This is a discussion of the movie, not a review. If you haven't yet seen it and don't want to know what happens, you might want to skip this.

So, not to beat around the bush, I don't understand the mostly positive reviews of this film. The characters are supposed to be professionals. They're the crew of a colony ship, named Covenant. Yet they are almost universally incompetent, stumbling from one idiotic decision to another. Early in the movie, lightsails are deployed in order to gather energy. There is a burst of energy from space that damages the ship, largely because the lightsails are deployed. The crew, most of whom are in cold sleep, are awakened. The captain's pod malfunctions and he is killed. This all makes sense except for the incredible coincidence of the energy burst just as the lightsails are in operation.

They then discover a transmission from an unknown world that for reasons that are never disclosed was somehow missed when this sector of space was surveyed. The planet looks better than their original destination so the captain, against the advice of the first captain's widow, who is next in line for command, decides to check it out. According to the reviews, the new captain is incompetent, but that's not entirely true. Aside from doubting his own judgment and being a little dogmatic, he makes basically reasonable decisions, until he decides to look down into an alien pod just as it's opening. Bad idea.

This is an Alien movie, but the franchise is not new, and at this point, aliens popping out of peoples' bodies is barely even startling. One by one, the crew is wiped out. We know it's going to happen, so it becomes almost boring. There's the usual frenetic action, little of which we come to care about.

This franchise went off the rails with the third film, where Newt and Hicks, main characters from the second film, the superb Aliens, are dead as the movie begins. The third film was not a bad film, except that the audience and fans were betrayed in the very beginning by the unexpected and foolish decision to so casually eliminate characters we had come to care about.

In Alien: Covenant, Ridley Scott has decided to embrace the mistakes of the past. Elizabeth Shaw, the protagonist of Prometheus, is dead at the beginning of this film, even though Prometheus ended with Elizabeth and David, the dismembered android, flying off to discover the secrets of the Engineers. Exactly how Elizabeth died is not made clear, but it is implied that she was killed by David.

All of this serves to warn the viewer that nobody is worth caring much about because, in the end, they will be vehicles for pointless action and then, most likely, discarded.

In this film, the crew lands, two are infected with a virus which turns into chest-poppers and it is revealed that David, who had landed, along with Elizabeth, some years before, has transformed the Engineers' original terrifying creation into the even more terrifying xenomorph of the original films, all because he resents his status as a creation/slave of the Weyland Corporation. He wants to create, you see, on a Wagnerian scale. This grandiosity is a recurrent theme in the film.

We never see the Engineers except for a brief flashback of David releasing the virus and thereby destroying the inhabitants of the new world.

So the big questions raised in Prometheus--how did humanity begin, why did the Engineers seemingly decide to destroy their creation (us) and maybe themselves--are not answered and the big bad turns out to be a disgruntled robot. Oh, well, maybe the answers will be coming in the next one but at this point, I really don't care.