Visually appealing film with questionable decision making!

Rating: 5/10 (12 November 2017)

I am a fan of the Alien series. I loved the first four, particularly Aliens. They were smart and believable in their context. And Sigourney Weaver's Ripley is one of the best movie protagonists of all time. I even thought Prometheus was pretty good, if not stellar.
The cinematography in this sixth installment is awesome and the aliens have never been as vicious and gross as they are here. Sadly, the protagonists - the crew of the Covenant - are so dumb and make such bad decisions throughout the film that you may find yourself pulling for the bad guy and the nasty creatures to eradicate them!
For starters, they're supposed to be on a long mission to colonize a carefully vetted planet with a couple thousand live civilians and another thousand embryos who are supposed to save mankind. So presumably, safety would rule the day? Well maybe, until you receive a weird and creepy radio signal from a previously unknown planet that is. Then the captain - who should have been a private given his decision making skills - decides to take his highest ranking officers down to the surface of this completely unknown world for a little look-see. And the hi-jinks which make up this movie of course soon follow.
This key decision was questionable at best. The Covenant seemed to be quite sophisticated. So wouldn't Mother have been able to take and analyze terrain photographs and other data about life forms on the planet prior to landing? If not, the crew could have at least bought a drone at Target for $199 and sent that down there to get some pictures. Pretty much anything would have been smarter than what they actually did!
And wouldn't a trillion dollar ship like the Prometheus - which the Covenant crew immediately encountered - have been able to transmit its final destination to earth? At a bare minimum, 11 years of investigation would have revealed at least the general area it disappeared to, right? If so, the crew of the Covenant, or at least the synthetic (the only one onboard who had an IQ in the three digits), would have known this and used extra caution and study prior to landing - versus barging in the proverbial front door like a bunch of drunken singing sailors who found the last open bar in town at 3:30 a.m.
Anyway, once they stumble out onto the surface - sans any semblance of HAZMAT protection - a couple of soldiers get infected and one gets dragged back to the ship by a female officer. There, the supposedly trained Mrs. Tennessee (don't remember her name sorry) loses all composure at the sight of the ailing soldier BEFORE the Xenomorph even comes out. Instead doing anything useful, she runs to the radio to cry to her husband up top in the main ship. Letting spouses serve together as top crew members on a dangerous mission was another decision which seemed questionable to me, but what do I know? After that waste of time, she exercises the only attempt at quarantine during the entire film. Much to the chagrin of the poor female officer who got locked in the chamber with the born-to-be-bad little devil!
Once that unfortunate officer is dispatched in most nasty fashion, Mrs. T decides it will be a swell idea to say "f quarantine" and open the door, only to comically slip on blood as she tries to shoot the skitty thing. She did manage to get the door closed again but this accomplished nothing other than 20 seconds of drama and one now mighty angry young alien breaking the single pane glass window to get out and further terrorize the hapless Mrs. Tennessee.
After running around screaming and shooting with all the pinpoint accuracy of a Chicago gangbanger during a drive-by shooting, Mrs. T ends up blowing the ground crew's only escape vehicle to smithereens. Ooops! I'm sure she also ended up getting some choice words in Heaven from them for being a complete moron! Then, the rest of the crew encounter the creatures and start screaming and running around like a bunch of 8 year olds confronted by a guy in a scary Halloween costume who just jumped out from behind the hedges. David, probably with a big sigh and shake of his head, then comes to the rescue, realizing these dopes were all about to get killed like a bunch of squawking turkeys in a slaughter pen if he didn't intervene, which would have foiled his devilish master plan.
Michael Fassbender delivers his performance as both Walter, the Covenant's sympathetic synthetic, and the unhinged David, the Prometheus' visually identical daddy-issue synthetic with precision. Why they couldn't have made the updated synthetic look a little different along with the other changes we later learn that they made was also beyond me, but I didn't care. Fassbender's acting is excellent and creepy. He single-handedly saves this film from being a complete train wreck and turns it into something reasonably watchable.
I could go on with questionable decisions from the amateur crew and various plot holes (e.g. where did all the aliens who hatched from the unfortunate peasants David infected go??) but you can watch it and cringe for yourself. Suffice it to say that the dwindling crew doesn't get any smarter as the movie goes on. The movie's final "surprises" are so predictable that I laughed out loud at the remaining crew members' reactions to them. I was like, "didn't Walter have a serial number you could have checked or something?"
I gave the movie an overall 5 star rating because the visuals are great and Fassbender does such a nice job. So it's worth seeing on Netflix, particularly if you're a fan of the series. But just don't expect a Sigourney Weaver style protagonist here. I really hope the next installment makes up for this relatively weak entry.