Review of Alien: Covenant

While there are worse ways to spend your money, Alien: Covenant is far from must-see movie-making. The earlier of these Alien reboot movies, Alien: Prometheus, was a hot mess - throwing half a dozen half-baked, super-ambitious ideas into the air and trying to catch them on the same saucer. It didn't work and mostly serves as a good example of why story must be the first, last, and everything in a movie.

Covenant is bit more coherent, if for no other reason than it really only has one idea in mind: getting us to a fully-formed xenomorph engaged in quality chest-ripping and murder-dicing. Which it does with reasonable competence.

Did I want more out of this movie? There are some moments that hint at a much more interesting and epic movie behind this one - the visit of the android David to the home planet (?) of the Engineers is one example. The idea of the evolution of the Xenomorph being a kind of machine directed domestication is intriguing.

But really this movie is the very first Alien movie with a couple of mythology elements grafted on, reheated and served to audiences who already know not to expect too much. This is the Olive Garden of sci fi body horror.

In particular, the characters were highly under-developed in this movie, which left their questionable decisions and general lack of safety concerns baffling. It's almost like every single human being in this movie was casted from a big catalog of stock horror characters for the sole purpose of giving rise to the Xenomorphs. Which, of course, they were.

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