Not as bad as Prometheus, but that's no endorsement

Rating: 4/10 (23 May 2017)

Prometheus......... I simply didn't like that movie at all. Whilst its themes were interesting, it did nothing with them, and was content to let what was supposed to be intelligent characters, die deaths that even a dumb blonde in a slasher movie would escape from.
I had ZERO intentions of watching Alien: Covenant in the cinema after the mess Prometheus was, but it was cheap night at the cinema, the missus was insistent that she wanted to see it, and we all know, you don't disappoint your missus..... you let Ridley Scott do it instead!
To be fair to the scriptwriter for this movie, he was utterly hamstrung by having to write a continuation of Prometheus, I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
At the end of Prometheus, Elizabeth Shaw and Davids head were flying off to go and find answers as to why our 'creators' wanted humans dead.
Well that story line was quietly ignored. This movie decided that the big build up of the Engineers in Prometheus was a dead end, so literally killed them off, no interaction, no questions answered, David decided to simply exterminate them.
Prometheus was Shaws story, with David being a bit of a dick.
Alien: Covenant is the story of David being a monumental dick throughout, Shaw is superfluous to the story, but at least is still more relevant than Vickers was in Prometheus, or her "DAD!" revelation.
The problem Prometheus had, is the utter stupidity of the characters and the script. Supposed intelligent scientists putting themselves in unnecessary danger throughout, just to move the story forward.
Well it seems that Ridley Scott and the new scriptwriter learned nothing of that experience, because its stupidity all over again, as the new crew make the same mistakes again with no helmets that lead to the inevitable infection that kicks it all off.
Scanning a new planet and noticing storms and landing sites (in water?), but not spotting the massive Engineer city that is literally within walking distance is just a reminder of problems that existed in Prometheus.
Throughout this movie and Prometheus, David has always been painted as an android of intelligence, but the motives of David end up looking stupid.
Its obvious now that David is going to be used as the catalyst for creating the Xenomorph we got to see in Alien, a shame really as just like the Space Jockey, mystery is no bad thing, but I digress.
Davids conversation with Weyland at the start of the movie and his discussion about life, and how Weyland will die, but he will not, and Davids appreciation for music, and all the other things in life, just doesn't fit with him being responsible for creating the xenomorph species.
This is a species that has no passion for anything other than killing and procreating its species. There's no intellectual conversation, no love of music, of art, of life, the xenomorph is everything David is not, so when he calls it the "perfect organism", the description is directly at odds with how David sees himself.
I suppose what irritates me most, is that both Damon Lindeloff and Jack Paglen seem utterly incapable of looking at their scripts, seeing the problems in them, and not doing some slight revisions to fix the script so that a whole host of minor problems, don't end up being the running theme.
The McGuffin of one of the characters hearing a really not very convincing John Denver track over his headset, and that being the catalyst of going to a different planet rather than the one they've been training for as well as being responsible for the lives of over 2000 people, simply isn't convincing enough.
The set of circumstances that lead a ship full of humans, with a synthetic android and a storm that disables the ship at the exact right time so they can hear an indistinct tune, that leads them to delay their mission to investigate a planet that has a similar model synthetic android that needs humans to continue his experiments........ is the result of a lazy script with far too many leaps of faith to be taken seriously.
Its basically a partial retread of the original Alien, except that movie had a plausible script, with a team of 'space truckers' who paid more attention to quarantine and their own safety, had a plausible reason to investigate the planet they landed on.
And thats the key, Alien and Aliens had a plausibility to their scripts that didn't make anything the characters did look out of place, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant seemed to have gone out of their way to insult audiences with slapdash scripts with characters that should have struggled to get work in a McDonalds, let alone scientists and trained ones on important missions.
I won't be seeing the sequel to this movie at the cinema, I feel both vindicated and saddened that Alien: Covenant is more of the same crap as Prometheus, but gutted that a franchise that includes Alien and Aliens has descended into this rubbish, and even more gutted that the proposed follow up to Aliens that was going to ignore Alien 3 and Resurrection seems to have been abandoned in favour of Ridley Scotts Prometheus trio.
Michael Fassbender is a decent actor, and like many others, his performance is the standout (Danny McBride wasn't bad either!), but the character of David feels like it really should have been in a different series of movies.
Gutted the Alien franchise has plumbed the depths of stupidity again, it's time it was facehugged.