Shouldn't be called "ALIEN"

Rating: 8/10 (7 January 2018)

To get this out of the way, I would consider this movie perfect if the alien at the end had any effort put into it.
Covenant is a visual masterpiece. It is also a deeply human film. It begins with humans. It spares little time in illustrating that humans are flawed and quite frankly stupid. This film gets so cynical about the human race. It's got a wicked honestly that stings and cuts with a chilling indifference. We see compassion from characters, optimism, enthusiasm, naivete... and it all culminates in the vicious destruction at the hands of irony.
The philosophy is very thick sci-fi, but it's off screen implications are of epic proportions. The androids are the highlight of the film for, despite my love for the human characters. It is through these synthetic characters that we experience the brunt of the human story.
This film is structured very deliberately, and fine tuned to accentuate a nihilistic contempt for the humans and their plight, even to the detriment of the film. The pacing is very acute, with the masterful finesse you'd expect from Ridley Scott trying to juggle his own story with the story the fans want and the story the studio wanted. The tone is thick and grows more and more suffocating as the progression through the structure nears the peak of the narrative's edge. It never quite reaches the tension of the original 1979 film's third act, and it would have certainly benefited greatly from that kind of finale.
Ultimately, the twist at the end is predictable and falls flat. If more run time had been granted to add another ten minutes to flesh out the alien attack and make it more tense, the misdirection from the twist might have worked. But because the alien wasn't compelling, our minds wandered and they centered on the not so subtle anymore signs.
If the alien had been awesome and the twist had landed, this movie would get a perfect score from me. The third act was way too weak, but fortunately the first two were so interesting and thought provoking and compelling that they spill some of their excellence over to the last chunk of this film.