If you're going to expand the universe of the single best horror sci-fi movie of all time... maybe you should at least try.

Rating: 1/10 (10 August 2017)

Same lazy filmmaking as Prometheus and suffers exactly the same flaws.
-Lazy, inadequate character introductions / developments. -Very poor writing (both dialog and story). -Too much focus on visuals.
The script made me think/feel like it was written by a high schooler. Oddly enough when this hit me about 1/3rd into the movie I realized I had forgotten that the exact same insight had struck me when watching Prometheus. The frequent use of the f-bomb in this movie could possibly be a homage back to the third movie, Alien 3, which was notorious back in its time for the liberal use of the word. This was even parodied in a scene in the fourth film. Known as "the fork scene". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUhnK4Jho8M
Anyway, the dialog is childish and bad.
The Christian character. "Hey guys I'm Christian and I have faith OK, don't bully me." You know a more subtle and cinematic way of translating this to the audience might have been to just have the camera raise up from the floor, up along a sitting man's legs then to his hands holding a bible and maybe rosary beads. His face in contemplation. A while later we are shown this man jovially mocked by another member of the crew for his faith.
But no, we'll just go with the character announcing his motivations/beliefs in the most unpolished way possible.
Oh and let's also have him use the most cliché Christian parables, and I do mean THE MOST cliché and well known ones. In an awkward way too. At one point he, as the captain, needs to regroup his people, and uses the "gather my flock" analogy. It makes you cringe, it's forced, it's bad. I mean... why not use lesser known Christian analogies / parables? Something that sounds religious and will have people wondering, oh cool, was that Christian? I'll have to look that up. Oh cool it was, thanks Alien Covenant I learned something.
But no. we'll just put the single most cliché ones in like we just wrote it down from memory and couldn't even be bothered to see if there was something better we could use or smarter we could do with it.
See why I'm arguing a high schooler wrote this?
There's just too many dumb decisions made by the crew to go over so I'll leave that.
The film seems to struggle with what it wants to be. Is it a horror movie? Is it an action movie?
Sure seems more like the latter. At one point you have two cyborgs fighting hand to hand in a fight sequence copy pasted from the Matrix.
I just don't see how that belongs in an Alien movie. The aliens, engineers, biological weapons, slippery blood and IQ relieved crew aren't enough dangers? We need kung-fu robots in the mix too apparently.
You see the problem here? There's just so much danger around, nothing is scary. The characters are so lazily introduced and developed we don't care about them at all.
Take a look at the first Alien movie which is legit scary to this day. The first action scene doesn't happen until what? halfway through the movie? When the guy has his chest burst. We've walked on LV-426 with these guys, we've had breakfast with them, we've seen them at their jobs, in their underwear and interacting with each other for half the movie before things get wild.
You have a curve of tension, fear and action that slowly gather pace along the entire movie which then culminates in an intense nerve-wracking climax. Here's the trailer for Alien. It works on the same concept. Mood, immersion, then tension that escalates and culminates. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n75AEkRrwJg
--- Covenant is more like a modern super hero movie. With hollow plastic characters, bad dialog, awful pacing, dumb plot elements left unexplained like no helmets on an alien world etc etc... the list is endless.
Another thing that makes me think the Prometh and Cov scripts are written by a high schooler is the plot devices used to terminate crew. Many of them are disposed of by xenomorphs and other beasts when they are distracted. Because that's a scary scene right? A person is distracted and you can see the danger creeping up behind them. Which you know, it can be, if it's done well with some thought and effort put into it like in Alien.
So in those scenes you need the people to be distracted... hummm what can we have them distracted by?... let's see... oh I know... sex!
In Prometheus, stranded crew in a clearly dangerous cave on an alien planet are left unmonitored by anyone because the captain back on the ship decides to go get his sex on, the rest of the crew? I dunno, they're off doing... something I guess.
In Covenant we have two crew members unable to hear a ship-wide alarm of an alien organism onboard... because they're distracted by the thing that distracts us the most dude! getting it on in the shower! Apparently the showers are exempt from severe on-ship alerts and even if they weren't, the loud music would mask it I'm sure. This is literally Friday the 13th level "horror". It's a joke.
And on and on like this it goes through the entire movie.
Waste of time, insulting to everyone involved.