the Covenant, a vessel powered by a golden sail cruising through space with 2,000 “colonists” in hyper sleep and years to go until they reach their destination.
But when a shock wave from a solar flare jostles the crew awake, they soon begin hearing a faint transmission of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” emanating from a curiously Earth-like planet. Such sonic waves would be expected if this was “Guardians of the Galaxy,” but this is the “Alien” universe – no place for sunny ’70s singer-songwriters. When the antsy crew deviates from their carefully planned mission to seek the transmission’s source, we know it’s only a matter of time until cosmic crustaceans begin bursting forth from bodies. Take me home? You betcha.
“Alien: Covenant” is, itself, a homecoming of sorts for a well-traveled franchise. Since Ridley Scott’s 1979 original – still the ultimate deep-space horror – “Alien” has passed through numerous directors (James Cameron, David Fincher, Jean-Pierre Jeunet) and a prequel reboot, Scott’s “Prometheus.” That film, more bloodless and brainy, sought to answer questions of origin with some pretty audacious backstory and – there’s just no easy way to say this – eyebrow-less colossuses who created the universe.
In Scott’s “Alien: Covenant,” taking place ten years after “Prometheus,” the so-called Engineers are, thankfully, nowhere to be seen. Back instead are everyone’s favorite extraterrestrials, those acid-dripping drama queens so fond of making a big entrance. Like some of the alien offspring, “Covenant” is a hybrid: part gory “Alien”-style scare-fest, part chilly “Prometheus” existentialism. It’s a tall order of thrills and theology that the ever gung-ho Scott, working from a script by John Logan and Dante Harper, comes close to pulling off.