Alien Covenant is a bitter disappointment

WARNING SPOILER ALERT

I'm a huge fan of the Alien series and I actually enjoyed Prometheus very much, because I felt everything had already been done in the first 3 movies, and Ressurection, while not a bad movie, showed that the series was beginning to feel overdone. Prometheus was not only a great sci-fi movie, it made me excited about what would come next.. 

The first major criticism is that the movie does not feature Elizabeth Shaw, she was the greatest character in Prometheus and after all her heroism in that movie, she ends up being betrayed by David.. and is only seen as a corpse in one of his sick experiments.. A huge shame, why kill such a great character in such a cheap way ? Besides she's way better than anyone in Covenant. There is no doubt in my mind Covenant would have been a much better movie had she survived instead of David.

And that brings me to the second major criticism; David. Sure he's an amazing character, but he already played such a major role in Prometheus.. Covenent is just the continuation of him trying to play God, I expected something else, something new.. They might as well change the name of the series from 'Alien' to 'David'.. and the twist in the end was so predictable.. and cruel. As I said before, Elizabeth should have survived not him.

The third major letdown is how they handle the Engineers. Now I'm pretty sure the population David kills are not actual Engineers but more like another race they created, like humans, because they looked like something in between humans and Engineers; their skin is pale pink and not white like the Engineers and they seem low technology, fascinated by the spaceship... If they are not Engineers, why did David want to exterminate them? The scene is also too short and could have been made much more spectacular, but ultimately I don't think it should have been done at all. In Prometheus we dream about discovering the Engineer planet in the sequel, and what we get is a 10 seconds scene of an unknown population being wiped out for no reason. Boring.

Now I will admit that the first half of the movie was actually pretty good, the scene with the woman being locked in the room with an alien was epic and perhaps the most frightening scene in the entire movie, but after that, once David appears, the movie just goes downhill. What a wasted opportunity. Instead of David showing up they could have shown them running into the forest, trying to fend off the aliens in what would have been a new environment for the series.. but it wasn't to be.

They could have saved the movie somewhat if the final part on the mothership was done better, instead we get an alien directed through tunnels like in Alien 3 and a boring final scene where he is blown into outer space, like so many times before.. The alien caused very little chaos on the mothership and there was never the actual major final showdown between the lead character and the alien.

For me Covenant is a movie that had huge potential, but totally messed up in the second part, making it in my view the worst movie in the entire series, as I enjoyed Resurrection more. It's not a bad movie, but for the Alien series standards, it is a major let down, there's no denying it.