Just saw Alien: Covenant...

Rating: 3/10 (18 May 2017)

I went in expecting a terrible movie and it wasn't quite as boring or annoying as I thought it would be. The beginning is actually good, we see the Crew of the Covenant do some work on their spaceship, which was interesting and showed them as competent spaceman for the first and last time in this movie.
It goes downhill as soon as they set foot on a planet they don't know anything about. As you can expect from an Alien movie, bad things happen and all of it could have been avoided by simple precautions like spending a few months in orbit to survey and map the planet and get a basic idea about plants, bacteria and possible dangers that might be there. And: wearing a simple protective suit, when first setting foot on an unknown planet seems like a good idea, as many have already pointed out. I tend to root more for characters who actually care if they survive or not on an alien planet and who act accordingly. It bothered me in Prometheus that the characters did not seem to care for their own safety and it's just as annoying here. Obviously, the Xenomorphs are more threatening if they can kill off the Crew, although everybody did everything possible to prevent harm.
In Covenant the Crew seemed less insane than in Prometheus, however almost every decision they made, was wrong, if they were trained to keep their cool in stressful situations, the training wasn't effective at all, and all this - and not the Xenomorphs relentless hunt for prey - leads to mayhem.
However as a standalone film this could have been a somewhat fun movie, like Friday 13th in space or whatever.
But: As a prequel to Alien or Aliens, or a sequel to Prometheus "Alien: Covenant" does more damage than good.
The forgivable: The technology is more advanced than in the movies that happen later in the narrative (Alien and Aliens etc.), the life cycle of the Xenomorphs is a mess. I could somehow accept that they are still experimented on, but then: where do the eggs come from? Did David create them? Why? Obviously there were spores on the planet that could grow Xenomorphs in a host-body within minutes, so why create facehuggers, which are less effective?
Why did Weylan Enterprise make Walter and David look exactly the same? I guess, so David could pretend to be Walter. Convenient.
Not so forgivable: Killing off all the "Engineers" is weird, why establish them as somewhat important in Prometheus in the first place?
Although I didn't like "Prometheus", I would have liked to see Shaw and David arrive at the Engineers Planet and have them discover that the Engineers were creating the Xenomorphs as the biomechanical Creatures Giger designed, but ultimately the engineers can't control them. At least, that's what I expected. Answering the question if the engineers created humanity would also have been nice (a simple "No" would have been enough for me) But "Alien: Covenant" makes "Prometheus", which was already bad, even worse by not following up on it.
As a somewhat mediocre Space Horror movie this would be a 6/10. As a part of the Alien narrative a 4/10, because it actually makes the original movies Alien and Aliens less exciting and takes away a lot of what was scary about the Aliens in the first place, which is: they were alien, and had nothing to do with human civilization at all. Hence the title.