The unfortunate shortcut

Rating: 6/10 (30 May 2017)

The anticipation the audience have when they see Ridley Scott as Director might be on a lesser level every time this man puts out some new production one by one during these years. Prometheus had opened new perspectives to an unique franchise with new evolution, creatures and questions which may have never occurred in the whole Alien anthology before. But that was the whole case with Prometheus; It wasn't called Alien" for a reason, because it had different point of view within this universe. What happened with Alien: Covenant though is exactly the issue which everyone was feared of: It really messed up the whole universe we loved for decades now.
First of all, I would like to talk about the overall effect Covenant beholds. It is exotic, bringing interesting additions to the franchise at first, suddenly gets dirty, depressing, and dark, but as a whole it is silly from the start to the end. It has exciting places, environments, but their potential to be a part of something interesting easily cuts short under the weight of the xenomorph obligatory appearance and their origin story.
The story is the same old one all over again with different surface; uninitiated people get some distress signal, and the leader of the crew decides to check the source even though no terms obligates them to do so: no mentions about the contracts they have with the company, only the leader thinks they should check out the unknown planet, but no one else in the crowd. Then, when they arrive onto the planet they don't even get any protection gear on themselves, no spacesuits, no helmets, even though they have only informations about the planet being habitable; What about any unseen viruses? Any kind of bacteria any toxins in the air which may have negative effects on earthlings? And yes, of course, some of them gets infected and everyone acts like an idiot asking what the hell is going on?", but when they enter to a city of a totally unknown species they don't show any reactions of any sorts it is indeed an everyday moment in a human life to encounter with another race in a godforsaken planet in the middle of the space way apart from Earth. Then after many ugly things happened let's not put on the guard yet guys, the totally suspicious android marooned on this alien planet can still be trusted, no matter what he says, even when he showed sympathy towards a neomorph, which killed our crew member a moment ago, and after all the disturbing documentations of his experiments, when we get into a dark cellar with totally ugly alien eggs holding something livin' inside it yeah, let's just listen to any word this android has to say put your head over it, it's totally safe"  oh sh*t, right, I'm on it! Ooops, not again! Something bad happened just only because I'm an idiot. This is the whole concept of the crew we have in the latter movies from Ridley. No wonder he get's bashed by his fans lately. Oh did I mention they totally ignored the engineers here? Well I guess that is why it is not called PROMETHEUS II anymore.
The atmosphere of the movie is actually exciting, which mostly must be credited to the Soundtrack composed by Jed Kurzel. The ugliness of the alienating events are perfectly reflecting through his music, which is a mash-up of both the Alien and Prometheus themes. The first appearance of the neomorph (the back-bursting scene) is the only well crafted horror scene in this movie: it is suspenseful, gory, new, fresh, and the music perfectly helps the build up of the momentum this couple of minutes have. And then there are those weirdly edited bath scenes (there are two), which are the weakest ones Ridley ever put on the big screen. The idiocracy of the whole crew deflects the whole atmosphere the movie wants to build up, and when the apex of the story comes in it ends up being the worst thing which could occur to this franchise. Yes, I'm talking about David being the sole origin of the xenomorphs. Oh, did I mention that he killed Dr. E. Shaw and dissected her in order to create the eggs? And that David's creations somehow imitates him for I have no idea what reasons or purpose for that matter? Why is this Alien Universe suddenly got smaller as David became the whole reason xenos exist? How come David knew everything about the whole Covenant ship; how things work there, what access codes are needed, how big cups are needed for the embryo-fridge case? Did he really changed his chip with Walter's? And if so, HOW? ...
Wai wha what the hell happened there? How did Daniels jump down then get back to the ship in the end of Terraforming Bay action scene (maybe it is a reference for Michale BAY?)? What is this lame editing, who cut this movie? Why are they smiling after all these sh*t things happened to their crew? GUYS?!
Prometheus was at least exciting and more coherent with interesting questions and new take to an old franchise, with new story lines which didn't needed to line up to the original movie, it could spread anywhere. But what happened? Ridley did a shortcut and went two steppes back and sacrificed a huge bunch of potential material only to please the crying fans who couldn't accept the whole direction Prometheus was on. But even if that was the case, WHY, oh why Ridley you had to listen to these people? You should have kept your own visions and plans for this franchise. NOW I only could ask Ridley this: Do you even know what you are doing anymore?" Because I don't think so...
6.5/10