Alien Covenant and Prometheus serve only one purpose

Rating: 1/10 (30 May 2018)

... aside from cynically making money on a ruined franchise...
These two films can only serve one actual purpose: being a cautionary tale against ever allowing corporate America (especially a Wall Street-listed entity) to ever conduct their own space exploration/colonization efforts. What other takeaway is there from this film?
The message, intended or not, is that corporate-funded expeditions will be loaded with naive idiots who have zero training, whose missions will have absolutely zero safety protocols/mission priorities. If these missions have any such protocols, they are meaningless when the missions are crewed by people who are guaranteed to not follow a single protocol, letting impulsivity, selfish emotion, and sheer naive stupidity get the best of them at all times. These are not professionals in the ideological sense. They are merely people who have been paid to do something they are clearly not qualified to do.
Was anyone on these two missions (Prometheus and Covenant) ever trained in any specialty relevant to the mission of dealing with unknown alien environments? Did anyone have any interest in protecting the mission and its members (or protecting the mission from its own members)? Clearly not.
The irony here is that the death of expertise in filmmaking is what causes the unintended cautionary tale of the death of expertise in space exploration in these scripts. These characters stumble stupidly into their contrived scenarios because of the lack of knowledge, skill (or just the sheer disinterest) of the scriptwriters, and everyone responsible for approving said scripts.
There is nothing else of value in these films (certainly not the anthropocentric cliches of gods, techno-fantasy creationism, and narcissistic father figures). I'm pretty sure this "message" is not what Ridley Scott intended. He has demonstrated the same behavior as his films' characters: impulsive decisions are executed on while proper planning is dismissed.
Ridley Scott is George Lucas ruining a franchise all over again, except Ridley Scott does it differently:
Lucas succeeds at outlining a long-term serial, but fails as a director. Ridley Scott succeeds at putting interesting visuals/action on screen, but fails to justify any of it through solid plotting and planning, utterly ruining a series by retconning the best bits into cliches, forgetting what made the original work, and clumsily/hollowly repeating elements of the original with the misguided notion of "that's what the fans/studios want".
When we begin watching a fantasy film, we agree to suspend our disbelief enough to follow a story in a fantastical environment, reached by fantastical methods. Throwing character incompetence in our faces does nothing but sabotage the willing suspension of disbelief. That kind of thing is for sitcoms, not techno-fantasy. Nor does it help to push a series of retcons and shove cliches and cynicism down our throats. This isn't entertainment. It's punishment for anyone with a lick of intelligence, education, knowledge, and sensibility.