Good effort - but the story is collapsing under its own weight

Rating: 6/10 (6 August 2017)

Covenant is one of those movies you enjoy while your watching it - but realize it wasn't quite as good as you thought it was the minute it's over.
The ingredients of a good - even great - movie are all there. The production values are top-notch. The sets and special effects aren't just good - they're works of art. The acting is superb - especially Michael Fassbender's dual performance as two androids who look exactly alike but nonetheless have very distinct identities.
And the characters and story - well both are impressive. The characters are believably imperfect. You won't always like them - but you can almost always identify with them. The story is impressive too, in that it attempts to build a complex interweaving mythology between the origin of the Xenomorph aliens and the origin of Man.
And therein lies the problem.
The more the franchise tries to explain the origin of the Xenomorphs, and especially as it attempts to make a connection between the Xenomorphs and humans, the less intriguing and scary they become. In the original Alien and its immediate sequel Aliens, the Xenomorphs were terrifying and intriguing precisely because they had no backstory - and because they had no previous connection to the human race. Like the shark in the original Jaws, the Xenomorphs from the first two Alien movies were utterly terrifying because it had no personal connection to us. We could at least understand Darth Vader or a Klingon's motivations. A Xenomorph, however, has no more sympathy or connection to us than a spider does to a fly caught in its web.
Or at least they didn't. Not until the last couple of movies. While Prometheus and Covenant are a vast improvement over the third and fourth entries, in trying (frankly a little too hard) to explain the origin of Xenomorphs as a second-generation by-product of human intervention, Prometheus and Covenant have failed to recapture the mythos of the first two.
It's what made the original Xenomorphs scary. Rather than being a Frankenstein-esque creation of our own doing - they were actually alien.