Alien Day Brings With It Our First Look at ‘Alien: Covenant’
Yesterday was “Alien Day,” the latest “holiday” concocted by studio marketing teams to continue interest in their franchises (see also: Star Wars Day, Force Friday and Back to the Future Day). The crass commercialization can almost be overlooked because Alien Day actually had some cool events for fans, including screenings with cast members and some cool new collectibles that only the luckiest fans were able to get their hands on. Amidst all of that, Fox wisely took the opportunity to promote their upcoming Alien film, the Prometheus sequel Alien: Covenant, with a first look that should get fans speculating.
First, here’s the photo shared on the Alien Facebook page along with the note, “The mission begins”:
OK, it’s a patch on a spacesuit, nothing groundbreaking, but it may tell us at least a little bit about the plot of the upcoming film. The patch is for the colony ship Covenant and the logo looks remarkably similar to that covenant, the Ark of the Covenant. You may recognize it from Raiders of the Lost Ark, but the central design has been around since the days of The Bible. The patch depicts the Ark’s kapporet, the gold lid that covers that ark with the two cherubim with their winds outstretched protecting the contents, the two stone tables of the Ten Commandments. It doesn’t take a biblical scholar to know what happens when you mess with the power of the Ark of the Covenant.
In Raiders, Belloq and Toht were famous consumed by the Holy Fire (Toht’s face melted off and Belloq’s head straight exploded), but it’s not just in popular culture. 1 Samuel 6:19 reads, “He struck down some of the men of Beth-shemesh because they had looked into the ark of the LORD. He struck down of all the people, 50,070 men, and the people mourned because the LORD had struck the people with a great slaughter.” It would certainly seem like the crew of the Covenant are about to discover a force they were never meant to reckon with(giant f---ing aliens) and humanity will pay dearly for it.
Bound for a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy, the crew of the colony ship Covenant discovers what they think is an uncharted paradise, but is actually a dark, dangerous world – whose sole inhabitant is the “synthetic” David (Michael Fassbender), survivor of the doomed Prometheus expedition.
Alien: Covenant opens in theaters on October 6, 2017.