Absolute, total pile of utter dog...ess, aitch, eye, tee

Rating: 1/10 (22 May 2017)

Oh, how the mighty have fallen!
Prometheus may have been a colossal clusterfudge and absolutely cursed to the marrow on every conceivable level, but at the very, very least it had the moxie to ask big questions even if no one and nothing within had the ability to answer back with anything remotely resembling logic or sense. Ridley Scott didn't seem to understand the logic and mythology of the universe he created and if you think he's going to retcon himself back on track with this pile of crap you'll be making the same mistake as me.
I knew that he had painted himself into a corner. If they followed the David/Shaw storyline and went to the Engineer homeworld (they are still the stupidest-looking creature design in film history) then every single part of the dialogue would have to be delivered by just two characters. So now we have a NEW ship with a NEW heavy- handed symbolic name filled with NEW fresh, disposable meat...I mean characters heading out into space under the banner of Weyland Corp.
After sustaining some damage from a solar flare or whatnot the crew pick up a transmission from a nearby planet and decide to go check it out. So far so very familiar. When they get down there they discover a crashed derelict ship. Okay, I've DEFINITELY seen this before. And then...all Alien hell breaks loose, but not before a long, seemingly endless succession of scenes where people loudly discuss the plot in a way that would make the earliest Scooby-Doo episodes look like masterpiece theatre.
This is complete garbage, kiddies.
There is a line of dialogue between David and Walter where Mad Dave actually says the words "You hold it and I'll do the fingering." Yes, he's talking about playing a flute but COME ON!!! How in heaven or hell did THAT go unnoticed? Was anyone paying attention to how terrible this is?
We don't even get the classic Xenomorph, but instead have to be content with a Neomorph/Protomorph/Morph/Sooty and Sweep/Howdy Doody placeholder. The Protomorph CGI is frequently terrible too and looks like something from a video game.
Ridley Scott succeeds, again, at making this look like a genuine, lived-in universe, but the characters are never anything more than fodder and even at 122 minutes you can tell a LOT was cut out of this. They clearly struggle to find a workable pacing in this theatrical cut and it feels sloppily edited throughout. The final 20 minutes seems like a completely different movie and lowers itself to the tone of a Friday the 13th film. Nothing against Jason Voorhees, but the Alien series is supposed to be more cerebral and Covenant is so lame that you'll actually be longing for the comfort of Alien: Resurrection or AVP: Requiem.
Alien didn't need a prequel. A huge part of the lure was the darkness, the mystery, the coincidence, the infinite unknown. To have it all explained by Prometheus was a bad idea, but that movie completely failed to even come anywhere close to that. Covenant should have spent its running time answering questions Prometheus dumped on us when it confused the audience. It should have spent 122 minutes getting this series back on track after the staggeringly bad choices of the 2012 debacle.
It doesn't. There is simply no way a third prequel can logically tie into the Nostromo crew finding a thousands-year-long dead Space Jockey fossilized in the derelict on LV426. Ridley Scott has gone insane and doesn't know what he's doing.
The original quadrilogy had the tangible DNA of four different directors upfront and visible in every frame, for better or worse. Scott has had too much creative control (two words I use with massive doses of irony) and it's time to either kill this series for good, forever, or let someone else rewrite whatever unworkable direction the Covenant is lumbering in.