ALIEN: COVENANT

ALIEN: COVENANT. Ridley Scott, dir., producer (one of five). Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, "based on characters created by." Jack Paglen and Michael Green, story. John Logan and Dante Harper, script. Chris Seagers, production design. USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Brandywine Productions, Scott Free Productions, in association with TSG Entertainment (production) / Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation (US distribution), 2017. See IMDb for further details.[1]

See for various aspects of mise-en-scène and parent/child relations, to be handled in a moment, and for Michael Fassbender's David and Walter: two androids, one of which, the later model Walter, was made and acts more robotic. In a nice irony, the more human David is the villain of the piece — in the tradition of Ash in ALIEN — as an ally of the Aliens and far more central to the film than any of the Aliens. The computer, Mother, again is heard, but is not developed, a possibly significant omission in a film that shows us spouses, lovers, fathers, sons, incipient children, and brothers, including the central doubles of David and Walter.

Missing are the strongly biomechanical Aliens and Alien-ized habitats of ALIEN and ALIENS, giving instead more anthropomorphized Aliens in some of their hybrid forms and, significant here, contrasting settings of the elegantly high-tech areas of the colony ship Covenant, its Industrial area more like the Nostromo in ALIEN, the organic life on the planet in the film — all flora, no fauna, given the Aliens — and a kind of monumental area that could have been built by P. B. Shelley's Ozymandias[2] (explicitly referred to in ALIEN: COVENANT), if the Egypt of Pharaoh Ramses II had developed spacecraft.

The geometric meme of hexagons is repeated in this film, though with more strongly stressed octagons and some pentagons with curved sides.

RDE, Initial Compiler 22May17