ALIEN: COVENANT movie review

Alien: Covenant is a sequel to Prometheus. Prometheus may be a prequel to the original Alien movie Ridley Scott directed but it is not connected yet to the Ellen Ripley story arc. If you haven’t seen Prometheus yet, it’s OK. It was only mentioned in the movie but it can be considered as a separate story.

Covenant is the name of the Colony ship that is transporting 2000 colonist to a new planet. Just like in Prometheus, the human race is still in exploratory stage but is already beginning to make colonies in other habitable planets.

Covenant is a suitable name of the ship because it sounded biblical. It draws parallelism to the Genesis stories of conquests to Promised Land. Only it is cooler because they have a space vessel. The design of the Covenant is the same design of what is a possible space vessel should be: A solar barge.

Since we don’t have a technology yet for interstellar travel, a solar barge is the only solution for it. It may be slow but it draws power to any Sun that it may come across in another planetary system. In real life, I already read breakthroughs of planetary systems found that may sustain life because it has an existing sun.

But it will take years to travel and it may be a lifetime so it is important to have stasis pods the occupants can hibernate. But how can a manned vessel go to the destination without an active crew. Since we already have computers and robotics, the Alien movies introduced that they have now the technology to build synthetics.

Photo credit: 20th Century Fox

Synthetics are basically androids and are far different from normal robots. Both are artificially created but the difference is they have synthetic body parts that almost function like a human being.  In the past, there are already four synthetics so far and in this movie, another synthetic followed after David, played by Michael Fassbender and is also playing a new synthetic named Walter. My only concern with Fassbender is that he can't play the role of a synthetic permanently. He will eventually look different in future synthetic roles.

Walter is like a super butler. His loyalty is to the Covenant and its passengers. Unlike David, Walter is not capable of emotions but is able to converse like any human. The only good thing about having no emotions for Walter is that he is not able to experience loneliness. If an ordinary human runs a ship by himself is like total isolation. No one would like to experience what happened in the other movie Passengers.

The movie shows more revelation as we understand how evolution can happen even if you don’t believe in that theory. The movie followed after Prometheus in about Ethics and the possibility of Ancient Aliens.

What Ridley Scott did is to make the Alien story expansion more concrete and as terrifying as the time when he first directed the original Alien movie. Because “in space, no one can hear you scream”.

Viewed during the Philippine premiere last Monday at Trinoma Cinema. Thanks to 20^th Century Fox for the invitation. For more quality and geeky movie reviews, follow this blog and like L.E.N.S. blogs on Facebook.