Alien: Covenant reviews

Milford Sound is both beautiful and sinister, and as the Alien story unfolds further, the Synthetic Humans are the biggest stars in this impressive production.

If you watched Prometheus and left wanting to /wrists, this is not the same thing.

Where Prometheus was ridiculous to a fault (e.g., why can people not run sideways out of the path of a giant rolling donut-), Covenant is a return to an Alien movie where they don't try to explain too much (busting things in the process – what even was the black goo–), and give you the horrific scenes you want.

Covenant follows the crew of a colony ship. Pulled off-course by an accident, they set down on a human-habitable world. Unfortunately, the monsters beat 'em too it. The character casting is on point; people are flawed in plot-useful ways but not clowns about it. The script goes off pretty much as you'd expect, not a huge amount of surprises, and you should be able to guess victims and survivors within the first ten minutes.

While the SFX are on point, what takes this from a 3-star experience to a 4 is Michael Fassbender. The dude is amazing in this movie. He plays two roles – a “nice” robot, Walter, and a “naughty” robot, David. As Walter, he is compassionate, likable, and the kind of 'droid you want on your starship. As David, he's the very devil himself, and how Fassbender manages to keep these two roles separate during filming I don't know. Whatever, the outcome is masterful: a David that is creepy, haunting and a cut above any Alien-francise synthetic to date.

This movie reminded me most of Alien vs. Predator in terms of not-too-unpredictable scares, and some decent oh-no moments. But it channels Alien and the sequel Aliens in terms of, “Dude, we're so screwed.” Try it out today :)

The story is a progression from Prometheus but the plot was predictable. There were no real twists and turns and there was little tension in the film. I expected so much more with Ridley Scott being involved in the movie but was ultimately disappointed. It is not a bad movie just very average.