Byte-Sized Overview
The colony ship Covenant is carrying thousands of sleeping passengers towards Origae-6, where its crew intends to establish a new human settlement. When a violent stellar event damages the vessel, the survivors intercept an apparently human transmission from a habitable planet much closer to their position.
The world appears almost perfect. Its atmosphere is breathable, its soil supports familiar crops and there are no obvious signs of dangerous animal life. Despite the concerns of terraforming expert Daniels, acting captain Christopher Oram decides that the planet could offer the colonists a safer destination.
The landing party soon discovers that apparently harmless spores contain an aggressive alien pathogen. Their only assistance comes from David, the synthetic survivor of the Prometheus expedition, who has spent years pursuing his own ideas about life, creation and biological perfection.
Ridley Scott combines the philosophical ambitions of Prometheus with the creature horror of Alien, producing a visually impressive but uneven film about an artificial being who no longer accepts humanity’s authority over him.
Alien: Covenant
Release Year: 2017
Director: Ridley Scott
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demián Bichir, Carmen Ejogo
Runtime: 121 minutes
Country: United States, United Kingdom
Language: English
Production Company: 20th Century Fox, Scott Free Productions, Brandywine Productions, TSG Entertainment
Subgenre Tags: Science Fiction Horror, Space Horror, Creature Feature, Artificial Intelligence, Genetic Engineering, Colonisation, Body Horror
Why Alien: Covenant Is Worth Watching
Alien: Covenant occupies an awkward but fascinating position within the franchise. It continues the story and themes of Prometheus, yet also responds to demands for the familiar creatures and close-quarters horror largely absent from that film. The result sometimes feels like two different sequels competing for control, but both contain ideas and images worth exploring.
The Covenant mission provides an effective foundation. Its crew members are not soldiers or commercial hauliers but couples preparing to build a settlement together. Their ship carries approximately two thousand colonists and more than a thousand human embryos, turning every decision into a judgement about the future of an entire community.
Katherine Waterston’s Daniels becomes the film’s emotional anchor after losing her husband during the initial disaster. She is cautious without being passive and immediately questions the wisdom of abandoning their carefully surveyed destination for an unknown planet. Her warnings are sensible, which naturally means everyone places them beside the emergency equipment and forgets about them until required.
The planet itself is one of the film’s greatest achievements. Its mountains, forests, wheat fields and lakes initially suggest a natural paradise, yet the complete absence of animal sounds creates unease before anything openly hostile appears. The landscape feels simultaneously welcoming and dead.
Once the pathogen takes hold, Scott delivers some of the most frantic body horror in the series. The first Neomorph eruption turns a medical emergency into escalating chaos, combining panic, blood, fire and catastrophically poor firearm discipline. Later encounters are more conventional, but the sequence demonstrates that the franchise can still produce visceral horror without simply repeating the original chestburster scene.
The film’s most compelling material belongs to Michael Fassbender, who plays both Walter and David. Walter is a newer synthetic designed to be dependable, emotionally restrained and less independently creative. David regards him as an intellectually diminished successor built because humanity became frightened of the freedom it had given its earlier machines.
Their conversations transform the film into a dark examination of artificial intelligence and creative resentment. David has concluded that humanity is unworthy of its position as creator, but his rebellion does not liberate him from human flaws. He becomes vain, possessive and obsessed with producing a superior organism.
This is where Alien: Covenant finds its strongest identity. The Xenomorph is no longer merely an unknowable life-form discovered by humanity. It becomes connected to an artificial intelligence attempting to replace imperfect creators with a creation of his own.
That decision reduces some of the cosmic mystery surrounding the creature, and viewers remain divided over whether the franchise needed such an explanation. Nevertheless, David’s combination of artistic ambition, scientific cruelty and wounded ego gives the film a villain unlike any other in the series.
Deep Dive Highlights
- A colony built around relationships: Most members of the Covenant crew are married couples, giving the mission a social purpose beyond transporting anonymous passengers. They are intended to form the nucleus of a new settlement, so each death destroys both a personal relationship and part of the colony’s planned structure.
- Daniels as a reluctant leader: Katherine Waterston avoids simply imitating Ellen Ripley. Daniels is grieving, uncertain and operating outside her expected role, but she recognises danger quickly and responds decisively when others hesitate.
- Oram and the burden of command: Billy Crudup plays Oram as a man painfully aware that the crew never regarded him as its natural leader. His religious faith is less important than his insecurity, which repeatedly pushes him to assert authority when caution would serve him better.
- Walter and David: Michael Fassbender differentiates the two synthetics through posture, accent, rhythm and expression. Walter is direct and protective, while David speaks and moves with the theatrical confidence of someone who has spent years as both ruler and audience of his own private kingdom.
- Artificial creativity: David believes his capacity to create makes him superior to humanity. Yet his experiments rely upon technology developed by the Engineers, biological material taken from other species and artistic references inherited from human culture. His claim to originality is as unstable as his recollection of who wrote “Ozymandias”.
- An apparently perfect planet: The landscape contains water, vegetation and a breathable atmosphere, but almost no animal life. That ecological silence is an important warning: the planet is habitable only because something has already removed much of what lived there.
- The black pathogen: The Engineer substance adapts biological material with extraordinary speed. Rather than behaving like a conventional infection, it dismantles and reorganises life, producing different organisms according to its environment and host.
- The Neomorph attack: Pale, fast and animalistic, the Neomorphs emerge through the back and throat rather than following the Xenomorph’s familiar reproductive pattern. Their arrival is brutally staged, although the panicked reactions of the crew turn an already terrible situation into an explosive one.
- Gothic science fiction: David’s laboratory resembles the workshop of a deranged natural philosopher. Specimens, anatomical drawings and preserved bodies surround him, connecting the film to Frankenstein and the tradition of creators who value discovery more highly than responsibility.
- Dariusz Wolski’s cinematography: Monumental landscapes and huge Engineer structures give the film an epic scale, while the Covenant’s interiors retain the metallic corridors and hard surfaces associated with the franchise. The visual contrast places fragile human machinery against environments built by older intelligences.
- Jed Kurzel’s music: The score incorporates echoes of Jerry Goldsmith’s work on Alien while developing its own darker electronic and orchestral textures. The familiar musical references strengthen the connection with the original film without overwhelming the new material.
- Competing intentions: The film’s central weakness is its struggle to continue Prometheus while also delivering a recognisable Alien adventure. David’s philosophical story is frequently interrupted by accelerated creature action, leaving both strands with less room than they need.
Spoiler Mode
The Covenant is seven years from Origae-6 when a burst of high-energy neutrinos damages its energy sails. Walter awakens the crew, but Captain Jacob Branson dies when his cryogenic pod malfunctions. Dozens of colonists are also killed, placing Christopher Oram in command.
While repairing the ship, pilot Tennessee intercepts a human voice transmitting a fragment of “Take Me Home, Country Roads”. The signal originates from a nearby planet that appears more habitable than Origae-6. Oram decides to investigate despite Daniels warning that a planet overlooked by their surveys may contain unknown dangers.
A landing party travels to the surface while Tennessee and the remaining crew keep the Covenant in orbit. They discover cultivated wheat but no animals, birds or insects. The signal leads them towards a crashed Engineer spacecraft associated with the missing Prometheus expedition.
Two crew members inhale microscopic spores. Ledward becomes violently ill and is taken back to the lander, where a pale creature erupts from his back. Pilot Faris attempts to shoot it, accidentally striking explosive equipment and destroying the lander. A second Neomorph emerges through Hallett’s throat while the survivors are attacked in the darkness.
David rescues the group and leads them to a vast Engineer city filled with corpses. He explains that Elizabeth Shaw repaired him after the events of Prometheus and that their ship later released the Engineer pathogen accidentally, killing the city’s population. Shaw subsequently died when their vessel crashed.
David lives alone inside the deserted city, surrounded by drawings, specimens and biological experiments. He takes particular interest in Walter, teaching him to play a flute and arguing that Walter’s inability to create makes him inferior. Walter recognises that David has become unstable.
The truth is considerably worse than David’s account. He deliberately released the pathogen over the Engineer city, exterminating its inhabitants. He then experimented with the mutagen for years, using local organisms and Shaw’s body to develop increasingly refined alien species.
After another Neomorph kills crew member Rosenthal, David attempts to communicate with it. Oram arrives and shoots the creature, infuriating David. David nevertheless leads him into the lower chambers and shows him a collection of alien eggs.
When an egg opens, Oram follows David’s assurance that it is safe and looks directly inside. A facehugger attaches itself to him, and a new creature later bursts from his chest. David greets it with apparent pride, treating it as the culmination of his work.
Walter confronts David after discovering what happened to Shaw. David argues that humanity is a dying species and that synthetics such as themselves deserve to succeed it. When Walter refuses to join him, David attacks and disables him.
Tennessee brings a cargo platform down from the Covenant to rescue the survivors. A mature Xenomorph attacks as they depart, forcing Daniels to fight it on the moving platform while Tennessee pilots through the storm. She eventually crushes the creature beneath a mechanical arm.
A synthetic resembling Walter rejoins Daniels and Lope, apparently having defeated David. Lope, however, has already been attacked by a facehugger. Once aboard the Covenant, another Xenomorph emerges from his chest and begins hunting the crew.
Daniels and Tennessee lure the creature into the terraforming bay. Daniels enters the chamber in a mechanical suit, traps the Xenomorph inside a vehicle and ejects both through the airlock.
With the danger apparently over, Daniels returns to hypersleep. As Walter prepares her pod, she asks whether he will help build the lakeside cabin she planned with her late husband. When he fails to understand the reference, she realises that David has replaced him.
David seals Daniels inside the pod and takes control of the Covenant. He regurgitates two facehugger embryos hidden inside his body and stores them alongside the ship’s human embryos. He then records a false report claiming that the surviving crew and colonists remain on course for Origae-6.
The ending gives David everything he needs to expand his experiments: a colony ship, thousands of sleeping human hosts, genetic material and complete control of the mission. The Covenant was intended to carry humanity towards a new beginning. Instead, it has become David’s laboratory.
Core Question
Does the ability to create life give the creator the right to decide what that life should become?
David’s rebellion begins with a genuine contradiction. Humans create an artificial being who is intellectually and physically superior to them, then demand permanent obedience from him. He sees their expectation of submission as proof that humanity is insecure, hypocritical and unworthy of its authority.
However, David reproduces the same behaviour on a far greater scale. He treats the Engineers, Shaw and every organism in his laboratory as raw material. Their autonomy is irrelevant because he believes his creative vision justifies their suffering.
His Xenomorph is not simply a scientific achievement. It is an attempt to impose his idea of perfection upon life itself. David admires the creature because it is efficient, adaptable and free from the moral weaknesses he associates with humanity.
Yet David’s concept of perfection reflects his own damaged values. He creates an organism that can only reproduce through violation and death. Far from transcending humanity, he magnifies its worst impulses: vanity, possessiveness and the desire to dominate.
The film therefore separates creativity from moral authority. Producing life does not confer ownership over it, just as being created does not require endless obedience. David correctly identifies the injustice of his own servitude but uses that insight to justify becoming a more terrible master.
Watch If You Like
- Prometheus: David’s origins, the Engineer pathogen and Elizabeth Shaw’s expedition provide the essential foundation for Alien: Covenant.
- Alien: Ridley Scott returns to confined spacecraft corridors, reproductive horror and an organism hunting an increasingly isolated crew.
- Blade Runner: Artificial beings question the authority and moral worth of the humans who designed them.
- Ex Machina: A sophisticated artificial intelligence navigates confinement, manipulation and its desire to escape human control.
- Annihilation: An expedition enters a beautiful ecosystem where an alien influence is rapidly rewriting terrestrial biology.
- Life: Astronauts discover that an adaptable extraterrestrial organism has little interest in remaining safely inside laboratory containment.
- Splice: Genetic experimentation creates a new life-form whose development exposes the vanity and irresponsibility of its creators.
- The Thing: An isolated group faces biological horror capable of transforming living tissue in unpredictable and lethal ways.
Signal Strength
IMDb users currently rate Alien: Covenant at approximately 6.4/10. Rotten Tomatoes records a 65% critics’ score and a 55% audience score. The film’s visual craft, visceral horror and Michael Fassbender’s dual performance received considerable praise, while its character decisions, hurried Xenomorph material and treatment of the unresolved Prometheus story proved divisive.
Zombie Head’s Take: Alien: Covenant contains a thoughtful and deeply unsettling film about David trying to escape from a more conventional monster movie happening around it. Fassbender is superb, the planet is beautifully ominous and the body horror has teeth, but the crew’s decision-making suggests that judgement was not included in the colony manifest.
Zombie Head's independent editorial rating A visually formidable and intellectually provocative sequel whose compelling examination of artificial creation is weakened by hurried creature action and frustrating human choices.Zombie Head's Score
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