hum...
I might be biased but I thought this was a complete waste of my time !
YES this is beautiful, YES there is some action and YES the aliens (and gory scenes) are great in this movie, but well...
I'm not spoiling there but : how can a crew responsible for 2000+ lives in a colony mission be so incompetent ?
I know the whole point of Alien films is to mix human errors and bad luck to make bad times, but this is just too much !
Overall, the scenario was quite hollow.

I'll be spoiling a bit from now on :
[spoiler]
really the only enjoyable moments were brought by the Synthetic stranded on the planet, this old generation David who served Dr Shaw was the only one bringing a bit of character depth, in the end I only wished he would "win" and was pleased to see that that's what happened.
The complete lack of responsibility from the crew was numbing : who would risk losing a spacecraft with thousands of souls onboard waiting to create a colony in a raging storm just to hope to have a contact with his half ? Who would again risk all colonists' lives and decades of preparations just to visit a planet they barely know anything of, just because they received a lost transmission of some singing ?
I know these are classic ways to bring this kind of situation in films, but the way it was brought was not subtle in the least.
In the end, while it was pretty clear for me that they had returned with the wrong David, this was the only really enjoyable moment.
[/spoiler]
Again, I'm encouraging everyone reading me to see for themselves and make their opinion, but for me this was a miss.

The most stupid, careless "scientists" to ever land on a planet.

I was rooting for the aliens this time.

Stupidity like that shouldn't breed.

Ridley, are you going senile??? Who wrote this hot mess???

Let me count the ways

Spoilers ahead

First, they go off mission.

Then, they stomp around with no precautions on an alien planet. Touching things, littering. No oxygen masks. No idea if there are dangerous animals. Dangerous flora and fauna. Dangerous aliens. They separate. Leave others behind. Go into a structure they know nothing about.

A sick guy throws up blood on someone. How does he get sick? Well, they are stomping around, poking things. She screams, don't touch anything while dragging a sick bloody guy and her bloody self through the damned ship.

The other crew member gets on communications screaming, something is terribly wrong. The others are sauntering back at a snail's pace - all of them - instead of sending someone ahead to see what the screaming is about. No matter, they wouldn't have approached with caution anyway.

They get saved. They immediately tell this stranger how many people they have on board. They they wander off even those very weird, strange killing machine *things* just tried to kill them.

Well, that's a good way to lose your head.

Their host is obviously nuts and obviously admires these creatures. Do they get the f*ck out? Nope. The idiot captains walks right into a trap.

The host says take a look. The moron captain does. Well, we know what happens when idiots go poking around a pulsating pod.

Then it goes downhill.

Really, you're rooting for the aliens to kill these idiots off to save mankind from their genetic material.

"At times a thrilling, stomach-churning journey, but one that leaves those on board wondering if the disorientation and down time was worth the investment..."

Read the full review here: http://screen-space.squarespace.com/reviews/2017/5/8/alien-covenant.html

Alien Covenant marks the third Alien movie directed by Ridley Scott and the second prequel to the franchise after Prometheus. They also seem to be getting worse with age.

Prometheus was really a lot of questions searching for answers, ambitious in asking not only about the creation of alien life, but human life as well. However the plan to stretch out these topics into 3 or 4 movies should be met with some skepticism.

Especially considering the basis for this was started by Damon Lindeloff, the creator of Lost and the man most of us are still waiting for answers for most of the things that happened on Lost.

He of course has abandoned this second movie, leaving it in the hands of the far more capable John Logan, but even he struggles to find meaning here, or escape the clichés that have started to grow like a Xenomorph in John Hurt's stomach.

We're dealing with a whole new crew this time; the Covenant. They are headed on a colonial mission to another planet before an electric shock takes out the ship, the Captain, and 47 other members.

Reluctant to get back into their pods for a 7 year journey, the on board crew responsible for the ship's upkeep decide instead to answer a distress transmission coming from another planet.

That's where they find what continues to be the best character in these prequels; Michael Fassbender's David the Android. His motivations and whether he considers himself human or God is constantly in question and Fassbender's soft-spoken performance continues to haunt.

I also really do consider Prometheus to be one of the most gorgeous-looking special films of the last decade and this continues that- from the Covenant ship to the grain fields and other vegetation eerily covering the mostly desolate other terrain of the planet.

We also get the first look at the Neo-morph, who is born the same way, seems a bit faster than the Xeno-morph but the main differences are it doesn't have the Venus fly trap tongue and it can stand like a human. Pretty cool.

Just it's at this point I should probably say that after Aliens there started to be less reason to want these. Alien 3 was fine, Prometheus I thought could really go either way depending on the sequels, and Alien 4 of course was garbage.

The biggest problem here is that it feels so redundant. We get a distress call, the crew investigates, some background characters do stupid things leading to impregnation, someone says "we never should have come", final alien chase.

The aliens, when you can see them, are cool, but there is a lot of downtime between them, and a few quality kills does not a 200 million dollar mega blockbuster make.

It's also really odd that Prometheus does this whole thing of setting up the engineers as the creators of human beings but here they only get one scene and let's just say those looking for more info about them will get angry.

The promise of some larger conversation is in here somewhere but these movies feel so stretched out at this point that when this does get to the few moments of actually having something to say, it's hard to get re-engaged.

The characters don't help either as most just come off like archetypes. Katherine Waterston is the Captain's widow and really the bargain basement Ellen Ripley here.

Billy Crudup plays the faith-based character, and like the last movie, this movie seems to be including that without ever really giving it value in the meaning of life conversation.

But at least those two have some background. I'm so tired of most of these others. The ones who just go tramping through the woods of an unknown planet or show the decision making skills of the Trump administration. You're not supposed to make us root for the alien, guys.

Finally i'm no closer to understanding why these movies are necessary. It's easy to tell what this movie wants to do and it's even easier to see the twist coming a half hour before it even comes.

There are a few nice kills here, I will give the movie that. If you can remember to wake yourself every time Fassbender and Fassbender (he also plays an android named Walter) have a philosophy conversation, you might find some interesting stuff there too. But overall not enough action or thought to make this overly drawn out series seem necessary.

So I go 5/10. For more reviews, check me out on Youtube here- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY_IvAm1bJADConJhDCuq6A

I had a few reservations going in to _Alien: Covenant_. In my opinion there hasn't been a truly great entry to the franchise since _Aliens_, so I was worried that the statistics were against it. I thought _Prometheus_ was incredible from a technical standpoint, but not a very engaging movie, and I was worried we might get the same here. The trailers had been mostly good but I was worried I had seen too much of the third act in them, and I was worried this would spoil the experience for me a little.

What I was not worried about was within ten minutes of the damn thing starting I would think to myself: "Wow, this movie is really poorly made."

Well I guess I'm an idiot because that is exactly what happened. And that feeling never entirely abated over the course of the whole thing.

Don't get me wrong, it's no "_AVP: Requiem_", but I was still very disappointed.

_Final rating:★★ - Had some things that appeal to me, but a poor finished product._