Alien: Covenant

To make a sequel to Prometheus is a very, very bold move for Ridley Scott. Alien fans didn't seem to like the movie at all, they didn't like how it focused more on an existential standpoint and not all about the Xenomorphs and shit. Frankly, I thought it was very well done, but see, there's a catch to that, as I'm not a very big Alien fan in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, Alien and Aliens were fantastic pieces of space horror, which truly made outside of this world a frightening place to be. But as I've said time and time before, horror is not my kind of genre. I don't get off to cheap thrills and scares, especially in this day and age of horror. But I still wanted to give Alien: Covenant a chance just for the fact that I found Prometheus so interesting...

Frankly, I can't really say that I was disappointed with Alien: Covenant, but I wanted something more from it. Instead of being Prometheus 2, it's more of a bridge between the story we saw in Prometheus and what we see in the first Alien. It tries to balance the philosophical with the space horror, and those things just clash way too much.

Story-wise, it's very okay. It follows the story of the crew of the Covenant, a colonization ship on its way to find a habitable planet for a human colony. After a tragic event in space, they are left with few less crew members than before, and are finding a way to make the trip a bit quicker, so they find a planet which is apparently just like their original target. However, it's not like the original target...not at all.

But going back to what I was saying before, it just feels like two movies trying to create one. You get one scene one second where face huggers and proto-Xenomorphs are chasing down the crew, and then one where our two synths in the movie are asking basic questions of life. Take out either of these and you probably would have ended up with a better movie with each one. It needed some sort of basic form, which it was greatly lacking.

Now for the cast, it's once again very okay, but the characters they were given were just absolutely stupid. In fact, the only really decent performance seen here was by Michael Fassbender as our twin synths. I've spoken the praises of Fassbender before so I won't go into detail, but he was very, very good in this role, playing both ends of the good and bad spectrum in a very, very smooth way. Otherwise, like I said, these actors are really good, but they don't have good characters to explore their abilities.

Truthfully, Alien: Covenant is just that, it's an okay movie. As a science-fiction film, it's very good, it does its job well. As a space horror film, it's okay at best. As an Alien film...I can't really say. It's nowhere near Prometheus, but it's a lot better than the likes of some of the Alien sequels we've seen before. To sum things up though, the movie needed a tinge more care to the story and finding out what it really wanted to be, and all that together gives me a rounded score of 7.0/10. This franchise still has some life left in it, but it needs a way to go to find itself to the quality it had back when it began.