I mean c’mon now, is this gonna happen every dang time, Ridley Scott?

(And for those worried about spoilers, here, the following simplified synopsis could apply to any number of films in the franchise or ripoffs thereof, so it’s not really giving anything away.)

A spaceship gets a distress call. They unwisely follow it to an uncharted planet and trace it to a spooky crashed ship. Some folks get mauled to death / infected / etc… by some weaponized parasitic aliens. A few brave souls escape back to their ship in orbit. Ooops, something got on board. Bang! Some lady blows it out an air hatch. Dun dun dun…but she better not rest so easily…

I felt like Kristen Wiig’s Aunt Linda the Film Critic character from SNL for most of Alien: Covenant’s two hours…exasperated and rolling my eyes.

In this yawn fest (and mind you, I’m a defender of Prometheus and a huge fan of the original two films), we also get the natural evolution of Michael “Can I Get Any Stranger?” Fassbender’s ubiquity: he plays not one but two robots, and gets to kiss himself after teaching himself how to play the flute. Seriously. We also get a couple having slippery sex in a shockingly roomy shower (aboard an otherwise claustrophobic spaceship) just hours after most of their friends / crewmates were slaughtered only to get paid a visit by that nasty stowaway.

I mean I guess we did kinda learn how the aliens evolved into the ones we loved in the first two films, but at this point…who cares anymore?  This could’ve at least been entertaining on a loony-toons level had it not been so unoriginal.

Scott, I’m afraid has laid a stale, rotten egg this time around…and just because it’s slick and manufactured well doesn’t mean it doesn’t stink.

Written by David H. Schleicher