Alien: Covenant is a 2017 American science-fiction horror film directed by Ridley Scott and written by John Logan and Dante Harper, with a story by Michael Green and Jack Paglen. A sequel to the 2012 film Prometheus, the film is the second installment in the Alien prequel series and the sixth installment overall in the Alien film series, as well as the third directed by Scott.
The film stars Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride and Demián Bichir, and follows the crew of a ship that lands on an uncharted planet before making a terrifying discovery. Alien: Covenant premiered in London on May 4, 2017 and is scheduled to be released on May 19 in the United States in 2D and IMAX 2D.
Directed by: Ridley Scott
Produced by:
- Ridley Scott
- Mark Huffam
- Michael Schaefer
- David Giler
- Walter Hill
Screenplay by:
Story by:
- Jack Paglen
- Michael Green
Cast:
- Michael Fassbender
- Katherine Waterston
- Billy Crudup
- Danny McBride
- Demián Bichir
Music by: Jed Kurzel
Cinematography: Dariusz Wolski
Edited by: Pietro Scalia
Production company:
- 20th Century Fox
- Scott Free Productions
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox
Release date:
- May 4, 2017 (Leicester Square)
- May 19, 2017 (United States)
Running time: 123 minutes
Synopsis
A short flashback shows Peter Weyland while he is still alive; he addresses a synthetic android who would become part of the Prometheus expedition. Weyland asks the android to select a name for himself and the android selects 'David' as his preferred name.
In 2104 the crew of the colony ship Covenant is bound for a remote planet with two thousand colonists and a thousand embryos aboard. While en route to their destination, an energy surge damages the ship, killing its captain and waking the crew. As they repair the ship, the crew intercept a radio transmission from a nearby planet and decide to investigate as the transmission is human in origin but the planet is supposedly lifeless.
Crew members Waters, Faris and Karine descend to the surface with a contingent of security personnel. Karine sets up an ecological survey station while the others track down the source of the signal. They discover it originates from an Engineer ship piloted by Elizabeth Shaw following the disastrous Prometheus mission. Two of the security team members are accidentally infected with an alien spore.
Karine attempts to assist them, but they are locked inside the landing vehicle by Faris as a quarantine measure. The security team are killed by a neomorph—a forerunner to the xenomorph—as they burst from their chests, and Karine is mauled to death. Faris dies when she attempts to kill the neomorphs, accidentally destroying the lander in an explosion.
Forced to retreat, the crew find the android David, the sole survivor of the Prometheus mission as they radio Covenant for help. Crew member Tennessee decides to respond despite being advised not to in light of the neomorph attack.
On the surface, a neomorph attacks a settler who has become separated from the main group and is killed by Oram, who witnesses David trying to tame the alien. David shows Oram a chamber he has been using to incubate facehuggers, which implant Oram with an embryo; the embryo erupts into a protomorph—an evolution of the neomorph—killing him.
As the crew search for Oram, they gradually uncover David's activities on the planet: after landing on the Engineer homeworld with Shaw, David unleashed the "black goo", a bioweapon recovered during the Prometheus mission. This killed the Engineers and allowed David to experiment on local fauna by using the black goo as a catalyst to cross-breed them.
The earliest xenomorphs came about after David experimented with a parasitic wasp that laid its eggs inside its prey; upon being born, the larvae ate the prey from the inside out. Elizabeth Shaw became the first victim of a facehugger, murdered by David in what David considers to be a necessary sacrifice. Realising the scale of David's crimes, the crew members attempt to evacuate. They are attacked by adult protomorphs as Covenant arrives.
Several crew members and colonists are killed, but they successfully escape the surface. However, crew member Lope has been implanted with a protomorph embryo, which has gestated and is now loose aboard Covenant. With the help of Walter, the ship's android who resembles David, the crew funnel the protomorph to the terraforming bay and eject it into space.
With the ship safe, the crew decide to return to their original mission plan and re-enter stasis. As Walter puts them under one by one, crew member Daniels asks him if he will help her realise her dead husband's dream once they arrive on their new home world.
However, Walter, whom Daniels previously confided in, does not understand this, and Daniels realises that she is talking to David, who has taken Walter's place. As Daniels enters cryosleep, David gains access to the colonists' cryosleep quarters where he regurgitates two facehugger embryos and leaves them with the sleeping colonists.