In an effort to beat the cellphone camera-wielding ushers of the world to YouTube, Fox dropped the new, presumably attached to Logan, trailer for Alien: Covenant late last night. It’s a gory, fun trailer, but we have a few quibbles with it.
To start, we’re a little less impressed this time around, given that “The Last Supper” was such an effective and interesting piece of marketing, and it kind of feels like Fox’s promo people shot themselves in the foot here. To go from the fun-yet-dark foreshadowing in that preview to a blast-’em-up chest-bursting Inception-hornathon is a bit of a downgrade. It’s a shame that the creepy atmospherics of the early part of the trailer (those shots of the quiet landscape and the “where are all the animals?” narration are actually pretty effective) give way to that nonsense at the end with Katherine Waterston’s character rappelling off the side of a spaceship while it takes off, but that’s sort of how the Alien franchise goes as a whole, right? You start off with this super scary premise all assisted by excellent design and a swell script (the whole damn first film) and then the whole thing devolves into action (we love you, Aliens, but we liked your brother more).
Regardless, there’s some fun things to tease out here, and the trailer leaves us with a lot of questions. Who is the cloaked figure we’ve seen in a couple of the shots? It’s most likely got to be Noomi Rapace or the sinister Michael Fassbender robot from Prometheus, right? Since we see a grey one and a classic jet-black one near the end of the trailer, how many different kinds of Xenomorphs will we have in this thing? Why’d they go ahead and spoil that Billy Crudup gets facehugged? Also, why on Earth did they send like six couples to start a generational colony on a habitable planet? Did they see Passengers and want to avoid that whole “Chris Pratt is a creep” thing that movie had troubles with? Finally, why do we have to wait until May to see it? We want it now!
Alien: Covenant hits theaters on May 19.
