Years after the "Prometheus" expedition, spaceship "Covenant" is heading towards an inhabitable planet, Origae-6, with 2,000 colonists. A neutrino burst damages the ship, so android Walter wakes up several astronauts from cryosleep. Captain Christopher decides to re-direct the spaceship towards a different, closer planet emitting a signal, despite Daniels protesting. A reconnaissance ship lands on the planet, the astronauts walk around without spacesuits, but one of them is infected with a floating virus entering his ear, which mutates into an alien, xenomorph, which bursts out of the astronaut's back, killing him. In the shootout inside, the ship explodes. Walter discovers his "twin" android, David, who admits he experimented with creating xenomorphs, thinking they are superior than the weak humans which will go extinct. Pilot Tennessee picks up Daniels and other survivors back to the spaceship in orbit, and they battle and throw out another xenomorph hidden inside. Walter turns out to actually be David, who kills Daniels in cryosleep and takes over the spaceship, planting xenomorph embryos inside.
"Alien: Covenant" is the "RoboCop 2" of the Alien franchize: it focuses only on the most primitive, superficial features of mindless brutality, splatter violence and bloody "clickbait" and doesn't even care about any character development, story, creativity or inspiration from its originator. "Covenant" is a waste of a time. A pointless reboot of the first "Alien", itself also overrated. A massacre on "autopilot". The sequel to "Prometheus", "Covenant" is a rushed mess that just runs through all the plot points of the original "Alien", as some sort of a bare minimum to have a justification for exploiting the fans once more, but it doesn't offer anything new, whereas all the characters are just one-dimensional, nameless extras who are just there to be slaughtered by the alien xenomorph. The director Ridley Scott shows no tact, no sense for measure or tone, and after half an hour nothing really matters, anyway—it's just random scenes where xenomorph kills people. Besides illogical plot holes (why would astronauts walk on an alien planet without any spacesuits? What would protect David himself from xenomorphs?), a sterile cinematography, and sadistic hate for humanity (xenomorphs bursting out of the back of a man, killing him; a man "throws up" a xenomorph from his mouth; a naked couple shower in the spaceship, while a xenomorph shows beehind glass and kills the man by impaling him through his mouth...), the movie also fails in writing a comprehensive storyline. There are some tiny good bits involving some scarce philosophical questions about humanity, such as when a man created android David, and David then created the xenomorphs because he considers them "superior" and strong, as opposed to the "weak" mankind which he believes will go extinct, since some contemplations could be made towards a clash between humanism and society based on violence. The story could be seen as the contemplation on violentocracy, and the twist ending is interesting, yet it establishes a strange trend—the more violent the "Alien" sequels get, the weaker they are.
Grade:+
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