Alien: Covenant|Sutherland Falls & Lake Quill — The Flyover Before the Landing

Before the Covenant's crew choose a landing site, the film gives them an aerial sweep across a world of hanging lakes and vertical water. Location guides place that flyover about sixteen kilometres south-west of Milford Sound, over Sutherland Falls and the lake that feeds it.

The numbers are worth carrying in your head when you stand under it. The falls drop 580 metres in three leaps out of Lake Quill, a glacial bowl hung in the rock with no obvious way in and no obvious way out. William Quill climbed the wet face alone in 1890 to prove the lake was up there. Donald Sutherland, who lived at Milford and had found the falls a decade earlier, got the waterfall; Quill got the lake. Neither of them had any use for the word cinematic, and both would have recognised what the camera is doing here — moving fast over terrain that punishes anyone moving slowly.

Getting there is the honest part of the pilgrimage. The falls sit on the Milford Track, reached on the third day's walk from the hut at Quintin, or from a scenic flight out of Te Anau or Milford. Walk the spur to the base and the updraught throws the bottom third of the water back at you as fog. You will not hear the person next to you, which is roughly the point.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.