Disappointing mixture of "Best of Alien"

Rating: 3/10 (21 May 2017)

I really looked forward to see this movie, although the trailers already gave a lot of stuff away (which trailers do all the time these days). Now after seeing the movie I must say I'm deeply disappointed.
The movie starts off well, Ridley Scott knows how to shoot space stuff. We get a short look at the crew (including two main characters: a Ripley wanna-be-double and Fassbender-Android v2.0 "Walter") before they make a first stupid decision to cancel their original mission to follow a strange signal from another inhabitable planet. Almost the whole crew goes there unprotected and as expected, hell breaks loose when they get in contact with the black goo pathogens planted by nobody else as Fassbender-Android v1.0 "David". Crew members get infected and give birth to alien like monsters which in turn kill the crew one after another. Then evil David saves the day just to feed the other crew members to his homemade alien zoo.
It looks like a movie that the filmmakers made a u-turn in the middle of shooting. First they were on the path to Prometheus 2. Then the whole Blomkamp thing went viral and they probably thought they needed to put more original Alien ingredients into the sauce. That way the whole Shaw story line about the Engineers is scrapped in a two minute flashback, after that the movie is basically a reboot of the first Alien. All of that results in a disjointed "Promalien".
I found the CGI a lot worse than Prometheus. The CGI aliens look bad, especially the newly born babies which don't look disgusting anymore but almost cute. The neomorph looks fine but only has minimum screen time. The egg-facehugger-chestburster-xenomorph cycle is done in five minutes and our beloved xeno looks awful in CGI. It's not "Alien 3" badness, but still inferior to all predecessors (including AvP). It's really not threatening at all, it behaves more like an angry cat.
The action sequences had too much fast cuts. The attack sequence in the wheat field is happening too fast, in almost darkness and with too many similarly looking characters. When they try to defeat the xenomorph two times in the end I couldn't make any sense of the action on the screen, and honestly, I didn't care. The main actress is miscast as a Ripley replacement, I never believed her when showed toughness or bad-assery.
Fassbender is good as always but has too much screen time including a cringe-worthy scene with him showing his "brother" to play the flute. And he continues to be the villain for a potential followup movie. I don't know if I like this.
In the whole "Alien: Covenant" is a gigantic failure. I thought I would never say that but I think the Alien franchise would do better without Scott and his irritating decisions. Like with Star Wars, the whole idea of a sequence of prequels which need to somehow connect to a lot older movie seems to generate mediocre and forced story lines. Even worse they seem to damage the great mystery of the original movies: the xenomorph is now basically just the result of the experiments of a mad robot. That's it, really?