Alien: Covenant|Lady Bowen Falls — The Waterfall Standing Behind the Landing Site

Look past the lander in the wide shots of Planet 4 and there is a white line coming out of a hanging valley. That is Lady Bowen Falls — Hine Te Awa — and location records for Alien: Covenant note that the working section of the ship was built on the Milford Sound foreshore with the falls deliberately placed in the background. The production did not have to move it, light it or invent it. It simply pointed the camera so the falls would be in frame.

Bowen drops roughly 160 metres in two steps, and unlike the hundreds of temporary threads that streak these cliffs after rain, it never switches off. It drains a hanging valley fed by snowmelt and by the seven-odd metres of rain the sound collects each year, and it is what supplies the small settlement here with power and drinking water. That is the strange doubleness of the place: a waterfall that reads on screen as untouched wilderness is also the local utility.

The walk is short. From the boat terminal a track runs west along the shore, over the Cleddau footbridge and up through beech, and in about fifteen minutes you are close enough that the air is wet on your face and conversation stops working. Turn around at the lookout and you see the water the ship came down on — the exact reverse of the shot.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.