Critics reviews

It's deadly serious about matters that he takes deadly seriously, and the only things that he derides with any irony are the movie's snippets of art greater than his own, by artists greater than himself—starting with Wagner, whose "Entry of the Gods into Valhalla" is heard in the first and last scene. The movie's lack of irony is all the more ironic since its subject is the recklessness of mankind in daring to synthesize humans androidally in order to extend our own control over the universe.

Scott does more than make a horror film here; he makes a film about the horror genre, its history, its place in the psyche, analysing the way the death-dream constantly underlies all fantasies of ego and eros.

There's an air of mystery to Alien: Covenant that the movie can't live up to, because for all its interest in _what it all means_, it has relatively little to show for all that idle questioning. You aren't alone, humans, but if you're going to keep squandering perfectly fine IP in favor of asking questions whose implications you don't take seriously, don't you deserve to be?

Our contemporary culture's need to resolve the dangling narrative threads of popular works of art is truly a pox... It's always better to allow the mind to race just enough so that it deepens the things that we see and hear. Covenant, with one exception, sheds so much light on what's come before, and augurs so much of what's to follow, that the overall experience is flat and lifeless—basically a big-budget, blood-and-guts rendition of Connect the Dots.

It's an Alien movie for our times, one in which mankind isn't just under the thumb of an oppressive corporation but sowing the seeds of its own destruction on a more sweeping scale. When a xenomorph, in its classic form, finally does make an appearance in Alien: Covenant, we see it not from a horrified human perspective but from the clinical point of view of a synthetic. It's a forebear of doom, but it also feels like a dark moment of triumph.

It does a more coherent job than "Prometheus" of having it both ways, of preying on our fears of what we can't see while teasing us with questions about what we don't know. But on some level, the impulses at work here... are at fundamental cross-purposes. Both threads holds your attention while they're on-screen in front of you, but with the exception of one stunning, nightmarish sequence of a genocidal cataclysm in progress, they never succeed in merging and breathing as one.

In The Counselor, Fassbender is mostly on the receiving end of speeches. In Alien: Covenant he gets to give them — solemn disquisitions on creation that serve mostly to set the audience up for a late, semi-effective shift into the kind of visceral, predator-prey horror show that Scott pioneered in the first place... [It's] suggestive of what's impressive and frustrating about a director whose eye remains sharp even when he can't see what's wrong with his own big, beautiful, insufferable movies.

The thrill of this new take on Alien that Prometheus promised is entirely drained from Alien: Covenant, which aims for being little more than Prometheus: Again—Fassbender is back in a big way, which is welcome, but none of the scenery, plot turns, bit players or "themes" add anything new to the recipe, and the shameless sequel setup at the end offers scant hope that the sigh-inducing third installment will bother with reinvention either

The movie is reasonably entertaining. But it slips off course after that opening section, and the problem is caused by the very creatures we presumably came to see... Alien: Covenant is filled with heady ideas that don't carry much dramatic weight in the end. But it's hard to argue with two-for-one Fassbenders. How did we ever make do with just one?

This is one of Scott's best-directed movies and one of his most entertaining overall, partly because he's working in a genre, the science fiction spectacle, that he does better than anyone since Stanley Kubrick, but also because he seems to be approaching it almost entirely in terms of visceral impact and emotion—as symphony of fire and blood, poetry and schlock.

Scott is too skilled a filmmaker to make something as disposable as the Alien vs Predator films or as ordinary as Alien Resurrection, but Covenant has the distinction of being the worst-scripted film in the entire franchise. If The Martian addressed crises in space by having a hero ‘science the shit out of' a problem, the writing team on this approach each challenge as if the answer were to ‘stupid the shit out of' it. Every idea here is half-baked, even the ones carried over from earlier films.

There is plenty to admire here. The sound design is masterful... Fassbender's performance is an elegant pas de deux that effortlessly delineates between the two identical androids. But the film is laboriously talky, filled with expository dialogue as stale as the recycled air on a spaceship. Long gone is the naturalistic banter that made Alien so potent and, with it, the ability to explore its ideas through image alone rather than pages of over-written words.