Alien: Covenant (2017)

written by John Logan and Dante Harper

from a story by Jack Paglen and Michael Green

based on characters created by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett

directed by Ridley Scott

Thirty-three years after his seminal sci-fi horror film Alien (1979), director Ridley Scott returned to the world he created with Prometheus (2012), a prequel that, despite some interesting ideas, pretty much sucked. Five years later, Scott continues the suck with the even more pedestrian Alien: Covenant, a movie that serves as a sequel to Prometheus and a more or less direct prequel to the events in Alien (got that?). In it, a colonization mission goes awry as the crew of the ship Covenant runs into the sole survivor from the previous installment, the shifty android David (Michael Fassbender), who’s been hard at work creating a new species to eradicate the human race.

As the creatures opened their multiple salivating mouths and proceeded to explode out of bodies, I kept wishing for some sparks of originality. But there’s none. You’ve seen it all before – and better – in Scott’s original and in James Cameron’s sequel Aliens (1986). And even as the franchise serves up an explanation for the origin of the xenomorphs (never trust an android), who knew that discovering it would turn out to be such a bore? Please, Ridley, no more.

Rating: *½

Carlos I. Cuevas