Film Review: ‘Alien: Covenant’ is a Pale Copy of Previous Best Films

CHICAGO – It’s worth noting that the Alien series extends back nearly 40 years, and yet the chest-bursting Xenomorphs have produced a grand total of exactly two good movies. The orginal “Alien” and “Aliens” are great films that stand the test of the time, while every other entry in this series would require a significant stretch of the imagination to be called barely watchable.

Rating: 2.0/5.0

“Alien: Covenant” is a sequel to the Alien prequel “Prometheus”, but it’s essentially the movie fans thought they would get when they signed on for that earlier, overlong essay of sci-fi mumbo jumbo. While the first two films tried to break new ground, “Alien: Covenant” is content to merely rehash the hits. It’s less of a new film and more of a Frankenstein’s Monster mashup of elements that worked before but have not necessarily gotten any better with repetition.

Things don’t start out promisingly as we’re greeted once again by megalomaniacal android named David (Michael Fassbender) at the moment he meets his maker, Mr. Weyland (cameo by Guy Pearce). It’s a sterile scene full of dry exposition in the empty blank space of the tech mogul’s mountain retreat, while reminding audiences of what happened in Prometheus. Coming into this film I realized I had forgotten 98 percent of that movie. I remembered Fassbender was an evil android, and there was an Alien at the end, but everything else in that movie was erased from my memory, and what I saw in that scene didn’t exactly make me want to revisit it.

”Alien: Covenant” opens everywhere on May 19th. Featuring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride and Demián Bichir. Screenplay by John Logan and Dante Harper. Directed by Ridley Scott. Rated “R”