Look on your works, Mighty Ridley, and despair

Rating: 5/10 (20 May 2017)

It's diverting enough as entertainment, if you show up with really low expectations, but in a genre as rich as science fiction, where stories and situations brim with big ideas and cosmic questions, I would never waste time on a second viewing of this vacuous entry.
I won't catalog the many plot holes. Other reviewers have thoroughly autopsied the story. But I would like to underline just one point that most reviewers rightly reviled: the ineptitude of the crew is epic. The only less competent spaceship crew that I can recall seeing, ever, were the Omarans from the Star Trek TNG episode, Symbiosis. But they had an excuse: they were in chemical withdrawal, in need of their felicium fix. No wonder they didn't know what an electromagnetic coil was.
In contrast, the crew of the Covenant are ill-trained and, it would seem, ill chosen people for the mission. Idiot was a word that leapt to mind a dozen times or more, but it finally got stuck and stayed stuck to Sir Ridley Scott. He does many things wrong in this movie, including having so many alien outbursts from human torsos that there was laughter in the theater. One of the reasons I could laugh was that so few of the crew members had any individual character that I had nothing invested in what happened to them. Billy Crudup stood out as the beta-male captain who was on the verge of tears most of the time. Katherine Waterston held her own as his Ripley-like (and - lite) female 2nd in command. But the rest of the crew, except for the android (Fassbender), seemed interchangeable. At one point, one of the men says, "I've never seen my wife scared before." I didn't even know he had a wife, or which one she was.