Second best Alien movie!

Rating: 10/10 (11 August 2017)

As someone who really hated Ridley Scott's "Prometheus" prequel and think James Cameron's "Aliens" sequel is painfully overrated, I did not have high hopes for Scott's second prequel ALIEN:COVENANT (2017), but thankfully my reservations were unfounded. I really love this movie! Alien:Covenant is easily, in my opinion, the 2nd best Alien film right behind Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi horror masterpiece "Alien". Covenant succeeds where Prometheus failed. Prometheus was too pretentious where virtually character, except perhaps David and Shaw (the irony), were inconsequential and oddly performed. Very thankfully, the only 2 good and decent characters from Prometheus were the ones to survive and salvaged for the sequels.
The plot of the film is that the Earth-originated ship The Covenant, carrying over 2000 colonists and over 1000 embryos, is on a permanent deep space mission to a faraway planetary system named Origae-6. While the colonists, including a 14-member crew, are in cryosleep, the ship is monitored by it's assigned synthetic being, the android Walter (superbly played by Michael Fassbender, who also played the android David in 'Prometheus'). Walter is a more advanced, less emotional version of David. During sleep, the ship is damaged by a solar flare, which forces Walter to awaken the crew, upon which the Captain (James Franco in a very brief cameo role) is burned alive when his cryotube catches fire.
Rounding out the crew are a strong cast of characters led by actors Billy Crudup (Oram), Katherine Waterston (Daniels), Danny McBride (Tennessee), Carmen Ejogo (Karine), Demian Bichir (Lope), Amy Siemetz (Faris), Callie Hernandez (Upworth), Jussie Smollett (Ricks), and Tess Haubrich (Rosenthal). In particular, Crudup, Waterston, and McBride shine as the mission leaders that everyone looks to guidance and support. But in general I enjoyed the believable chemistry of these characters as a real crew who had each others' backs. More laid back and less internal animosity than the original Alien crew, the Covenant crew is focused on settling down and finding a permanent home.
The mission is sidetracked by a transmission on a nearby planet and the Covenant crew proceeds to investigate as well as scout the location as a contingency for a permanent home to colonize. As they investigate, they find a crash-landed ship, the one that David and Shaw escaped from LV-223 with. A couple of crew members also accidentally ingest alien spores, wreaking incredible havoc and putting the entire mission at risk. They also run into David himself, as he recounts exactly what happened to both him and Shaw upon escaping LV-223.
Alien:Covenant is a very spare film, cutting to the chase immediately. There are no wasted moments or scenes. The running time feels just about right. The acting very convincing, whether it's during the routine, mundane moments or during the more exciting action sequences. The characters are refreshingly normal, identifiable and easy to root for. Fassbender is exceptional in the dual roles of Walter and David and the staging of the scenes when they play off each other is amazingly shot. Even with the ties to the Alien franchise, Covenant is very much an entertaining movie-watching experience in it's own right. Is it as great as Alien? Of course not, no film in the franchise is or ever will be. But this film feels like the first one that truly follows up the original film and pays tribute to it's brilliance.