Yikes

Rating: 3/10 (29 May 2017)

I was excited when I entered the theater. I couldn't wait for Alien:Covenant to begin. Anticipation coursed through my veins as I angrily cursed the existence of the annoying, pre-show BS.
When I stood up from my seat and left the theater, I was angry as could be.
So what's so bad about the film?
First off, it comes with the 'Alien' moniker in the title. As such, it would be fair to assume that it's part of the Alien franchise, right? Well, not so. In fact, it's a direct sequel to Prometheus, and our beloved Xenomorph is nowhere to be seen for almost an hour- and-a- half. The film should've been titled 'Prometheus 2 Feat. Alien and James Franco for some reason'.
Yes, James Franco is present here. For about a grand total of 30 seconds. I really don't know why this is, but it's a symptom of a bigger disease that the film suffers from: wasting good actors.
Excellent actors such as Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Demian Bechir and Danny McBride are brought in and given NOTHING to do, as all they do is inhabit shallow husks of what should be actual characters. NONE of the Covenant crew are developed at all, which means that when the developmentally disabled-looking creatures start bursting from people's backs and throats, the result is that I don't care. The graphic and gory visual effects are fun to behold, but lose some of their shock value when the person dying means nothing to the audience.
The only one who gets out of this unsullied is Michael Fassbender, whose two characters are given some great, though semi-pretentious, scenes together. As ponderous and interesting as they are, even they aren't safe from some unintentionally hilarious dialogue. (You blow the flute, I'll do the fingering.)
What really aggravates me is the fact that Covenant's existence came at the expense of director Neill Blomkamp's proposed Alien film, which would have been a direct sequel to Aliens. It sounded excellent, and now it's never going to happen because Ridley Scott got a bug up his ass about making a new movie in the franchise. But instead of delivering something intelligent and stylish like Prometheus, he gave us a weird, pseudo-sequel to BOTH Prometheus and Alien, threw in several dull horror tropes, uninteresting characters and bad dialogue. The result is an absolute mess, and feels like what it is: two movies awkwardly mashed together.
Not even the scenes that actually feature the Xenomorph-proper work very well, as they're completely devoid of tension and horror, instead settling for blood and fire-your-weapon-blindly style action.
But it's not all bad. As mentioned previously, the gore-spattered special effects offer a bit of a visceral thrill to an otherwise dull flick. Michael Fassbender's scenes with himself are well-acted and interesting.
I love Ridley Scott as a filmmaker. But even I have to admit that he really screwed up with this one.
3/10