This has become my favorite "Alien" movie, interesting and gripping all the way.

Rating: Null/10 (21 September 2017)

Ridley Scott directed this, if you look at his body of work he seems to specialize in big, sweeping movies and this one fits in that category. While I enjoyed all the previous "Alien" movies after seeing this one it has become my favorite, for the overall story, the cinematography, and the sound track. I watched it at home on BluRay from my public library.
It opens with one of the most magnificent 5-minute scenes ever. Filmed mostly in New Zealand we see two characters in a large all-white room with wide panoramic floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a lake with mountains in the background. There is a black grand piano, there is one painting on one wall, there is a small statue of Michelangelo's David, and in the solitary chair a man dressed in all white. The other character questions him, the man in the chair is an intelligent animatronic created by the other man. He takes the name David.
Then the movie cuts to a large spaceship the "Covenant". It is the year 2104, it is carrying a crew of 15, plus 2000 colonists, and over 1000 cryo- preserved embryos. They are all in a state of suspended animation, headed to a distant planet chosen as the site of a new human colony. They are still a bit over 7 years away. An animatronic man, who looks just like David from the opening scene, cares for continuous operation of the spaceship, but we find out his name is Walter. He speaks to the ship's computer called Mother.
Upon deploying the large sail-like solar panels to recharge the ship's energy cells an unexpected burst of solar energy disrupts everything, resulting in the ship's crew coming out of cyro prematurely. The systems are rectified but now they are awake. They get a strange signal, garbled, but one crew member identifies it as a John Denver song. They locate the source and determine it is a nearby planet, Earth-like, and after some deliberation decide to divert to there. (Would a real expedition do that? Unlikely, but let's go with it for the entertainment.)
And that is where all the action really begins. Michael Fassbender is his usual superb self at creating two different roles, the initial David with a British accent and the later Walter, a later and improved model, with an American accent. The movie of course has a number of good actors but it all depends on Fassbender.
SPOILERS - read at your own risk. It turns out that the music source was a crashed ship from an expedition some years earlier, when they encounter David he tells them how they all died but we eventually find out he was lying, and he was responsible for their deaths, and subsequently experimenting with breeding and hybridizing new forms of aliens. This originated in the opening scene all those years earlier when David and his creator discussed "creation" and where did various species come from? David had become a creator. As the movie ends and the aggressive aliens have been fought off, the remaining crew and colonists head again for the original destination we see what appears to be Walter attending to everything but it was in fact David, who also brought aboard some alien embryos. This sets up for the sequel which, according to IMDb, is now in the planning stages.