Alien: Covenant is a 2017 science fiction horror film directed and produced by Ridley Scott, and written by John Logan and Dante Harper from a story by Michael Green and Jack Paglen. A joint American and British production, it is part of the Alien franchise, serving as a sequel to Prometheus (2012). It features returning star Michael Fassbender, with Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, and Demián Bichir in supporting roles. It follows the crew of a colony ship that lands on an uncharted planet and makes a terrifying discovery.

In a prologue,[a] business magnate Peter Weyland speaks with his newly activated android in a lakeside apartment. The android chooses the name “David” for himself after observing Michelangelo’s statue. Weyland states that one day they will search for mankind’s creator together. David comments on his unlimited lifespan as compared to Weyland’s, which unsettles Weyland.

In 2104 AD,[b] eleven years after the Prometheus expedition, the colonization ship Covenant is seven years from reaching planet Origae-6 with 2,000 colonists in stasis and 1,140 human embryos in cold storage. The ship is monitored by Walter, an advanced android model that physically resembles David. When a neutrino burst damages the ship, Walter reanimates the human crewmates. The ship’s captain, Jake Branson, is incinerated when his stasis pod malfunctions. While repairing the ship, the crew picks up a transmission of a human voice from a nearby planet which appears eminently more habitable than Origae-6. Despite the protests of Daniels, Branson’s widow, that this new “perfect” planet is too good to be true, the new captain, Christopher Oram, decides to investigate.

With pilot Tennessee maintaining the Covenant in orbit, his wife Maggie Faris flies a lander to the planet’s surface, where an expedition team tracks the transmission’s signal to a crashed alien ship. Crewmembers Ledward and Tom Hallet are infected by spores from fungus-like organisms; Christopher’s wife, Karine Oram, helps the rapidly deteriorating Ledward back to the lander, where Faris quarantines both inside the med-bay. An alien creature, the neomorph, bursts from Ledward’s back, killing him, and also kills Karine. Faris tries to dispatch the creature with a shotgun, but accidentally triggers an explosion, immolating herself and destroying the lander. Another neomorph bursts from Hallet’s mouth, killing him. The creatures attack the remaining crew, fatally injuring crew member Ankor. The remaining crew destroys one neomorph before David, who survived the Prometheus mission, appears and drives off the other.