Since purchasing 20th Century Fox for a cool $71.3 billion back in 2019, Disney has seemingly pulled off the impossible: It’s revived the Alien franchise. You might think murderous xenomorphs are an easy sell, but history says otherwise. While the original Alien and follow-up Aliens are undeniable classics, the sequels that followed tend to verge on the unwatchable. And although original director Ridley Scott made a valiant effort to resurrect the saga in the 2010s, starting with Prometheus in 2012, those movies proved too heady to win over casual audiences or studio executives.
More recently, however, things are looking up for everyone’s favorite biomechanical space monster. Alien: Romulus was a hit, relaunching the film franchise with promises of a sequel. And later this month, Alien: Earth will bring the xenomorph down to our planet for the first ever Alien TV show.
But while we wait to see what fresh sci-fi horrors Hawley has in store for us, it’s worth revisiting arguably the most overlooked and underrated movie in the Alien franchise, which just so happens to be streaming on HBO Max as of Aug. 1.
Released in 2017, Alien: Covenant occupies an awkward place in the franchise. After critics and fans bashed Prometheus for not feeling enough like an Alien movie (which, fair), Ridley responded by giving his detractors exactly what they wanted. Covenant combines the leisurely world-building of its predecessor with many of the tropes you’d expect from the earliest iterations of the franchise (abandoned spaceships, gunfights, and lots of scary space monsters). It doesn’t exactly coalesce into a great movie, but it does provide a few memorable moments — most of which come courtesy of the evil robot David (Michael Fassbender) who was established in the previous film.
Interestingly, in an interview with SciFiNow, Scott revealed that Covenant wasn’t a direct reaction to the fan response garnered by Prometheus. It turns out, the sequel had long been in the works, which is why David survives the first movie and shows up in the second.
“That’s why we left [David] alive at the end,” Scott said. “He was in two parts but we left [David and Shaw] together at the end because I thought, ‘One way or another, we’ll be doing the next one.’”
In that same interview, Scott hinted that he had already begun work on a third film in the so-called “David” trilogy, which would wrap up his Alien prequel story and perhaps definitively explain the origins of the xenomorphs and their creators, the Engineers (aka, those big, blue, bald aliens in Prometheus). However, based on the current direction of the franchise, that seems unlikely.
In a recent interview, Alien: Earth showrunner Noah Hawley even went so far as to say that the events of Prometheus and Covenant weren’t “useful” to him. While being careful to note that he discussed the new show with Scott, Hawley explained that the origin story presented in Scott’s prequels (long story short: the xenomorph is a biological weapon created by David… maybe… it’s never fully explained) was less interesting than the idea presented in the original Alien film that it’s some sort of “perfect life form” that evolved over millions over years to become the ultimate killing machine.
Hawley isn’t wrong — and there’s a reason the original Alien is still one of the best sci-fi movies ever made — but he’s also seemingly missing the point of Covenant. Scott’s planned prequel trilogy isn’t just an origin story designed to fill in the Wikipedia entry for xenomorph, it’s a mythology of the entire franchise; a gritty, biblical space epic to help explain the brutal dystopian future of the Alien franchise. Because without that mythology, all we have to lean on is the retrofuturistic aesthetic of the original films. And that will only get you so far.
It seems clear that the future of the Alien saga may have increasingly little to do with Scott’s planned prequel trilogy (and Scott himself recently proclaimed he’s “done” with the franchise). But even as the story moves on under Disney’s watchful eye, it’s worth revisiting Alien: Covenant, a messy movie that tried to give Alien the origin story it deserved — and sort of succeeded.
Alien: Covenant is streaming now on HBO Max (and also on Hulu).
