Alien: Covenant Footage Reaction – It Looks Pretty Awesome & James Franco Is Part Of It

The upcoming installment in the Alien franchise, Alien: Covenant, has just premiered both a trailer as well as 15 minutes of footage at a 20th Century Fox preview event in New York. By all reports from folks who saw it, director Ridley Scott has taken it back to the series roots – solidly in the horror genre.

As part of the clips that were shown it was revealed that James Franco is indeed a part of the titular Covenant’s crew. As a shout out to Erik’s writing earlier this summer, he’d guessed that he might be joining film back as early as July. The Covenant in the name of the movie is actually a colony ship; Fans of the series will expect it to be another one of Weyland-Yutani’s shake and bake operations. So there’s a few spoiler-guesses floating around, so let’s hit the reactions before getting to them. The spoilers won’t start until after the twitter reactions.

The attendees who were there were given the green light to share their impressions on social media and they all point to the idea that the film’s expected hard-R rating will be definitely well deserved.

FOX just showed us first footage from Alien: Covenant. Make no mistake. This is a full blown, bloody HORROR film, in line with original.

— Sean O’Connell (@Sean_OConnell) December 8, 2016

Wow, we just watched the gnarliest 15 minutes (plus 1st trailer) for #AlienCovenant. Aliens busting out of body parts; super intense action! pic.twitter.com/ArdBgLhTjB

— Fandango (@Fandango) December 8, 2016

Well #AlienCovenant looks intense. Gory. Terrifying. Disgusting. Can’t wait to see the rest of it

— Angie J. Han (@ajhan) December 8, 2016

https://twitter.com/jhoffman/status/806940249439997952

Katherine Waterston’s character looks to be way more Ripley than woman-in-distress. Kind of a badass. #AlienCovenant @joblocom

— Arctic Ninja Paul (@arcticninjapaul) December 8, 2016

So there you go, it’ll be back to basics intense, kind of gross, and very definitely a horror film. Now, if we want to get back to talking about Franco and how he might fit into the storyline, we’ll pick this up after the following image.

Alrighty, let’s put some pieces together. First off he’s reported to be the captain of the Covenant, and husband to Katherine Waterson’s character Daniels (one of the other crew members).  Now that’s all fine and well, and not especially spoiler-worthy. However if you combine that with the fact that the website the Playlist back in June ran a story mentioning Waterson’s casting in an unrelated film. The last line of the article made reference to her character being the mother of Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver’s character in the earlier Alien films).

Somewhat firming up the rumor would be that the article has been changed and the new last two lines read as:

Late last year, she was cast as the main female character in Ridley Scott‘s prequel “Alien: Covenant.“
Spoiler removed at the request of the studio.

The studio doesn’t do that kind of thing (generally), unless the original information was indeed correct.

So what does that mean? Well, James Franco is dad to one of the all-time greatest cinematic sci-fi heroines.

And now we wait for another week or so until Fox deems it time to deliver on the trailer to the rest of us.