Alien: Covenant. A Load of Old Trash.

If you thought the idiots in Prometheus were stupid wait until you meet the morons in Alien: Covenant.
I watched this movie with high hopes, I mean surely it couldn't be any worse than Prometheus right? Wrong. Prometheus was freaking Citizen Kane compared to this cinematic polished turd. Adding Xenomorphs and Facehuggers into the mix doesn't improve things one bit without good ideas and a DECENT SCRIPT with characters you can identify with, symapthise with and root for. I was hoping every single one of these moronic dipsh*ts would die painfully and horribly. A good movie stays with me after I have left the cinema, and usually provokes a bit of thought on what I have seen. Even Prometheus, though weak, did provide a bit of food for thought after I had seen it. Alien: Covenant - absolutely nothing. I did not cogitate for one second after seeing this mess, except for "Well that sure was a load of festering crap." as I left the cinema (and I was not alone, the audience laughed and jeered throughout the film, also obviously unimpressed).

Ridley Scott may be a good director, and an innovative visual stylist, but he is not a writer. His ideas stink big time (even as far back as Alien, he had some terrible ideas that luckily didn't make it into the movie, apparently the studio even sent a couple of minders to ensure he stuck to the script. Obviously Mr. Scott is now so powerful no-one wants to stand up and say "Hey Ridley this SUCKS," he obviously employs "Yes" persons only). Alien: Covenant looked good but the script was pathetic, his "Origin" for the xenomorph was pathetic. He should never have tried to provide backstories for the alien and the Space Jockeys, this totally robs them of any mystery whatsoever. David "Created" the xenomorph a few years before Alien? Rubbish. What a load of garbage. David was the most interesting character in Prometheus, but Fassbender got royally screwed in this one, he's a great actor and I wondered why the hell he signed on for this garbage? Possibly because he picked up two paychecks instead of one. Even the awesome Guy Pearce looked like he was embarrassed at being involved with this. I actually had to re-watch this film to write this review (a version a mate of mine downloaded, which was dubbed into Spanish. Well I certainly wasn't going to waste my money renting or buying this piece of crap).

What went wrong? Well Ridley Scott is obviously making this crap up as he goes, as I originally surmised, and Alien: Covenant proves this beyond any shadow of doubt.
I have to mention a very heavy handed bit of (unintentional?) subtext that no-one seems to have noticed, yet it smacked me upside the head immediately upon viewing this scene - Blonde haired, blue-eyed, uber Aryan android David bombs the planet inhabited by a race of hook-nosed humans. Alien: Genocide of the Space Jews would have been a more appropriate title. Was this movie secretly written by Mel Gibson?

How the hell did the solar flare get into the captain's hypersleep chamber? Why was James Franco even in this movie? This scene was unneccesary and ridiculous. As was this terrible movie.

An animal species that propagates via plant spores? WTF? In Alien the creatures' breeding cycle was based on that of the parasitical breeding habits of certain species of terrestrial wasps, believable and horrific. Here a guy gets infected when a plant spore floats into his ear, pathetic and laughable

You would think the Covenant crew would be highly trained professionals, but no they are a bunch of idiots who panic at the first sign of danger. Real astronauts are thoroughly psychologically tested and selected for their ability to remain calm and professional in the face of potential danger. Weyland-Yutani really need to re-assess their hiring and psychological screening practices, how these idiots get to be in charge of trillion dollar space vessels is mind boggling.
As with Prometheus, Alien: Covenant features a bunch of moronic characters doing stupid things to further the plot. Exploring an alien planet without spacesuits is ludicrous, even if it has a breathable atmosphere, they would still have to observe biohazard and decontamination protocols due to bacteria and alien micro-organisms, and surely they would check out the planet thoroughly with drones before exploring it. But hey we need some idiots to get infected, so we'll send down a team unprepared and unprotected. How did they miss a vast city full of corpses within walking distance of their shuttle?

The idiot who locks her friend in with the creature to contain infection. She had already copped a faceful of possibly infected blood when the creature split the guy's back open*, so this makes no sense whatsoever. Also there is a continuity error here, her face was spattered with the guy's blood, but when she uses the radio to contact the Covenant the blood is gone, when she goes back to the med bay the blood on her face has returned. Then this panicky idiot goes on to blow up the shuttle and herself, eliciting derisive laughter from the audience. *(Ridley Scott claimed that he would "Top" the chestburster scene from Alien, so we get a backburster instead, not even close).

The new Captain Moron has just shot dead the evil android's pet alien, which had munched off his crewmate's head. Evil android is super pissed about this, and yet Captain Moron obligingly sticks his face right over an object that looks suspiciously like a big, slimy egg when evil android tells him to.

Alien: Covenant totally ignores the rules set up in Alien - They manage to pull the facehugger off the guy's face (which had somehow managed to impregnate him after only a few seconds). In Alien when they try to remove the facehugger from Kane's face Dallas states - "It's not coming off without tearing his face off with it." plus the facehugger takes several hours to impregnate Kane, not a few seconds.
The ridiculous "Twist" ending that is totally obvious as soon as we see the Covenant has a "David" model android aboard, especially so when David cuts, dyes and styles his hair to match that of identical model android Walter. How did he cut his hair to match Walter's perfectly? (you try cutting your hair using a mirror). Where did he get the hair dye from that conveniently exactly matched Walter's hair colour? The Engineers were all bald so I doubt they had Hair Salons. Why would an android's hair grow? Absolutely pathetic.

The Engineers did not resemble the Engineers in Prometheus, who were albino, almost translucent, with black eyes, yet the Engineers in Alien: Covenant had human skin tones and normal eyes. There is major inconsistency with the effects of the Black Goop - It disintegrates your body and unravels your DNA, or it turns you into an alien zombie, or it lets you impregnate your sterile girlfriend with an alien octopus baby, or it kills thousands of people and leaves their black corpses frozen in place, or it mutates plant life into producing spores that create proto alien animal life. Unfortunately the only thing it doesn't do is mutate bad scriptwriters into good ones.

"You hold onto it and I'll do the fingering." this line was met with howls of laughter from the audience.
The idiots in the shower. If half your crew had just been wiped out by alien creatures methinks you would be too traumatised to have a bonk in the shower stall.

Ripley Lite #1. At least the personality vacuum actress that played the "Heroine" in Prometheus met a suitably horrific Gigeresque fate, though it's a pity we didn't get to see this happen to the annoying idiot.

Ripley Lite #2. The personality vacuum actress who portrayed the "Heroine." in Alien: Covenant. Her only facial expression throughout the film was as if she had just been slapped across the face with a dead fish.
Why are modern screenwriters unable to write scripts with convincing and logical reasons for the actions performed by the characters, rather than have them doing dumb things to drive the plot forward? Why are these hacks getting paid good money to write these garbage scripts? Hollywood studio executives are obviously contemptuous of the audiences for these films, and continually underestimate people's intelligence, "Hey we'll just put in a few more explosions and no-one will notice that the script is full of illogical garbage that makes no sense."

With Prometheus and Alien: Covenant Ridley Scott has retroactively ruined Alien for me. The Space Jockeys and the Xenomorph species didn't need intricate backstories:
David created the Xenomorph ten years before Alien? The Space Jockeys were nothing more than albino steroid abusers in suits? What a load of stinking crap.
I always felt that the Space Jockeys were an ancient, alien species, long extinct, possibly related to Lovecraft's Elder Gods, and their motivations would have been alien, unfathomable and eldritch (to understand them would drive you insane). The Alien was a force of nature, not something cooked up by an unhinged android with daddy issues. Yet with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant Ridley Scott has managed to turn the dark Lovecraftian Alien universe into a clone of the utter crap Star Trek series where all the aliens in the galaxy are just humans with stupid lumps on their heads, a concept that is totally freaking ludicrous. As I have long suspected he has been making this crap up as he goes, (and doing a piss poor job of it too) which Alien: Covenant proves without a doubt. Yes I know I have already stated this, I just thought I should re-iterate it. It seems the "screenwriters" were only there to help facilitate Ridley Scott's dumb ideas, rather than write an intelligent, engaging story, with characters you could actually sympathise with, they're obviously doing it for the money with no shred of personal or artistic integrity whatsoever.

Hopefully Ridley Scott will retire before he can make any more of these mega budget turkeys. A dose of Syphilis would probably be less painful than sitting through another one of Ridley Scott's pathetic Alien prequels (and no I am not speaking from personal experience here, just surmising).

ADDENDUM. Apparently Alien: Covenant was a commercial and critical failure* (no surprise there, if the audience I saw the movie with are any indication) and it seems there may be no more of these crap prequels (we can only hope).
*Not my personal opinion, I have read that this is so.

I have heard the rumours of a Netflix television series based on Alien/Aliens, which if true may redeem the franchise somewhat. I have even had a go at coming up with a format and characters, based on characters and ideas from my Alien fan fiction stories for a possible way to do this show.