Terrible Script, Terrible Effects, Utterly Boring

Rating: 1/10 (19 May 2017)

The film is in all ways worse than literally every Alien film that has come before it and I actually include the god-awful Aliens vs Predator films because at least they didn't over- promise and under-deliver so grotesquely. This film is filled with deus ex machina, clichés, bad techno babble, worse dialogue, and overused tropes. It is not only bad, it is laughably bad. There are extensive spoilers in this review, nevertheless I urge you to read on so that I can save you from this piece of absolute garbage.
The nonsense begins pretty much in the first minutes of the film. A disaster befalls the colony ship Covenant, which has stopped in deep space to unfurl its sails to recharge for some reason. I guess the ship runs on solar power or something because the people writing the script figure that's how it'll work in the future, and didn't bother checking with a technical consultant. So this disaster —a giant neutrino burst caused by a nearby star farting or something— damages the ship's solar sails, and causes fires to break out all over and steam vents to start spraying steam, and most notably killing the ship's captain James Franco whom I imagine had a larger part but saw where this mess of a script was going and cut fence along with Noomi Rapace who really only appears in likeness, but I digress.
So the flight crew of 15 (the rest of the ship's population of colonists are kept in hanging freezers that just kind of swing around like they're on coat hangers) has to fix the sails. Whilst Danny McBride is outside the ship doing this his helmet intercepts a cryptic signal of some one singing a —I'm not even kidding— John Denver song. Apparently only Danny McBride's helmet could pick this up because the ship has "communication buffers" that block out communication attempts I guess because that's how the communication systems aboard solar powered space ships of the future will work.
The replacement captain who no one trusts because he is "a person of faith" decides to take the ship off course to investigate the source of the transmission because it is coming from a planet that is awesome, way closer than their original destination that is still 7 years away, and yet that they somehow missed when selecting a planet to colonize. Of course it turns out the planet they find is the planet that Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender from the previous movie ended up on.
This is deus ex machina at its absolute worst. The odds of a ship in the vastness of space, just happening to run out of gas and getting a flat tire in front of Planet Bates Motel completely undermines the rest of the film, which even without this silly contrivance would have been terrible.
The colonists organize a landing party with their only shuttle, because of course they do. They find an eerily dead world because of course they do. Some of their number get sick on spores and end up birthing some monsters because of course they do. Things get particularly bad once David makes his appearance.
Yes David has survived since the events of Prometheus, his hair has grown out because I guess Weyland Corp makes androids that need hair cuts. Some more nonsense happens — I'm not going to go into it in detail because it is just so hackneyed and predictable. Suffice it to say more people die. And then the first huge twist of this pathetic film: David invented eggs and face huggers. That's right. David the android, still doing his best Peter O'Toole impression, stranded on a dead engineer world inhabited by monsters, decided that with all of this time on his hands he may as well invent the alien menace because he was mad about, I don't know, something, and wants to take it out on humanity by inventing a penis-headed monster. Maybe because he was made without a penis, I'm not really sure, they don't cover it. It is never adequately explained how he even does this or what tools he uses, or even how he knows how to do this in the first place.
We stumble across the preserved and vivisected corpse of Noomi Rapace that David has kept for some reason ala Bates Motel, as well as an art studio filled with of creepy poster sketches David made of her — I guess this planet had a Hobby Lobby. What ensues is a bad, nonsensical, utterly devoid of suspense or tension, chase sequence with terrible creature effects. I won't bother to tell you how it ends, it's just as stupid and predictable as the rest of the film.
To make matters worse, one of the script writers who churned out this turd also wrote the script for the upcoming Bladerunner sequel for which I now have absolutely zero hope. I don't know what is wrong with Ridley Scott. He keeps working with absolutely terrible scripts. Does he read this garbage beforehand? Does he show up on day one of shooting and just say "to hell with it, let's get this crap in the can"? Maybe he is just taking these projects on in order to set up trust funds for his kids — I don't know where the budget for this film went, it looked like it could have been filmed for less than a quarter of what went into it. Skip this film. And just to be safe skip any other films that happen to follow it. Nuke the whole god damn mess of a franchise from orbit. I can only hope this is the final nail in the coffin of this series I once loved.
0 Stars