Alien: Covenant | review by Rafe McGregor

Scott forgets female leads and the human species in a strange sequel.

Alien: Covenant is the second in a proposed trilogy of prequels to Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), following Prometheus (2012), which was also directed by Scott and reviewed for TQF by myself, Howard Watts, and Jacob Edwards. The titles of the prequel trilogy have been selected by the spaceships whose stories they tell and the story of the Covenant is set ten years after the disappearance of the Prometheus. The Covenant is en route to Origae-6, a distant planet designated for human colonisation, and is carrying several thousand settlers and embryos and a small crew, all of whom are in stasis with the exception of the ship’s synthetic, Walter (Michael Fassbender). The ship is caught in a neutrino blast, which kills the captain and prematurely wakens the crew. The captain’s loss proves significant for two reasons: it introduces his widow, Daniels Branson (Katherine Waterston), who will turn out to be the only human character to make full use of her agency, and it places the second in command, Christopher Oram (Billy Crudup), in charge. Oram is not cut out for his unplanned promotion and makes a series of disastrous decisions, beginning with a diversion to investigate a signal that appears to provide evidence of a human presence on a nearby planet. The signal, as anyone who has watched Prometheus will realise, is from Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), the sole survivor of the doomed mission to find the origins of human life.

Prometheus | review by Rafe McGregor

Scott sacrifices the superficial to the substantive in disappointing prequel.

Sequels and more recently prequels constitute something of a genre of their own in that the play between similarity and difference is at least as important as the director’s inventiveness and imaginativeness.  Viewers familiar with any one of the Alien quartet expect to see gut-wrenching body horror and a gutsy heroine who overcomes adversity, but will be content with neither a re-run of Kane’s exploding chest nor a mere replication of Ripley.  The demand for resemblance without replication is exacerbated in Prometheus, which is both a prequel to the quartet and a prequel to the remaining pair of prequels in the prequel trilogy.  One of the concerns of the quartet was the opposition of the capitalist imperative to what one might call basic human values or the more charitable of the religious virtues.  Some of the trouble in Alien was caused by the profit motive and all of the trouble in the rest of the series was caused by the military-industrial complex’s interest in capturing a live alien to create yet another weapon of mass destruction.  In this respect, Prometheus takes the series to new heights because the quest around which the narrative revolves, the search for the origin of human life, is completely commercial.  The venture is not only sponsored by the Weyland Corporation, but undertaken at the whim of its owner and commanded by his representative, Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), who treats the Prometheus’s captain like a lackey and is openly contemptuous of the scientist passengers.

Alien: Out of the Shadows, by Tim Lebbon and Dirk Maggs (Audible Originals) | review by Stephen Theaker

This full cast audio interquel places itself between two of the greatest science fiction films of all time, Alien and Aliens. That takes a good deal of ambition, but, then, it is adapted from Tim Lebbon’s novel by Dirk Maggs, whose CV, taking in everyone from Superman to Arthur Dent, shows he is not afraid of a challenge. We join Ellen Ripley (played here by Laurel Lefkow), sole human survivor of the Nostromo, as she records a message for her daughter and settles down for hypersleep. What she, and we, didn’t realise at the end of Alien was that murderous company android Ash had uploaded his consciousness to the escape pod’s computer. He hasn’t given up on his mission, and what’s worse he now sounds just like Rutger Hauer, having scraped together a new voice from what’s available in the computer system. He changes their course, taking them to LV178, a mining planet where he suspects the alien xenomorphs might be found. And he’s right. The miners disturbed something on that planet, and now, like Dracula coming to Whitby, it’s on its way up to the orbiting Marion in a shuttle. Chief engineer Chris Hooper (played by Corey Johnson) and the other surviving miners will need the help of Ripley if any of them are to survive, but the presence of Ash is just going to make things worse.

Aliens: Colonial Marines, reviewed by Howard Watts

Aliens: Colonial Marines (Sega, PS3). It would be pointless for me to go into great detail regarding the backstory to this game: suffice to say, it follows straight on from the events of James Cameron’s rather excellent Aliens.

From the outset, it’s clear the developers have attempted to maintain a cinematic experience in this game. The titles and original music by James Horner create the perfect atmosphere, and we’re assured by this beautifully rendered intro that we’re in safe hands. From then on the backstory establishes the game’s scenario: explore the Sulaco…