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!

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.

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.

Better than Prometheus, but not as good as Alien or Aliens - Alien: Covenant review by William London

This movie follows the usual Alien story (nice humans take no precautions then become hosts and die), integrates nice touches from both Alien and Aliens (fans will love these), makes use of modern special effect unavailable 40 years ago, and adds an "Origin" part. It really should have called "Alien Reboot" or "Alien Origins". Despite that, the movie is filled with suspense, up to the last second. And the cast is good. However, this movie doesn't bring anything fundamentally new compared to "Alien vs Predator". It's a good evolution and therefore a worthy remake. Any fan of Alien should watch that movie, but I am not sure it will be worth watching a second time in the future.

Oh no! Not more hapless redshirts - Alien: Covenant review by CP Customer

What is it about the Alien crews and captains. They are so Brad and Janet and do such stupid things that you could not imagine any trained space worker doing. It gets worse in each film and now in this Alien remake this low IQ army get chased around by aliens and infected by spores despite having many opportunities to GTH out of there.

Will there really be Christians in 2104? - Alien: Covenant review by JE

The depressing storyline of people of faith crusading to the stars in a little over a hundred years from now is the most fabulously unbelievable plot in recent movie history.

Some of these 'Christians' are genetic scientists and yet the movie posits a creator for the human race, one we must search for in the stars.

The simple truth is that scientists in the future might look wistfully at the claims of the Abrahamic religions but nobody is actually going to believe them. The dwindling band of the credulous who cling to religion at the moment are losing to the tide of reason that has washed away the foundations of faith.

The DNA the characters in the Alien movies so blithely manipulate proves one thing - we evolved on this planet. We were not created, not designed and not descended from grey space apes. We share a percentage of our DNA with the begonia so unless Ridley Scott has evil space plants to start the development life on our planet I am afraid the franchise has wandered away in the wrong direction.

Science fiction used to dream on the possibilities thrown up by mans potential future. Given the technology of their age great writers have imagined futures both brilliant and terrifying. What Scott gives us is a future imagined from our unenlightened past. A direction from which no comfort or understanding can be drawn, just misery.