R-rated tentpole movies are back in force. Logan has just opened to rave reviews and enviable box office predictions, and in just a few months Fox are returning to the well of gore and profanity with Alien: Covenant. Ridley Scott’s film is set to be more in line with the horrors of the original Alien than it is the PG-13 rated prequel Prometheus, bridging the gap between the two movies.
Earlier this week a new trailer made its way online, giving a better explanation for what the crew of the sub-titular ship were up to - they’re sets of couples attempting to colonize a new world - and a few more glimpses of the film’s various xenomorph creatures. Despite the movie bringing the gore, though, this was only a green band trailer, despite a darker red band one also promised. Now, however, that’s arrived.
Fox have released an international, red band version of that trailer featuring a few extra, gorier moments, which you can see above.
The trailer is ostensibly the same as the green band, covering the same plot beats, but it has a couple of shots that were deemed too much for PG-13 audiences. After the neomorph first attacks, there’s a shot of a skinned humanoid posed in a strange position (the regular trailer simply had one of the characters falling), and following the hooded figure raising a gun there’s a shot of Callie Hernandez in the shower covered in blood (which was seen in the previous trailer) instead of a cleaner, more generic scream.
These two moments don’t add much in a macro sense, but they do add to the unsettling horror that Ridley Scott is going for. The first is the more intriguing, giving another look at what appears to be a lab set up by Michael Fassbender’s David - after leaving LV-223, the devious android has been researching the Engineers and their various biological technologies. This figure is likely one of those creators, while drawings of facehuggers and other creatures are on the wall. There’s something incredibly unsettling about humanity’s creation analyzing our creators, which will hopefully be probed further by the movie.
The marketing for Covenant so far has been very keen to distinguish itself from Prometheus, with its themes of intelligent creation offset by a grimier, used-future aesthetic. However, the prominent presence of Engineer ideology - and the big question over Elizabeth Shaw’s return - hint things will be a bit more balanced in the finished film.
Source: 20th Century Fox
Next: Alien: Covenant Trailer #2 Breakdown & Analysis
- alien covenant Release Date: 2017-05-19
