Alien: Covenant
My first impression after watching Prometheus was that it felt like a prelude to revelations in the next film. After watching this, I can conclude that neither Prometheus or Covenant are worth the bother. Covenant, though it has a fascinating villain, still fails to provide any answers and ends illogically.
What the Alien franchise has desperately needed is a new type of alien. We know the life cycle of the Xenomorph, so there is no longer any dread in the face of this threat, only momentary shocks due to jump scares. Also, Prometheus was a more interesting movie than Covenant for me because at least there was some nominal change in the plot structure of ‘ship gets a signal and investigates’.
Here’s an idea, Scott: Have a ship with a bunch of competent scientists and soldiers get lost in deep space, crash landing on a planet far from Earth and encountering a threat that is entirely different than the Xenomorphs or the Engineers. It’s pretty simple.
I think a shift in storytelling would make these films better than just making a new threat. Covenant tried to balance action, horror, and the philosophical elements of Prometheus to somewhat lackluster results as the latter two don’t feel nearly as present in the film. If the film had just been scarier and answered a few more questions I would have enjoyed it a lot more than I did.
That it’s not scary is a structural problem though. As I said, there’s negligible mystery in the Xenomorph life cycle, so we’re all just waiting for the hapless redshirts to catch on before they all bite it. We’re not learning along with them the dangers of this threat. The other problem is the lack of answers. It’s not that we are given few answers to Prometheus, but that the person who demanded these answers is gone and with them the drive in the story to provide those answers. Therefore, the answers it does provide it provides to the audience and not to the characters in particular, making it explanation heavy while failing to satisfy our desire.