In Space, no one can hear you Yawn

Rating: 3/10 (22 May 2017)

The chief problem here is, all of those old Alien motifs – slimy power jaws, lunging facehuggers, and acid blood – have been repeatedly seen and mined already, Ridley, old bean. They're just no longer particularly scary to us any more. Seriously, this is easily the least-scary Alien film ever made, by a long stone's throw. Even the overlong and talky "Alien 3" had more scare power in it, here and there, than this humid dud does.
I gave "Prometheus" a D-minus, a failing grade. The film made not a whit, not an ounce of sense, and none of the characters were likable at all, except Dr. Shaw, sorta, and the synthetic being, David the droid, with his Lawrence of Arabia complex. "Covenant" is just a sliver better than "Prometheus," thanks to being many orders of magnitude less impenetrably, metaphysically preachy: at least "Covenant" delivers a rapid-fire body count, some mildly interesting space flight scenes and some lush planetary vistas amid misty forested moors. Ridley does love his cloud-wreathed mountain vistas. And at least the characters here don't engage in patently moronic middle school dialogue, a common aggravating feature of "Prometheus." But it's not very much better. Not even the bad guy here is all that interesting (I'll try not to spoil that one, but, jeez, it's so frickin' obvious).
Other than a few background attributes – visuals, atmospherics, set design, prosthetics – "Covenant" has very little to offer worth spending the time it takes to watch. The cast is populated with lots of folks you're not given time to get to know, thus you do not care about any of them at all. The acting is, well, to call it fundamental would be being nice. Only Michael Fassbender (playing two androids, David from "Prometheus" and a new model, Walter) and Katherine Waterston as 3rd officer Daniels, perform above the bare minimal expectations.
Basic premise: As we board the UCSCC Covenant, its prime crew is in cryosleep, set to be awakened seven years from now, when the ship approaches Origae-6, a world previously identified as a target for terraforming and colonization. Aboard ship are 2,000 adult colonists, also in cold sleep, and thousands more human embryos, being preserved to become a new generation on the destination world.
As android Walter minds the store, a surprise solar flare seriously damages the ship's power systems, compelling the onboard computer – yes it's named Mother – and Walter, to wake them up during the emergency. After they stabilize the ship, they detect an odd signal which contains a human voice, coming from a much closer-at- hand star system, and scans confirm that one of its five planets is Earthlike. So Earthlike, in fact, that it seems like a better colony destination than Origae-6 is supposed to be. So, against Daniels' protest, Capt. Oram (Billy Crudup) decides they should divert to check out the newfound planet and find out who sent that signal.
Sigh. The whole rest of the movie follows the same ridiculous pattern laid down in "Prometheus," in which supposedly highly-trained scientists, the cream of Earth's intellectual crop, just decide to up and ignore EVERY SINGLE CONCEIVABLE aspect of scientific caution regarding injecting themselves into an alien environment. Worse yet, they keep doing it, in stages, throughout the middle act of the film. Forehead slap-inducing stuff.
Remember the zoologist in "Prometheus" who, upon coming upon a snakelike alien creature with a weird flattened sucker-like upper appendage, emerging from a murky pool of water in the bowels of an unexplained crashed and derelict alien spacecraft, then decides the smart scientific thing to do is to coo in sweet-talk-to-your-dog tones to the snake-thing, "Heyyy, babyy, hiya, sweetheart, how are Yoooo?" And then snake-thing's flat head whips forward and attaches itself irrevocably to that dumbass's face? "Covenant" is chock-full of stuff like that. Are these scientists the vanguard of Earth's desperate attempts to perpetuate the human species, or are these in fact the dumbest scientists who could be found for this mission, and Earth sent them away to be rid of their dull asses?
Fast-forward: Various biological versions of the alien xenomorph start a-busily-getting' born (we find out how that process has been facilitated a bit later), then they rapidly attack the crew one by one, you get lots of screaming, blood splatters, futile weapons fire, face-eating, general unfocused panic. But we do get our required "Prometheus" tie-in. The second alien ship found on LV-223, the one David's dismembered head could fly, apparently crashed on this Engineers world years earlier, with Dr. Elizabeth Shaw and David aboard. Or so David says.
We wind up with a last battle aboard the Covenant up in orbit, and then we get a not-at-all-a-surprise reveal at the end. Which is as set-up and primed for a three-quel as it possibly could be. But by then you don't effing care, because not a single minute of the 2:03 show you just watched made you care at all where this franchise goes next, because it showed you absolutely Nothing New, and told you Nothing you didn't know already about the ethos of this now totally dramatically bankrupt series.
I gave "Prometheus" a D-minus because it was sluggish, confused, childish, illogical and not particularly entertaining. I have to give "Covenant" a D, or 3 out of 10 stars, because it commits those same sins all over again, plus adds being repetitive atop it, like a stinking black-green alien cherry sitting atop a frisson of Just Plain Stupid alien resin. If not for the quality visuals and Fassbender's performance, I'd give this thing a big, wet, whopping F. Somebody really needs to take the keys away from Ridley, gently. Because in the space inside his head covering this series of stories, he can't hear us Yawn.