Alien: Covenant changes everything we know about cinema’s most terrifying monster

On the opening night of the SXSW film festival, Ridley Scott hosted a screening of his 1979 classic Alien along with a special bonus: a preview of footage from the upcoming Alien: Covenant. Normally, I don’t think there’s a ton of value in writing up preview footage, particularly in a review-style format. It’s always the best of the best, hand-picked to get people as hyped as possible, and let's face it: even the worst movie can have great moments.

The 20 terrifying minutes of Alien: Covenant that screened warrants a bit more discussion, however. Made up of three discrete sequences, the footage covered what appear to be at least two pivotal moments in the film, along with a revelation that upends the entire Alien mythos as we’ve known it for the last 38 years. And did I mention that it was almost unbearably tense?

Let's dig in, but first things first. Warning: minor spoilers ahead.

WHAT'S THE GENRE?

Sci-fi horror. More than any other mainstream franchise, the Alien films have always played genre ping-pong. Scott’s original film was a horror flick, James Cameron’s sequel turned it into an action franchise, and the various sequels have bounced back and forth ever since. (The conflict also marred Scott’s 2012 prequel Prometheus, which appeared to be a ponderous drama about the origins of humanity before turning into a horrorshow in its own right.)

But if the footage screened was any indication, the tone of Covenant is full-on, breakneck horror, taking what the original film did and amping it up by a factor of 10. The footage starts with a drop ship sequence, as Daniels (Katherine Waterston), Christopher (Billy Crudup), and other members of their team leave their hulking mothership to explore a planet. (Michael Fassbender’s character from Prometheus — or at least an android that looks exactly like him — is also along for the ride.) It’s standard space adventure stuff, with the production design nicely melding the 70’s look of Alien with the utilitarian ‘80s hardware of Aliens to create an aesthetic combination that fits neatly with the most famous entries in the series. (The film is a sequel to Prometheus, so the events are taking place before the events of the 1979 original.)

But in the second sequence, Scott takes the gloves off. I don’t want to give away all the details here, but let’s just say that the landing party shown in the recent trailers ends up with two infected members, who then have alien creatures burst from their bodies in horrific, grisly ways that make the original Alien chestbuster scene look like a Disney Channel movie. (I’m not being hyperbolic there; audience members moaned out loud during the screening.) Upstream Color’s Amy Seimetz plays a team member that tries to stop one of the newborn aliens in a taut sequence that is one of the most harrowing chases in Scott’s filmography. As you might imagine, things generally don’t go well — and half the team is left stranded on the planet with a wild alien newborn on the loose.

WHAT'S IT ABOUT?

On the surface, Covenant appears to be about a bunch of Alien-esque space truckers that unwittingly come up against the most hostile natural force in the universe.

WHAT'S IT REALLY ABOUT?

This is the most intriguing part of the preview footage, because the third scene shown changes the fundamental conflict behind the entire franchise. On its most basic level, the Alien series has always been about the conflict between humanity and nature. We may have the technology to explore the universe, but the alien creature — shark-like in its evolutionary perfection — is something we’re simply unable to handle. Accordingly, any attempts to harness it in the name of corporate gain (key plot points in both Alien and Aliens) only result in carnage and loss of life.

That changes with Alien: Covenant. In the final preview scene, Michael Fassbender’s android David (he’s definitely the same character from Prometheus in this scene, as he’s called David by name) walks Billy Crudup’s character through his personal workshop of biological terrors. He shows off different mutations of the creatures, explaining that he has been trying to understand the aliens that were discovered in Prometheus, going so far as to genetically engineer new versions — a process that’s been waiting for one final puzzle piece to complete.

That’s when David takes him into a small chamber filled with four eggs that look identical to the ones seen in the original Alien. The final puzzle piece, David says, is “mother” — a waiting host — and Crudup’s character is lined up for the honor. The dots are easy to connect: the alien as audiences saw it in 1979 wasn’t the result of evolution or natural selection. Instead, it was the result of an android intentionally breeding the most dangerous, lethal creature possible.

Instead of being about humanity fighting the hostility of nature, the Alien series suddenly becomes something much more timely: a story about humanity sowing the seeds of its own demise, through a relentless pursuit of technology and artificial intelligence. Prometheus had poked around the edges of similar ideas, with the notion that humanity was the result of some sort of alien intervention, but the Covenant footage makes it brutally clear that its our own creations that will destroy us. And according to Scott himself, it’s a theme that the film will explore in much deeper ways than simply tweaking some backstory. During a press event on Friday, Scott was asked if the film will tackle the question of humanity’s relevance in a world where AI and alien creatures can so easily overtake us, and his answer was blunt. “Always. [It’s a] big subject in this,” he said. “I'm not going to say anymore until you guys see the fucking movie. It's right there; it's one of the big questions.”

BUT IS IT ANY GOOD?

It is impossible to tell whether a movie as a whole will be good based on 20-ish minutes of footage. But what is clear is that those 20 minutes that screened were exciting, terrifying, and full of fascinating revelations. And perhaps more intriguing, nearly all of the footage shown in the film’s trailers was pulled from these three previewed scenes — meaning that there is a lot in Alien: Covenant that audiences still have no idea about.

WHAT SHOULD IT BE RATED?

So this one is going to be an “R.” A hard “R”. A hard “R” that will probably have a director’s cut Blu-ray that will be filled with so much extra blood and grisly gore that you’ll probably wish you could unsee it. But I’m just being optimistic here.

HOW CAN I ACTUALLY WATCH IT?

Alien: Covenant is scheduled to be released in theaters on May 19th, 2017.