It’s obvious that we’re all excited about Alien: Covenant. Every new little piece of footage or information just elevates that excitement, and at CinemaCon 2017, it happened again. Fox showed a clip that featured destruction and death on a level that’s rather rare, even for the violent Alien franchise.
This footage definitely contained spoilers—so if you don’t want to know anything about the movie before you see it in May, click away.
The footage started with an arc-like ship flying in the air. Think of it like an upside-down U, with the opening at the bottom. It then links with the iconic ship we recognize from LV-426 and other Alien films—the craft is a similar shape, but is flying in a different configuration. They link with their open ends, kind of like a puzzle, and we realize this is all happening above a civilization of creatures. They aren’t humans. Nor are they engineers. They seem to be something in between. It’s then that we see David—the android we first met in Prometheus, played by Michael Fassbender—on the ship, where he unleashes hundreds of black canisters. These are the same ones we saw in Prometheus (and in the image above) and, as they hit the ground, they begin to destroy the population with the black, liquid death.
The human-like creatures are running and screaming as this black death just takes over everything. Bodies rip apart. Bodies melt. They climb on each other but there is no stopping it. David and his disease, or whatever you’d call it, have wiped out this entire population. The footage continues, and it’s revealed that this is the planet the Covenant will land on. The crew will see this very destruction with their own eyes and not be able to fathom what happened here. We think they are about to find out.
After a montage of action and horror aboard the ship with the iconic xenomorph, we then see David again, and he admits that the human race is over but that he has found perfection. No—he has created it, and we see images of the xenomorph. (This was also revealed in footage screened a few weeks ago.)
Alien: Covenant is fast approaching. It opens May 19.