Seriously good & not nearly as bad as some would have you think

Rating: 10/10 (3 July 2017)

The awakened crew members are shaken, demoralized and still far from their destination, so when they hear a distress signal coming from a nearby planet that seems habitable, they decide to take a leap of faith and head there rather than go back into hyper-sleep and risk death again. And they all live happily ever after in a land of rainbows and unicorns. Just kidding! They end up trapped on a rainy planet filled with creatures that want to eat or impregnate them.
They're momentarily rescued by David (Fassbender again), who settled there after the bloody climax of the first film and now has long hair, a Jedi robe with hood, a sullen and a grandiose demeanor, and lives in a spectacular ruin of an old city that was originally colonized by the Engineers from "Prometheus." Daniels, who is determined to realize her late husband's dream of building a cabin by the edge of a lake, went along with Oram's plan to detour to this new world, and now feels trapped and hopeless. So do the other colonists, several of whom ingested spores that will gestate into the creatures.
This one has a lot of nifty variations, most revolving around Fassbender's dual performance. The film starts with a flashback prologue showing the android David in conversation with his creator, technology magnate Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce, who acted the role in old age makeup in "Prometheus"). Alert viewers will realize that the movie wouldn't start with a flashback to David's creation unless it intended to bring him back in later. His entrance is delayed (perhaps too long, though your mileage will vary), but once he's in the story, saving the wrecked colonists from an unrelenting, expertly choreographed attack by aliens in a field of tall grass, Fassbender is given numerous chances to act against himself, via digital com-positing that's so subtle that we forget we're seeing effects. And it's in these scenes, thoughtfully written by John Logan and Dante Harper and gracefully acted by Fassbender, that we realize that this movie is not merely a bridge between the "Alien" films and "Prometheus," but between the "Alien" films and "Blade Runner" as well.
The David-Walter relationship differentiates "Covenant" from all other "Alien" films. It gives it a beating heart as well as an endless source of humor that's often dry and occasionally self-aware, verging on campy. The highlight is a marvelous scene, done with a laterally moving camera and no cuts, where David suggestively teaches Walter how to play the flute. It's charged with hilariously amp ed-up homoerotic energy, but it's also a dandy joke on actor narcissism: this is a rare movie where the star gets to seduce himself.
As in all of the "Alien" films, characters do tremendously stupid things with such regularity that you pretty much have to stop judging the movie by real-world logic. Instead you have to judge it by the standards of a fever dream or nightmare, a Freudian-Jungian narrative where the thing you fear most is what happens to you, and where you're doing stuff like going to work naked or trying to climb across the face of a skyscraper or accepting someone's invitation to look into, say, the sticky maw of an alien egg that just opened (the latter actually happens in "Covenant").
The atmosphere inside David's city of the dead encourages that sort of engagement. It's one of the great sets in horror movie history, right up there with the refinery vessel in the first film and the infested colony in the second. The medieval look of the place (it seems to have been carved from volcanic rock by laser) drives home that "Covenant" only looks like a hard sci-fi film about technology and rational thought. In its heart it's more of a dark fairy tale about destruction and creation, death and birth, parent and children (biological and figurative) and sexual violation and monogamous love (many of the crew members are married, including a crowd-pleasing couple played by Danny McBride and Amy Seimetz).
The necropolis is where David tries to devise new life forms and tantalizes Walter by insinuating that he's missing out by failing to evolve, as David has been able to do. He's a Frankenstein's monster who has, over time, become a version of Dr. Frankenstein (in effect becoming his own "father," Weyland), and his dubious achievements include delusions of godhood. But there's much more of Shakepeare's exiled sorcerer Prospero in the character, as well as echoes of Caliban, the hideous and jealous son who, like David, is obsessed with impregnating the humans he despises so much. (In Shakespeare's play, Caliban declares, "Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else. This isle with Calibans.")
This is one of Scott's best-directed movies and one of his most entertaining overall, partly because he's working in a genre, the science fiction spectacle, that he does better than anyone since Stanley Kubrick, but also because he seems to be approaching it almost entirely in terms of visceral impact and emotion—as symphony of fire and blood, poetry and schlock. The best sequences (in particular the spore infestation that brings us inside an ear canal, the first attack in the grass, the flute scene, the flashback revealing the city's destruction, and the escape from the planet) put nearly everything else being done in science fiction or fantasy at this budget level to shame. It's rare to see such a combination of technical mastery and wicked joy in a film by a director who's been working as long as Scott. This is the third best "Alien" movie after the first two, but don't be surprised if repeat viewings kick it up a notch.