For a long time, 20th Century Fox lagged behind and played it safe with their franchises. Films like “X-Men: Origins,” “Fantastic Four” and some of their earlier super hero films demonstrated a studio who meddled in their franchises and often tamed and defanged them. Now that a regime change has occurred — the conservative Tom Rothman gone for a few years now — Fox has been regaining their edge with R-Rated movies like “Deadpool” and “Prometheus.” And the studio looks as if they are seriously going for broke in 2017. At the recent Fox preview in New York — where the studio rolled out new footage from “War For The Planet Of The Apes” (you can read our footage report here), “The Cure For Wellness” (you can watch the trailer here), the final Wolverine movie “Logan” (more on that soon) and Ridley Scott’s “Alien: Covenant.” Suffice to say all the film footage was fantastic, “Logan” appearing darker than any “X-Men” movie by a mile, and “War For The Planet Of The Apes” continuing to create deep emotional stakes within the action drama genre. But if any film “won” the day it was hands down “Alien: Covenant.”
The trailer is here, you can see some of what we’ve described here.
With about 10 minutes of footage shown, plus the upcoming new trailer, “Alien: Covenant” horrified. It was as though Ridley Scott took issue with the mixed reviews of “Prometheus” and was coming back hard with a vengeance. ‘Covenant’ footage looked like a fan’s wet dream: a disturbing picture, with scares, gore and guts that appeared to be hard-R terrifying.
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“Oh, God. I feel like I’m gonna throw up,” were “Alien Covenant” star Katherine Waterston’s first words after watching the new scenes shown to press and the trailer. “I haven’t seen any of the footage from the film yet, it’s so nauseating on two levels I can’t really handle scary movies and then [this footage is] also just overwhelming just to see.”
Based on the two scenes and trailer, “Alien: Covenant” appears to be a mélange. The footage press was shown echoed “Prometheus” (the ships and interiors looked similar including the blue lighting illuminating the consoles), James Cameron’s “Aliens” (a very reminiscent transport drop flying down onto an alien planet with marines aboard) and the 1979 original “Alien” film (genuine horror mixed with distressing suspense).
“Alien Covenant” began with the aforementioned ship and a transport drop — all the soldiers buckled in and flying in at violent speeds nearly losing their lunch in the process. But it’s not all soldiers in this film but a mix of team members.
“They’re colonists. They’re scientists, Amy [Seimetz] is a pilot, they are all civilians, and yes, there are some military dudes around to protect us,” Waterson, the new heroine of the series, told the audience at the 2017 Fox Showcase. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this, but I’m gonna say it anyway,” she added. “Most of the people on the ship are couples. They are these colonists who are in a cryosleep…” she said trailing off perhaps afraid to say too much.
But the ship hurdling towards the planet was no joke. “We were really rocking around in there when we shot that scene,” she explained. “And people had whiplash. I mean, it was really violent.”
Press were shown two scenes from the film, all of them occurring from what seemed to be the first act. Ridley Scott introduced them in a pre-recorded clip. “In the first clip we’ll follow the crew of the colony ship Covenant to what they believe is a new world,” he said. “Then we’ll discover they’re not alone.”
In the first aforementioned clip, the Covenant crew is about to land on what is perhaps LV-426 from “Alien,” but could possibly be LV-223 from “Prometheus.” Danny McBride is a pilot on the mother ship and Seimetz is flying the smaller cargo ship which is experiencing massive interference as it throttles towards the planet. Billy Crudup appears to be a military commander and other members on board are Carmen Ejogo and Demian Bichir who appear to be either scientists or colonists. Of course, given a starring role is the Neomorphs, the new breed of alien Xenomorph featured in ‘Covenant.’ There is jocular camaraderie and even a joke about a pilot’s wife’s “tits.”
While the first clip set the stage, clip two was where it was at in terms of gore, blood and frightening stakes. Seimetz and Ejogo are reporting back to the mothership to notify them that one of the crew members [an unidentified male] is bleeding. But their distress signal keeps breaking up and things go from bad to worse. It’s clear that there’s been a contamination breach and the man has been face-hugged, or in this case, possibly infected.