Alien Covenant dreams of a future without Workplace Safety Policies

Rating: 6/10 (18 May 2017)

Formulaic to a tee, the latest offering from the Alien franchise is a repackaged story line with a less frightening creature feature. Most notable is the clear but unexpected stance the film takes on colonising planets without an advising Workplace Health and Safety Officer in attendance. Let this be a cautionary tale regarding failure to implement appropriate biohazard and fire safety controls, children.
Following on from the 2012 film, Prometheus, Alien Covenant picks up 10 years later with a spaceship of colonists from Earth headed to a habitable planet. As in the previous films, crew are maintained in hyper-sleep for the long journey and tended to by a synthetic human, Walter (Michael Fassbender). Struck by an energy flare on route, the crew is awakened to manage repairs to the ship and subsequently decide to take a side trip to investigate a mysterious transmission nearby. Can you guess what else might be lying in wait on this conveniently located new planet?
Laden with jump-scares and poor life choices, the Prometheus and Covenant films are prequels to the initial film, Alien, released in 1979. Bound by trying to maintain the 'look and feel' of a movie made with special effects from over 30 years ago, Covenant does well to replace creature puppets with computer generated nightmares while trying not to be so flashy with upgrades as to make the 'future' obsolete.
In place of substantive character development, early dialogue awkwardly refers to characters by their relationship, specifically 'my wife', rather than allowing a natural progression of backstory for each character, presumably to save time and get to the gore. I can only hope that the overuse of the wifely title was to lay grounds for a future drinking game at the end of a harrowing movie marathon weekend. Although, realistically, if you encouraged drinking every time a previous plot point from the series is reused, you'd be well on your way. It really does feel like the script was put together by joining the dots on a collection of Post-It notes from a brain storming session called 'Things which worked really well last time'.
And yes, fans of the genre; the androids of Covenant, comfortingly, continue to be ambiguous in their agendas. However, the strong, independent, doe-eyed female lead (Katherine Walterston), is disappointingly not as kickass as Ripley from the original films.
Overall, if there is a special place in your heart for the mythos of the Alien universe, you know you'll go see this edition in spite of it all to revel in the nostalgia of a recycled premise. However, I would recommend a lowering of your expectations first. No, lower. Lower. There. Now you're ready.