Recycling and rail-jumping

Rating: 6/10 (29 August 2018)

** Spoilers follow **
What can I say that's good about this film? Well, the aspect ratio was good. And if you look at some of the shots as still-frames, they look well-composed. The lighting's good in most instances. And the ending is pretty neat. By that I mean the last ten minutes of the film.
Now for the problems in this film. First and most obvious (to me anyway) is the camera that the DOP opted to use. I'm not sure if more than one spec of camera captured the material for this movie but there are quite a few shots that look like high-resolution home video. It appears to be a frame-rate issue (and no I wasn't watching it on one of those horrid high-frame-rate televisions). Note to future film-makers, please do tests to determine if you're getting a 'home video look' to your shots. And if so, find a way to avoid it (whether through a different camera selection or using some kind of film-look filter... or better yet, shooting on actual film).
The next issue is the music. There are sections of score that call back to the score for the 1979 film. However, they're placed in scenes in which they just don't match up. Then there are new pieces of score that sound like excerpts from Star Trek Voyager. Either way, it doesn't suit the material here.
Characters are the next item to address. Similar to Prometheus, there are miscellaneous crew characters that are both flat and borderline silly. In this motion picture, many of them conduct themselves in an unbelievably unprofessional manner. It puts me in mind of the conduct you'd expect from a bunch of campers in a budget slasher horror flick.
Then there's the plot and the timeline -- neither of which make any sense in the context of the original 1979 feature. We know that the events of Prometheus take place around thirty years before the events of Alien. And we know that the events in Covenant take place from that time through to about twenty years prior to the events depicted in the 1979 film. However, it was clearly established that the Space Jockey in Alien had been in the chair long enough that it had fossilized. Its ribs were burst outwards and the familiar leathery large eggs were already in the ship. So we can already conclude that the eggs on the ship in Alien and the death of the Space Jockey had taken place thousands of years ago -- if not millions of years prior to the discovery of the ship by the crew of the Nostromo. The idea of David being the one who completed the development of the genetic engineering of the bio-weapon into the form of the Alien that we see in the 1979 motion picture is simply not possible considering the time-frame.
Further complicating this is the concept of the facial structure and bulk of the Space Jockey being a suit worn by a large humanoid (as proposed in Prometheus). Again, this doesn't match up with the position of the ribs of the Space Jockey in Alien. I'm surprised that the writers didn't instead go with the concepts laid out in the Dark Horse graphic novels that followed the film Aliens.
Even if we were to go with the idea that it is a large humanoid in a suit then we have to deal with some other questions raised by Covenant: If in fact they are such an advanced race, then how is it that they wouldn't include some form of authentication for vessels of their own that approach their home-world? How is it possible that their planetary defense system consists solely of a single shield? Where are the rest of their ships? For a space-faring race, how is it that ships from other worlds that they have very likely explored are not returning to investigate the crisis on their home-world? Are we to believe that no distress signal was ever sent from their home planet in response to being bombarded by their own bio-weapons? It just seems like the details weren't thoroughly thought out. And this seems to be a recurring problem in modern film-making -- especially when dealing with prequels and sequels.
Next on the list is the use of recycled lines from other films (including Alien and Blade Runner). Now I'm not sure what secret screenplay writing manual instructs writers to recycle lines as some supposedly clever way to tie a new script into an existing one but I have news for whomever believes that. It doesn't work. Recycling lines is a sure-fire way to cheapen both the original film that's being referenced and the new film -- all in one go. It isn't clever and it comes across as juvenile.
Creature design is another issue. Although I suspect that the idea of making monkey-aliens is supposed to suggest to the audience that there's a primitive stage right before the official Alien stage in the creature design, it unfortunately ends up looking ridiculous. The crazed little monkey-aliens running and jumping around are more comical than creepy and turn the scenes into something akin to slapstick.
Finally, I have to mention the scenes that just don't seem to fit the tone of Alien. These include the flute-playing lessons and the aforementioned mini-alien antics in the wheat field. And if we go back to the previous film (Prometheus), there are the scenes that include the crew-member talking to a snake alien like it's a cute pet, the two guys howling in the hallways in an attempt to anthropomorphise their mapping spheres, and the very silly head exploding scene in the laboratory.
Keeping consistency of tone is what's really hurt this series of films. It was very apparent starting with Alien Resurrection and carried right through to Covenant. It's unfortunate because a sophisticated and well-designed film like Alien really deserves better.