Alien: Covenant (R)
20th Century Studios; Dread Central; IMDb; Kindertrauma; Rotten Tomatoes; TV Tropes; Wikia; Wikipedia; Xenopedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Google Play; Hulu; Movies Anywhere; Vudu; YouTube

Caution: spoilers.

This is a sequel to Prometheus, and both movies are prequels to the original movie Alien. It came out in 2017, but I didn't see it until 2024, on the night that the next movie, "Alien: Romulus" debuted in theaters. I struggled a bit to decide whether I liked this movie slightly less or slightly more than "Prometheus", but ultimately I gave it the same rating as that movie. In some odd way, I feel like I'm being both too generous and too stingy with my rating of the movie. I dunno what to tell you. It was okay.

There's a prologue with Peter Weyland activating an android he had created, which chooses the name "David" for himself. (This is apparently the same David from "Prometheus", or it could be another one of the same model, I don't know for sure.) The movie then flashes forward to 2104, eleven years after the Prometheus went missing. There's now a colonization ship called Covenant which is seven years away from its destination, a planet called Origae-6. There are 2000 colonists in cryosleep and a crew of fifteen, who also go into cryosleep, while the ship is maintained by an android named Walter (Michael Fassbender, who also plays David). When the ship is damaged by an unpredictable neutrino burst, Walter wakes up most of the crew, but the captain dies because his pod was damaged, I guess. After making repairs to the ship, they pick up a signal coming from an unknown planet that's just a couple weeks or so away, so they decide to investigate.

Once they reach the planet, part of the crew goes to the surface in a lander. Two members of the crew get infected by like spores or whatever, which leads to alien creatures bursting out of them a bit later. I guess both creatures are killed, and then the crew is approached by David, who tells them he had crashed there on the Prometheus. He says Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, the only other survivor of the events of the previous movie, had died in the crash, and that a pathogen had been accidentally released, which killed all the fauna on the planet.

Beyond that, I don't want to spoil any details of the plot, except to say that the crew eventually faces another alien creature. And there are only two survivors. I feel bad about not saying anything specific about (nor even naming) any of the crew, but... I guess I just wasn't interested enough to bother. Which is not to say there was anything wrong with any of the characters. They were... fine. The whole story was fine. As a prequel to the franchise, I think it actually works a bit better than "Prometheus", but probably wouldn't have worked as well without that movie coming before this one. But it still leaves something to be desired. Like, there still seems to be at least one piece of the puzzle that should come between this movie and "Alien" (which I guess is set in 2122, eighteen years after this movie). But I don't know if we'll ever get that puzzle piece, considering the next movie, "Alien: Romulus", is an interquel set between "Alien" and "Aliens". Anyway, there were definitely things I found interesting about this movie, mostly to do with David. But there's at least one thing I found pretty damn disappointing, which I think fails to deliver on the promise set up by "Prometheus". And I don't know what else to say.