The focus here is on ideas, not scares

Rating: 6/10 (19 August 2017)

Plot; A colonization ship intercepts a musical transmission from a planet able to sustain human life and sets out to investigate.
I don't know that the titular aliens of this long running franchise really needed the sort of convoluted and at times logic-challenged origin story that Covenant and the previous entry Prometheus provide, but I do appreciate the attempts--if not always the execution--at thought provocation and world building. Unfortunately all of that philosophical mumbo jumbo doesn't mesh very well with the seemingly half hearted attempts at old fashioned monster movie scares. It doesn't help that the crew here is mostly generic and interchangeable. The saving grace is the always compelling Michael Fassbender, wonderful in a dual role.
I thought that Prometheus was a handsomely made film with ham-fisted ideas. Conversely, Covenant at times looks a tad cheap (the budget was $30 or so million dollars less than its predecessor), and the aliens in particular fare poorly. But I thought its ideas, while not always fleshed out very well, were a tad more interesting. After underperforming, I'm not sure we're going to get another entry in this series any time soon, but if we do, I'm game for a return to a simpler formula of screams and scares.