Alien Covenant 2017 6 out of 10
Alien Covenant is the sequel to Prometheus and as such a prequel to Alien. The story picks up about 10 years after the events of Prometheus and follows a colony ship that is headed for a distant planet being woken up early after some ship damage and receiving a message from a nearby planet capable of supporting life. They decide to investigate, which turns out to be a bad idea as the planet is where David (the android) and Elizabeth from Prometheus have crash landed. The crew encounters some Alien spores that infect several crew and turn into Aliens quicker than anything in the original film. Their landing ship is destroyed and they are about to be annihilated until they are saved by David.
David has apparently been overcome by a serious god complex since we last saw him as a severed head in the first film.
The film makes the same mistake as Alien 3 and kills off the main character from Prometheus before the film even begins . Apparently there was some deleted scenes that dealt with this that we don't get to see. Instead we get a flashback to David arriving on the Engineers planet and unleashing some destructive disease that wipes them out. Since then he has apparently has been experimenting with the Alien DNA. Trying to make a better creature. It is a decent Alien film as far as the battle with the creatures, but it is just too much rehashing of already covered material. The ground crew gets destroyed while battling the creatures and the main ship swoops in to try and rescue them. We get some scenes that rethread the same battles at the end of Aliens as they try to escape the planet.
To make things confusing David and an android that looks just like him from the Covenant named Walter end up battling the climax of this battle is not shown. (Surprise) at the end David replaces Walter as a couple of crew that haven't been killed off escape. This not so surprising twist happens at the end of the film just as the two remaining crew members go back into hibernation. And then David coughs up and places a couple of Alien eggs into a
I really liked Prometheus-- but this sequel just continues to take the Franchise off in a weird direction. This film makes the connection to the original Alien more convoluted. If David is the one that creates the Aliens from the original film, why are they found on an Engineer Spaceship with a Space Jockey Pilot? I also don't like that the new films have basically wiped out the Alien Vs Predator films since they don't fit in with the new Timeline. They kill the Alien Vs Predator shared universe concept which is a shame. Sure the Aliens vs Predator films never lived up to their potential, but they were better than Alien 3 (One of the only movies I've ever walked out of a theater during). Alien and Aliens still stand out as the gold standard of the franchise. This film is pretty much a forgetable entire to the franchise.
Here is a Timeline Video that tries to explain the Alien Timeline from IGN.
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