Director Ridley Scott says, “It’s right in your face” when talking about the scope of Alien: Covenant, but as with previous previews for the upcoming film, an Easter egg will slip by if you look away.
On April 8, IMAX released a featurette specifically designed for director Ridley Scott to encourage people to go see Alien: Covenant on the biggest screen possibly, preferably in IMAX. He claims that the experience of seeing the film in IMAX will put you in the movie: “You have to turn and look to see everything that’s happening,” the director says almost threateningly.
Footage for the new film has already played up the horror roots of the original Sigourney Weaver shriek-fest, but that frightening aesthetic isn’t the only thing Alien: Covenant has in common with the original.
At the very end of this new tidbit, green surveillance footage seems to depict a downed spaceship that looks very similar to the ship from the first film. Here’s the last few seconds in GIF form:
Look at that derelict ship.
In 2012, Prometheus established that these ships were in fact flown by a race generally known as the Engineers; nearly god-like beings who created a bunch of gross creatures as potential weapons.
Here’s the ship in the 1979 Alien:
The ship in the 1979 'Alien'.
In the larger canon of the films, Prometheus took place on a moon called LV-223, which orbits the larger gas planet Calpamos. Because Prometheus is chronologically set way before Alien, many fans assumed this moon was the same one see in Alien. But it isn’t. The moon/planetoid from the original movie is called LV-426, also know as Archeron.
This new Covenant Easter egg looks a lot like the surface of LV-426, which is weird … because the movie shouldn’t be anywhere near that system. According to the official Covenant synopsis, the crew of this ship are “bound for a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy.” Now, Dr. Shaw and David did take one of these Engineer’s ships in Prometheus and seemingly warped to the far side of the galaxy, so it makes sense that the crew of the Covenant can and will bump into them.
But … how the heck does the original space jockey from Alien get back to LV-426? Are we going back to the Calpamos System in Covenant? Could we finally figure out how this spaceship crashed in the first place? If this Easter egg of the downed ship is true, and we are looking at a crashes ship on LV-426, then many threads will be connected.
Then again, it could just be a different downed derelict ship? After all, Ridley Scott isn’t above throwing chest-bursting curveballs. Watch all the way to the end of the new featurette for a glimpse the famous downed ship.
Alien: Covenant is out in wide release on May 19, 2017.
