Jaws: Genesis

Rating: 4/10 (9 September 2017)

I want a prequel to Jaws where a marine biologist / serial killer trains a young shark genetically-engineered to be super ferocious. Oh, and since the killer was once shot by a sheriff, he teaches the shark to be particularly vicious to law enforcers and their families. You know, I've always wondered why that Great White gave Brody such a hard time!
What say you? That would be unbelievably lame? Well, I have good reasons to think Sir Ridley Scott at least would like the idea!
If you need the explanation of this dull sarcasm, I hate Alien: Covenant. I kind of hated Prometheus too, but I cut it some slack because of its solid first act and the attempt to do something novel and ambitious, even if it FAILED MISERABLY.
This is Prometheus all over again, now without the benefit of the doubt. My sense of dread set in ten minutes into the movie, when a space mission sent to colonize a faraway planet (you know, the kind THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE plan ahead in detail FOR DECADES) changes destination mid-route to another world they stumble into - like when you go out to eat sushi and decide halfway through you feel like pizza instead.
They land - without spacesuits, because Dallas was a wimp to be afraid of breathing ammonia and unknown alien pathogens - and it's all downhill from there: schlock, stupidity, one of the most obvious twists I recall in a major production, awful characterization. The *only* individual the movie seems interested in is Fassbender's android David, while everyone else is just a name, a face and (occasionally) a single element of backstory (ranging from "dead husband" to "wears hat").
And even David isn't that deep. His character premise - the android with a god complex - is neat on paper, but the execution doesn't make a lot of sense. Why would a sophisticated being who styles himself after Lawrence of Arabia and relishes music and poetry regard as a perfect organism a carnivorous, mute, drooling parasite? It made sense for cold, pragmatic Ash, not for this grandstanding guy - it would have been more logic, for example, to have David betray mankind for the more advanced Engineers. Congratulations, Covenant: you have *one* character arc and it falls apart under scrutiny.
Most of this would be forgivable if Covenant was exceptionally well-crafted but, while the movie looks fine in terms of production values, the Xenomorph set-pieces are bland (except the first one, which does have some tension), revealing a lack of interest on Scott's behalf. He clearly enjoys lingering on David's shenanigans; almost everything else is stale routine.
In fact, Scott seems to identify with the android, supposedly his directorial avatar as a dark genius creator of nightmares. Sadly, he's more like Billy Crudup's misguided captain, foolishly altering an original plan which was just fine, then making a botch of it and sticking his hands and face where he's not supposed to.
Fans (rightly) gave George Lucas crap for turning the Force into bacteria in the Star Wars prequels... but at least those were just a couple lines of dialogue. Ridley Scott is making movie after movie ABOUT his own Midichlorians. Every time in Covenant you see a kernel of cosmic horror (like an alien necropolis with thousands of corpses), the movie goes out of its way to make it lame (oh, it was David who bombed them with his bio-weapon in a ten-seconds genocide). Guess what was the best thing about Alien, Ridley? Its lack of explanations. The way it hinted at a Lovecraftian universe full of mysterious threats. Now we know it was a smug villainous android who... for shame, man.
4/10 As a Prometheus sequel, it's baffling (former protagonist Noomi Rapace gets five seconds of screen time as a corpse); as an Alien prequel (something which, frankly, should never have been done) it's also a mess, as the Xenomorph action/horror material is lackluster.