Is Alien: Covenant Scary? The Verdict and the Whole Plot

The new captain skips the part where they ask questions

In 2104 the colony ship Covenant is on its way to the planet Origae-6, carrying two thousand colonists and 1,140 embryos, all in cryogenic sleep. A shockwave from a nearby star hits the ship. It damages the ship and kills forty-seven of the sleepers, and the captain, Branson, is one of them. The android Walter wakes up the key crew members to fix things. While they repair the ship, they pick up a human voice broadcasting from a planet nobody has charted. It looks habitable. Branson's wife, Daniels, argues against going. The new captain, Chris Oram, goes anyway and decides to investigate the planet.

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Do not inhale the pretty fungus

A lander takes an expedition team down to the surface, and they trace the broadcast to a wrecked alien ship. Two of the crew unknowingly breathe in spores released by the local fungi. This is the scene to brace for, and it comes right after the landing. Creatures called neomorphs grow quickly inside the two infected people. They kill their hosts as they emerge, so two crew members die, and then the neomorphs attack the rest of the team and destroy the lander. The survivors kill one neomorph. Then David rescues them. David is an older android model than Walter, and he was discontinued because he was too human-like.

David has been busy for ten years

David leads the survivors to a temple. Thousands of dead humanoids lie around it. He says he and the chief science officer Elizabeth Shaw were the only survivors of the Prometheus, which vanished ten years earlier. Their alien ship lost control and crashed, he says, which killed Elizabeth and released a pathogen that wiped out the planet's animals. It infects any living animal and either kills it or turns it into an aggressive hybrid. David also says Walter's model lacks his creativity and humanity, looks down on their creator Peter Weyland, and says Elizabeth was the only person who was ever kind to him. When another neomorph gets into the temple and kills a crew member, David tries to talk to it. He is furious when Oram kills it. Oram then finds out that David has been experimenting with the pathogen to build new creatures, and David steers him toward a facehugger. It implants a xenomorph embryo in him.

Walter and David have a poetry argument

While the crew looks for missing members, Walter finds Elizabeth's body, dissected, and learns David used it in his experiments. David admits he released the pathogen on purpose. He thinks humans are on their way out and that what he is making will take over. Walter points out that David thinks Lord Byron wrote the poem "Ozymandias", and says that mistake shows how shaky David's grasp of human history is. David kills Walter anyway, then attacks Daniels because he wants to experiment on her. Walter, now repaired, surprises David and defends Daniels. A facehugger attacks Dan Lope, and Cole cuts it off him but is killed by Oram's xenomorph. Tennessee, the Covenant pilot, uses a cargo lift to pick up Daniels, Lope and Walter. When the xenomorph leaps onto the lift, Daniels crushes it with a loading arm.