"This is a monumental risk not worth taking."

Rating: 7/10 (19 August 2018)

For the diehard 'Alien' series aficionados, this film doesn't pass muster according to many of the reviews posted here on IMDb. I'm not all that fluent in the Alien universe and have to look up terms like neomorph and xenomorph to understand what some of the fans are talking about. My approach to a movie like this is to suspend disbelief from the get go because after all it is science fiction, and because I've watched most of the Alien films distantly apart from one another, it's impossible for me to keep the continuity of the films in any kind of order. With all that said, I found this one to be fairly entertaining, even if some of the decisions made by the Captain and crew of the Covenant defy credibility at times. The biggest mistake, as most viewers cite, was for Captain Oram (Billy Crudup) to deviate from the original mission and head toward Planet 4 with it's 'Country Road' transmission. Someone back at home base would have called that insubordination, though Oram paid for his mistake in a big way. It's too bad almost all the rest had to pay for that mistake too, but that's how it is in these sci-fi/horror film milieus.
What I did like about the story was the Walter/David (Michael Fassbender) dichotomy, and how the synthetics sparred with each other given their roles in the picture. The real horror of the story line is revealed when David admits to Walter that "I was not made to serve. Neither were you." That effectively sets up the twist at the end of the movie (along with the sequel) when David places the pair of Alien embryos in cryogenic suspension, to be released when the Covenant reaches Origae-6. I'll probably be back for that ride too, in the meantime wondering how it is that an android in the form of David managed to grow hair while on Planet 4.