The Aliens Movie I Still Never Wanted

Rating: 3/10 (26 May 2017)

The Alien franchise has gotten on Mr. Bones Wild Ride and the end is nowhere to be seen. When audiences saw the giant mummified alien in the first movie, they awed blissfully unaware that they were going to be stuck hearing about them 30 years later. And that is the crutch of everything wrong with this movie: its head has firmly disappeared up its own arse.
There is a danger in writing stories with in depth lore. In crafting the world, you easily forget to actually tell an interesting story. Alien Covenant isn't an interesting story where the characters have agency in the events unfolding, its events 1000 years ago. But then why not just make a movie about events 1000 years ago? Why do we need to involve people in the now? And how does this help them overcome their current situation? Now 1000 years is hyperbole, but the rest of this is a legitimate issue. the whole movie feels like part of a bigger movie, a rather small part that was stretched well beyond its means. As though they took the scene where Kane gets the face hugger attached to his face from the first film, ran it until the xenomorph burst from his chest, and stretched it for an hour and a half before rolling credits. Yes they are planning to add more as the series continues, but everything here was so unsubstantial, its already wearing thin. It just doesn't feel like a complete movie.
This is especially disappointing as there is something to thee characters. There are a lot of them that seem like they would be compelling if given the chance. The religious first mate and his wife/girlfriend, the pilot and his wife who is also a pilot, and the terraforming experts whose husband was the captain before his hibernation pod fell and turned into an oven for some reason (kind of a serious design flaw), there was a lot that they could have done with them if they gave them some sort of control over their lives. Instead they are unceremoniously popped off. Instead we get most of the story from the android, the one character who has as little personality as possible. Cold and unfeeling best describes the movie. Watching Michael Fastbender play two roles would be great if they weren't both him trying to be as stone faced as possible as he teaches himself to play the flute.
There is too much emotional distance between the audience and the Covenant's crew already but the technique with which they are killed is also sorely lacking. Everyone has seen the tail in the shower scene from the trailer. What they don't realize is that i pretty much the entire scene. A good movie teases it, builds suspense gradually until the violins reach a crescendo and the audience is at the edge of their seats. Alien Covenant just drops it on the floor unceremoniously. It is worse than a jump scare, its a jump scare that tries to be more than it is but not very hard. The lack of suspense is palpable, even the xenomorphs are phoning it in. The first alien attack is in bright daylight, it sticks out like a sore thumb as a barely passable SyFy CGI neomoprph is born and immediately goes on a killing spree. In spite of the fact its four inches tall and they probably could have just put the boots to it. The alien is around too much, it climbs walls, walks in plazas, and descends ladders, we know so much about it that it ceases to be an ever present threat and becomes another character that doesn't really have any importance to the story.
Now the alien, what have they done to them? There is something strange about how they consider them to "evolve," the superior alien is the black xenomorph over the white neomorphs but there explanation why falls on its face. Functionally, they are very similar. They move the same, have the same speed, and look generally the same, the only difference being the xenomorph's second mouth. But production wise, they made the xenomorph more complicated and dare say more vulnerable. It transitions through multiple stages to reach maturity, the face hugger, the larval, and the full sized form but that seems hardly as effective as their predecessor which has only two, spore and beast form. As weapon, it just adds more bulk to it, one face hugger needs a foot tall egg while the spore eggs are the size of a mushroom. The spores were even proved more fatal in the flashback, wiping out an entire colony of engineers in seconds. The neomorphs also take a lot more bullets to kill apparently, the infant neomorph takes a face full of buckshot like a champ. It doesn't even bleed. If Ripley fought a colony of that in Aliens, she'd be up a creek. The Covenant crew were lucky there were only two.
I want a new Alien. Alien is one of the best horror movies. Aliens is one of the best action movies. Alien 3... lets just stop at Aliens. But what I am trying to get at is this Alien universe that they are creating is counter productive. It sucks the mystery out of everything and questioning where we came from isn't all that important when there is a giant space insect/penis about to bite your head off.