I am sort of amazed, as I think Covenant is sincerely worse than Prometheus.
I was NOT expecting it to be any good, but worse than that pile of shit? Consider me surprised.
It's just an awful movie all around, and pretty much the tombstone on the Alien Franchise, at least for me.
So depressing, it's like beating a dead horse at this point. Please Fox, prevent somehow Scott from releasing another one, making the fans like me suffer even more.
Basically, the only things that "sort of work" are sterile copycats of situations already seen in previous movies, kinda like Jurassic World. Whenever something original gets introduced, it's pretty much a trainwreck:
- terrible characters, with so many stupid decisions that the two scientist from Prometheus could be considered Nobel candidates. I physically facepalmed two or three times, in particular that scene where the captain listens to David and puts his face over the egg is honestly depressing and put me on the verge of leaving the cinema.
- no sense of tension whatsoever, as the enemy is not even there for a large amount of time. And by there I don't mean "in front of the camera", of course. Oh and the pacing... so, so bad.
- The biology of the Xeno just got even more complicated, duller and simply dumber. Good job, seriously.
- The Xeno itself is clearly not the focus anymore, but neither are those bald albino body builders known as the Engineers. While I frankly don't miss the latter, I do miss the times when the Xeno was the star of the show. And no, I don't fucking care about the bland new abominations that get introduced here (and in Prometheus before, like the Deacon and the Space Cobra), get a grand total of 5' of screen time and just die, being left in the obsolescence they deserve.
- Lots of usual non-sense/bad writing here and there, but I guess that's granted at this point.
- Tons of CGI, at times far from stellar (even if the black rain of bombs is indeed a very impressive sequence).
To add insult to injury, quite a few times (mainly when David was showing his research) I was frankly reminded of Alien Resurrection. And no, that is by no means a compliment.
Congrats Ridley, congrats.