"I'll do the fingering."

Rating: 8/10 (15 May 2017)

This film attempts to tackle the great 'is kissing your clone incest or masturbation?' debate and does so very badly. Other things happen too, but it was certainly an interesting scene that I didn't quite expect in my 'sexual-predator-metaphor aliens kill people' movie.
Alien Covenant is the newest installment in the Alien franchise. Ridley Scott might be milking it, but I did buy a ticket, so who knows? The plot is thus: some colonists are heading to a planet to colonise, they follow a rogue signal off-course to another planet that's closer, younger and better looking, and then they all get killed by aliens.
It's a tale as old as time, if this tale includes Michael Fassbender playing flute to himself for a good three minutes. It's been twelve hours and I still can't believe that Fassy said the line, "I'll do the fingering," with a straight face in a serious sci-fi film. Not going to lie, it's a little hard to pay attention when a man has such good sexual tension with himself. Kudos, Michael, kudos.
This movie was a gloriously stupid mess and I loved it. I've not had this much gory fun at a movie for a while and it's definitely worth seeing for that alone.
Is the ensemble cast a tad distracting? Yes. Is the 'twist ending' lamp-shaded viciously? Yes. Is every character in this film completely moronic? Yes.
That being said though, it's a hell of a lot of fun. (At points.)
There are time where the film is trying(???) to be deep and falls apart at the seams.
Do I care about one of the characters' crisis of faith? Not really. Do I care about the evil android's villainous monologue about how all humans should die? Not really.
There's a little bit too much blood and screaming for that to come through properly in the dialogue.
The action is about as mindless and hard-to-follow as one would expect, and the animation of the xenomorphs is a bit bad, but who cares? There's two types of people coming to see this film, and if you're a couch 'space movies are cool i guess' fan, you're probably not going to have much of a problem with it.
Actual fans of the Alien franchise, though? Might be another story.
It takes a certain type of film creator to tear their own work apart and trample on its still bleeding corpse. I don't actually know if that's what Ridley Scott has done with Covenant but a lot of people on the internet seem to think so. Decide for yourself! Go and see the movie.
In the words of the friend that I saw this film with, "0/10 – historically inaccurate," but I suspect he might have been joking.