What the hell happened?

Rating: 4/10 (3 August 2017)

It appears that Scott is done with the Alien saga, whether out of understandable displeasure with its direction in later movies, or "been there, done that". I'm not inclined to watch many interviews in the hope i'll find out why he's murdering a franchise that I thought couldn't be butchered any further.
It has the same basic plot of a 100 D-grade sci-fi movies with a touch of Alien lore sprinkled on it, but understand this: it's not an Alien movie, it's very much a Prometheus movie, so the original title: "Prometheus 2" would have been more apt.
Scott has decided to throw away the accumulated xenomorph lore of ALL the movies that followed his own. Everything you learned about aliens, from Aliens onward, has been jettisoned. So, for instance, you learn who created the xenomorphs, and why, but the moment you do, you laugh as it's impossible; not if you saw the entire saga, especially the Alien vs Predator movies. there's just a sliver of a remote possibility of shoehorning it in, but i assume you'll have to wait for "Prometeus 3" to see whether he's clever enough to bring it all together. However, as things stand right now, i'm not hopeful, the alien origin he's woven is simply incompatible with the rest of the lore. He's simply added several more plot holes.
i won't tell you how the aliens are created, or by whom, but as in the original Alien, there's no queen in the life-cycle, destroying all following "Alien" and "Alien vs" movie lore. it's in the "Alien Vs" movies that you see the earliest encounters of mankind with the xenomorph, brought along millennia ago by the predators to create the perfect hunter in order to battle it. "Alien: Covenant" sets the creation of the xenomorph not long before the events of Alien, maybe some 20 years earlier.
Not content with this, Scott also reduced the xenomorph subspecies from runner, warrior, praetorian and queen to a single being, an assassin. The life-cycle is interfered with in more than one way, while the facehugger is basically the same, there isn't a chestburster anymore, the alien emerges fully formed from its host, a perfect miniature of the fully grown beast. finally, you can't tell from the clip because the camera lingers little on the xenomorph, but it has only a vague resemblance to the beast we all know and love. it no longer has lips, for instance, so its face is frozen in a permanent snarl. the tubes on its back, which H.R. Giger made specifically for the purpose of supporting that massive head, are now there for cosmetic purposes. Scott decided that in this version of the xenomorph, the tubes should be shorter, thinner and should radiate outwards from its back, therefore they're no longer capable of supporting anything. the ugliest change, however, is that the alien used to have tubes that curved from its back over the shoulders, framing the neck, but these grew out of its body organically, while in the new alien, they are actual pipes, thin, separate and pointless.
aside from the changes above, the alien's creator made them to destroy a humanity he hates, yet that same person also wipes out a planet full of engineers he seemed to be rather impressed by, both the people and the technology, so what's the reason behind the genocide? it's never addressed. there's also the problem with the inconsistent look of the engineers: you remember their white, flawless skin? you get to see them like that in flashbacks to the events of Prometheus, yet when you see the flashbacks to the genocide, they are identical to humans except they have the engineer's nose. this change in their look made it necessary for Scott to specify in an interview that the people on the "heaven planet" were engineers. imagine that, needing clarification because otherwise people wouldn't have understood.
AFAIC there were some odd choices in the casting: maybe it's because i find Danny McBride a poor actor, and unpleasant to boot, but to me he's an odd choice for that character. i find that he's best suited to comedy roles than drama or sci-fi. i also dislike Billy Crudup, who unfortunately has quite a lot of screen time. Katherine Waterston is a beautiful young woman if not a good actress, however, in this particular movie, i din't even recognize her and despised her presence; this may be partially due to the makeover she was given, which makes her look like a teenage tomboy. of course, Waterston and McBride's characters are the only two survivors, so two unlikeable characters are the only ones who are in every single scene.
finally, the cgi is variable in quality. impressive and unbeliavably life-like in some scenes (only logic tells you that you're watching a composite shot with bleeding edge cgi in it ) yet devoid of depth in others, robbing the shot of believability. most shot of the huge trees are pretty bad.
For the first time ever, i am at a loss about how to rate a movie. This isn't bad, in fact there's a lot to like there, it's just a BAD ALIEN movie. I would have given it 5 stars in the hope that Scott can bring it all together and close all plot holes in the next installment, but the choice of cast and the variable cgi bring the movie down yet more. I would give it 3 stars if not for the fact that i've seen movies that truly were worth only 3 stars, and this one has so much more to offer, just not another installment in the Alien saga.