As dumb as Prometheus, but not as conceited

Rating: 7/10 (9 May 2018)

The spaceship Covenant carries 2000 deep-sleep colonists and a lot of embryos. The crew are also asleep: only synthetic Walter is awake when an incident leads him to wake the crew. They discover a message with a John Denver song coming from a nearby colonisable planet, so they go to investigate.
Obviously they haven't seen Prometheus, or they would have guessed this was where Elizabeth Shaw and David ended up. But before they find that out, horrible things start happening. I won't say what, because horrible deaths, and what order they happen in, is the reason for Alien films.
This is Ridley Scott's 3rd trip in the Alien universe. He started it all with a straightforward sci-fi horror back in 1979, and then gave us Prometheus in 2012. This was a film which was so full of pretentiousness that it completely forgot not to be stupid. Fortunately, Covenant isn't anywhere near as pretentious as Prometheus.
It has its share of stupidity, however. If the humans (aka "alien fodder") wore helmets in the atmosphere of the new planet, then a lot of trouble could have been avoided, for instance. And why weren't the colonists' sleep pods secured better? Hanging from cup-hooks is asking for trouble, surely?
Michael Fassbender plays David, the synthetic from Prometheus, and Walter, another synthetic created from the same template. They are very different characters, their English and American accents being just one of the ways to tell them apart. Fassbender is, as always, brilliant. The effects used to allow the two characters to interact in their scenes together are flawless.
The rest of the featured players vary in how much impact they have. The bigger the name, the bigger the part and the bigger the impact. We do identify with most of the characters, so it matters what happened to them. Even so, there are those who are in the film only because we need someone to at various points.
I felt that I had seen much of the film before: it goes over familiar ground from the very first film and also from Prometheus. We even have a facehugger. We get more story material, though, and an ending you can see coming from a mile away.
The deaths are very gory indeed, and the aliens - a mixture of CGI, puppetry, and suited actors - are very well realised. If you are viewing this because you enjoy inventive, splattery slaughter, then you will be pleased. And, of course, this will be one of the reasons why many will see it. The film looks good, and the effects overall are as slick as we have come to expect these days.
Prometheus annoyed me immensely. Being so pretentious, yet so carelessly stupid, I felt it insulted me. Alien: Covenant is a much more direct and straightforward film, and succeeds all the better for being so.
I wasn't expecting to enjoy this, but I did, a lot.