The first trailer for Alien: Covenant, Ridley Scott’s newest film in the Alien franchise, has burst onto the internet like a xenomorph snapping John Hurt’s breastbone, and the overall theme is: blood. Whether it’s smeared along the floor of one of the series’ trademark long, dimly lit corridors, spurting from a doomed crewmember’s spine, or spattering all over Callie Hernandez’s face, the trailer wants you to know that in Alien: Covenant, things that should stay inside the body are coming out, like it or not. (And things that don’t belong there are headed in, ranging from the familiar facehugger ovipositors to some sort of spores flying straight into an ear canal.) The film, a direct sequel to 2012’s Prometheus, features a new unlucky group of space travellers encountering unfriendly aliens and lots and lots of body horror. Katherine Waterson takes over final girl duties from Prometheus’ Noomi Rapace, Billy Crudup plays the reckless ship captain, and a teary-eyed Danny McBride (!) presumably plays one of the salt-of-the-earth Weyland-Yutani employees that made the tone of 1979’s Alien so unique. The film will have some familiar faces as well: Michael Fassbender will play an all-new android who happens to be identical to the one he played in Prometheus, and, although they don’t appear in the trailer, Rapace and Guy Pearce will reportedly reprise their roles.
And then there’s the music. There’s not exactly a shortage of creepy pop music in trailers lately, but using eden abhez’s “Nature Boy” seems especially egregious. For one thing, it’s been a slow and haunting song since Nat King Cole first recorded it; there’s no need to creep it up. This version adds unnecessary reverb to the vocals and a low-pitched drone below them, managing to sound like a reimagining of the song without actually being one—although the single-piano-note transition to generic Terminator-style drums toward the end is new. But the producers seem to be making a classic Baz Luhrmann blunder: mistakenly believing America has somehow forgotten the song’s iconic usage in 1948 box-office flop The Boy with Green Hair. Don’t get involved in a land war in Asia, don’t overestimate the public’s intelligence, and never, never invoke the legacy of a beloved film about a boy with green hair, lest you be besieged by Joseph Losey’s legions of online fans. Unless, of course, the soundtrack choice is a clue: a canny hint that the ever-changing xenomorph’s true face is that of a young, green-haired Dean Stockwell.
RKO/IMDb
This mystery, as well as many others relating to aliens, covenants, and (possibly) green hair, will be solved when Alien: Covenant hits theaters on May 19, 2017.
