First 'Alien: Covenant' Trailer Delivers New Creatures to Terrorize Your Holiday
Santa has just dropped off a little extra something for film fans: The first trailer for Alien: Covenant. Ridley Scott’s sequel to 2012’s Prometheus arrived at midnight on Christmas Eve, picking up with a new crew, who intend to build a colony on an uninhabited planet… or at least, they think it’s uninhabited. What they actually find is a whole new species of aliens that wreak bloody havoc on the humans at a rate that would make any Xenomorph Queen proud. Michael Fassbender returns in two separate roles, one of which is Prometheus android David (whose character was the high point of that film). Covenant also introduces a new star to the franchise: Katherine Waterston as Daniels, a reluctant alien slayer in the vein of original Alien heroine Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). As the trailer shows, the new film goes back to the franchise’s horror roots and promises a bloody, back-bursting good time. Watch it above.
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Earlier this month, Yahoo Movies had the opportunity to preview some footage from Alien: Covenant at a press event in New York City, which included a brief Q&A with Waterston. Here’s what we can tell you about the highly anticipated sequel.
The neomorphs are really gross. Imagine a rat crossed with a cockroach, starved down to a skeleton, and rendered by H.R. Giger, and you’ll have some idea of the skin-crawling baby aliens we saw in the preview footage. Small and white, with two sharp bones protruding from its spine, the neomorph is Covenant’s equivalent of Alien’s chestburster: a slimy creature that can burst out of a human body with disturbing ease. The question remains: What will it look like when it grows up?
In space, no one can (still) hear you scream. Like the 1979 film that coined the iconic tagline, Covenant aims to be more of a horror film than its immediate predecessor. The footage we saw included dazzling shots of planets and spaceships alongside frightening scenes of those creepy-crawly aliens making crew members spasm in agony before ripping their bodies apart from the inside. Pro tip: Blood shows up really well on an all-white alien.
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There’s a new Ripley in town. Though Waterston swore that the subject never came up during filming, it’s clear that she’s being positioned as the next Sigourney Weaver. The advance footage introduced Waterston’s character as part of a trash-talking, hard-working crew, much like that of the Nostromo. When the bodies begin to fall around her, she becomes an action hero. Even her look is evocative of Ripley (though Waterston claims the short hair was a coincidence: During the Q&A, she said that Scott wanted her to keep her bobbed haircut from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and she sent him photographs of herself wearing co-star Ezra Miller’s wig to convince him otherwise).
