Fassbender and the Special Effects Steal the Show While the Rest of the Movie is Pretty Mediocre

Rating: 7/10 (21 May 2017)

*Minor Spoilers Ahead* This movie picks up 10 years after the events of Prometheus, where the crew of the spaceship Covenant are travelling to colonize another planet. Walter (Michael Fassbender) is the only crew member that's not in hyper-sleep. He's an android and they don't have to worry about him aging during the journey. While the ship is recharging using solar sails, it's hit by a random event that causes the ship's power supply to be damaged. The resulting shock wave wakes up most of the crew and actually kills one of them. The crew is visibly shaken and remain nervous about getting back into their pods. They accidentally pick up a transmission from a nearby world that by all appearances seems to be habitable. The highest ranking officer, Cpt. Oram (Billy Crudup) is already worried about his ability to command the ship so he makes a controversial decision to check out the planet despite the reservations of Daniels (Katherine Waterson).
I was really mixed/divided on this movie, I really liked some aspects and other parts had me shaking my head. The one thing that I was consistently impressed with was how great the movie looked. The CGI and the green-screen work was really well done. The planet that the crew visits is beautiful in a cold and emotionless way. The designs of the other environments were interesting and the creature design was top notch (even though you've seen some of them before). I expected this with the budget this movie had (reportedly $97 million) but you still get the occasional movie with a huge budget that has crappy special effects (R.I.P.D. comes to mind). At least the movie held up their end of the bargain from that angle.
I would love to talk about the characters but despite the fact that you have approximately 10-15 crew members that wake up, you only get to know 5-6 of them including Walter. The character development isn't spread around very well (admittedly you don't always get that in this type of movie) but Covenant is more plot driven. I wanted to know more about certain crew members like: Tennessee (Danny McBride), Karine (Carmen Ejogo) or Upworth (Callie Hernandez) but you barely learn their specific function on the crew. They're all married, if you aren't talking about Walter, Daniels or Oram, that's about as much as you get to work with. The movie treats a large percentage of the crew as cannon fodder and while that's not atypical; I still would have liked more.
This movie features one weird yet wonderful performance and the rest range from decent to okay. Michael Fassbender plays a dual role (to describe it further would spoil it) and just like Prometheus, he's one of the top reasons to check this movie out. He's one of the best actors working today and he was a standout here. I liked other members of the cast, Katherine Waterson was a nice mix of emotional yet strong, Danny McBride was an inspired choice for Tennessee. It was cool to see him in a more dramatic role. I also liked Billy Crudup even though it was hard to sympathize with his character in specific instances.
My biggest complaint with Alien: Covenant might seem like nitpicking but I thought it was pretty glaring even for a horror/thriller movie. Some of the crew members are really stupid, I was rolling my eyes or throwing my hands up in the air more than a few times. I was impressed at the beginning as their reasons to visit the planet initially were decent. But it was all downhill from there. The worst was when one character tricked another character into following him/her into a dark room despite the fact he/she just discovered how perverse that character's moral reasoning had become. I also found the ending stretched plausibility pretty far and I had actually guessed the twist about 10 minutes before it happened. They deliberately don't show something and it wasn't hard to figure out from there. When you're supposed to be frozen in suspense, a predictable ending becomes annoying and it took away from the goodwill I had for this movie.
I wanted to give this movie a 6 but I don't think I'd be giving it enough credit. The action wasn't bad even if the marketing was a little misleading (the Xenomorphs aren't in the movie as much as you would expect) and the movie was also much gorier than I imagined. They delivered an interesting movie that furthers the Alien lore. This movie reminded me of Prometheus in the respect that it wasn't bad but it wasn't amazing either. I think this will play better for fans of the Alien franchise (specifically for those who enjoyed Prometheus) because new comers to the Alien franchise are going to be confused without that prior knowledge. I liked this movie but unless you're a die-hard Alien fan or you need to go see a horror movie this weekend, there shouldn't be a big rush to go see this.