An improvement over Prometheus

Rating: 7/10 (25 May 2017)

To open: I know a lot of people really like Prometheus and think its attempt at a new direction was great. Personally I think the basic idea behind it was ambitous and could have been amazing, but it was ruined by trying to include TOO many ideas and too many irellevent characters, and definitely too many for the farcical, inadequate screenplay to hold together.
Watched ALIEN: COVENANT last night. Definitely better than Prometheus. It's clear that the writers decided not to follow the exact story as was intended at the end of Prom, possibly due to the criticism it received. It had a lot of unashamedly obvious references and call-backs to Ridley Scott's original Alien, and even a couple of nods to other classic films of his like Blade Runner, with some very reminiscent scenes, and dialogue lifted straight-from. The first two acts kind of wrap-up what was introduced in Prom, the final act almost comes across as a soft reboot of Alien.
It's an improvement over Prometheus no doubt, but still has a couple of annoyingly stupid characters doing annoyingly stupid things (luckily nowhere near as many is Prom did) and some silly plot elements that seem illogical, unnecessarily convoluted, or just plain unnecessary. (I really wish they had never introduced the black goo nonsense in the first place, the original parasite concept was perfect and much more scary, and adding more vectors muddied the elegance of it)
The action is mostly good, except (ironically) for the scenes with what we now regard as the classic Xenomorph, which are almost totally lacking in tension, neither as shocking as Alien, or ominous as Aliens.
Not wanting to sound too negative: The films looks great and you are getting your money's worth in terms of atmosphere and sound and production design. It has an effectively gritty tone compared to the (what I considered) shallow half-baked fantasy/allegory of Prom and all the performances are good to great. Michael Fassbender again has easily the best moments and plays dual-roles very well.
Over-all i'd say it's a fairly good serious sc-fi action film compared to what little else similar is around these days, it has much less of the confused directionless feel that Prom had, and after having seen this, the sequel it obviously sets up at the end is more welcome now, even if Scott seems happy to comfortably sit and trade on past glories.
I think we can now possibly expect a slew of average to quite good sequels if they carry on in this vein (and he stays in good enough health to carry on directing), I doubt there will ever be anything that has the same impact as the first two again.