Rent Alien: Covenant (2017)

The Horse is Dead - Alien: Covenant review by KC

Stop flogging this deceased horse, it has snuffed it and is already pushing up the daisies. All sense of Fun and even great action sequences have been abandoned in favour of a pompous story arc that is desperately trying to prolong this franchise. Like the Terminator, they should have stopped at two rather than allowing greed to drive them to create ever more tortured reincarnations of a once great movie that has now been buried under the weight of its own fruitless sequels.

Dissappointing, trashy Space Opera! - Alien: Covenant review by CS

I'm not quite sure what the point was of making this film? Prometheus ended promising us a new series of adventures with the surviving girl becoming the new Ripley with her robotic sidekick, but sadly Covenant doesn't deliver anything like this at all. If anything it takes the story in a completely different direction, centring on the Android himself, rather than the rest of the cast, who are now there to simply become fodder for the monsters, like in every Star Trek episode where they always had extra crew who would get killed off, only in this the Android becomes our captain Kirk whilst everyone else (spoiler alert) is killed off! Right from the start, this didn't have the gravitas of earlier films in the series and none of the characters have any sense of depth to them. The acting was average, slightly hammy, but in part this was down to the script and poor direction. Characters doing the wrong thing every time to the point of silliness, that the whole thing simply became unbelievable! Would you really send almost the entire crew off to explore, ten split everyone up, take your helmets off on an alien planet, land in the middle of a swamp or generally behave so stupidly to the point of silliness? Once upon the planet, everything becomes very dark, with incredibly poor lighting, making it difficult to make out anything of the sets, scenes, monsters or anything at all really. It felt as though they decided to turn the lights down so you couldn't see how bad the sets actually were, rather than to create a brooding atmosphere! As for the Alien design, seen it all before, nothing new here and not particularly well done when you do see them either! I thought the editing was poor and bitty whilst the cinematography almost didn't exist, perhaps because the film relies far too much on CGI than good set design! I found this quite a bore to watch and incredibly predictable, I would say this is the worst in the franchise so far! Everyone talks about what a brilliant job Fassbender does, but I would question whether this is because the script and direction is so poor that he needed to up his game , otherwise we would have been left with a very poor waste of effort? I even predicted the ending which came as no surprise, leaving a gaping hole wide open for the next one in the franchise! It was ok to while away an evening, but not a patch on Prometheus or any of the others, an almost rushed exercise with very little thought or imagination, I thought!

Please, no more like this! - Alien: Covenant review by NP

The first Alien movie is a classic and the second, possibly better but it's been downhill ever since. Prometheus was very flawed but at least it had an intriguing story that did bear repeated viewing (for me at least).

But this? There's no point in letting it off for great effects - I would expect nothing less from Ridley Scott and his extensive team (check out the endless credits) - but did anyone spend any time at all on editing the script, looking for plot holes, crafting it just even a bit so it less resembles a third-rate graphic novel?

Get it if you have a couple of hours to waste, it will give you something to talk about with your friends but expect jaw-dropping incredulity throughout.

Same old same old - Alien: Covenant review by Alphaville

It’s the same old bog-standard Alien movie in which spaceship crew members get bumped off one by one. The first 30 clichéd minutes are wasted getting to know the wisecracking crew. When, incredibly, they find an earth-like planet, their unbelievably po-faced acceptance of it and its massacred humanoid civilisation is laughable. Fortunately the aliens soon appear to start killing them... as long as you like your killings blood-soaked. As for the supposedly surprise ending, is there any viewer who hasn’t already figured it out?

It’s better than Prometheus (it had to be) but why is Ridley Scott bothering to direct virtual remakes of his original Alien? Listen to his on-the-nose commentary, which merely describes what’s happening on screen and shows no insight whatsoever, and you begin to wonder if he’s simply running out of imagination. Still, the action scenes are well orchestrated if you like watching aliens dispatching humans.

An ambitious sci-fi that's too cold to live up to the franchise - Alien: Covenant review by BG

Every time I watch Covenant, I get more divided about it.

In the cinema, I was enthused and excited.

Reading the novel, I was struck by how antiseptic some of it feels. Now, re-watching it on 4K, that feeling persists.

The 'Alien' is about something primal; the fear of a hideous and possibly prolonged death at the hands of something invasive and unknowable.

David, the android protagonist of Prometheus, and one of the antagonists here, is about cold detachment. A superior intellect. Something chilly and remote.

Unfortunately, Scott has declared publicly in words that he's bored with the alien and only interested in the AI threat, and that's something he conveys here with the imagery. After a beautiful space chapter, Covenant is a film of browns and greys. Derelict structures, empty woodland and deserted floodplains.

It comes briefly and sometimes powerfully alive with the characters' fight to survive - and a standout sequence based around the first emergence of a threat shows that Scott still has ferocious horror chops when he chooses to bring them; however, despite some delicious character interplay and elegant dialogue, much of the rest of the movie takes pains to be cruel, remote and cold.

It also commits the cardinal sin in horror of demystifying the beast at its core.

For decades, Jaws and Alien have been held up at the monster-movie templates; Jaws largely because of technical malfunctions that forced Spielberg to reimagine his villain into a rarely glimpsed threat, and 'Alien' because of a startlingly unnerving design that only gets deployed in brief, horrifying moments.

Now, the man who brought us one of those templates chooses to not only spell out exactly where it came from, but to show it as subordinate to a threat that some viewers find less interesting. It's akin to saying "Oh this? It's not that interesting really. And it's almost just a pet..."

It might be one of the most damaging moments in the franchise, and with Scott's declaration that he wants to sideline the Alien even further, a strong indication that the studio should have ditched him and stayed with the mooted (and braver) 'Alien 5'.

For those after chilly intellectual thrills, Covenant does deliver on some levels, and Scott might still be able to bring us a decent closing chapter if he can control his influences - but it's an antiseptic beast next to the emotion and terror of 'Alien'.

Alien Schmalien - Alien: Covenant review by NW

Was looking forward to this latest offering, however... Boring and predictable. Weak storyline. Been here before. Come on Mr Scott, move on or move over.

It's time to give up - Alien: Covenant review by Bad Dad

We now know all we need to know about the origin of The Alien. What we now need is either a ground breaking Sci-Fi horror full of originality and suspense (much like Alien) or, a Sci-Fi action horror bug hunt (much like Alien 2). We need original characters we can relate to, not characters that have been recycled from the original films. We also need some suspense, any at all would be a significant advance over this rather disappointing movie. If we can't have any of this, please don't bother with another film where I'll feel obliged to watch it, just because I've watched all the others and sadly I am a serial optimist hoping that we'll get a film that's even close to the first two.