I saw the film yesterday, and while I spoiled the movie for myself with watching all the footage that was given out by Fox and having read the leaked script a long time ago as well as having seen the leaked test screening scenes, I still liked the movie.
IMO, Ridley Scott can't win; prior to Prometheus, he wanted to move away from just showing xenomorphs running around and hence explored the idea of the origins of the space jockey and tried to tie that with origins of mankind, but most of the Alien fans or the fans who went in wanting to watch xenomorphs running around didn't like it as there were no xenomorphs. Ridley changed his view and then brought out Covenant which gave the fans the alien creatures, but at the same time did not avoid the origin of them, nor the fate of David/Shaw/Engineers, but the people who want to see more of the Engineers and to explore the grand themes in Prometheus are disappointed with this movie. He cannot please everyone, and while everyone can of course have an opinion about the film, but hating the movie for not taking a direction you wanted it is rather counter-productive IMO.
Now onto the movie, the break-neck speed of the movie was pretty obvious, but I thought that was because Ridley wanted to show all these things but Fox wanted him to cut it all down to about 2 hours. But despite the pacing, I think it successfully conveyed the points it wanted to.
I loved the score, particularly the eerie weird one that was used multiple times including in the med-bay. The neomorphs were vicious and an excellent addition to the franchise, and I am not sure why lot of people have complained about the CGI for the xenomorphs; apart from the birth scene, where they used a practical model I think, the CGI looked pretty good IMO.
I thought Fassbender was excellent as both David and Walter, and I actually liked Walter better as a character. It was a shame we didn't quite get to see how David actually ended Walter or if indeed, he was disabled. Crudup was very good as Oram and I didn't have any problem with him being led to the basement by David. Oram was not stupid, infact he was the first to see that something was fishy with David and asked David to reveal what was going on. As far as Oram is concerned, David is still an android, and he is has the weapon with him, plus he just killed that neomorph. Faris, Karine, Cole all behave as one might expect in those situations but the thing that irked me was Ricks and Upwowrth getting it on. Oh well, they might have been a freaky couple I guess. On the topic of charachters making poor choices, we see that in other movies in the franchise as well; for example: Spunkmeyer and the pilot of the lander leaving the door to their lander open when their colleagues just got their "asses kicked" by a very aggressive alien organism.
The extremely fast growth of the neomorph and the xenomorph are of course a little strange, but I look at it this way, from Ledward getting infected to him giving birth to the neomorph didn't take long at all, and this probably is a characteristic of the black goo, which is said to be a pathogen and an ACCELERANT. So, it makes sense that the creatures have a fast life cycle just like the trilobite from Prometheus. I think it also worth remembering that all of these creatures are precursors to the xenomorphs in Alien/Aliens/Alien 3 where clearly some sort of bio-mechanoid splicing has happened which might impact their life cycle.
This is a good movie and IMO, many people have romanticized the first 3 movies. If Alien 3 came out tomorrow, I am fairly sure it would get more criticism than even Prometheus or Covenant.
1. Alien 10/10
2. Aliens 9/10
3. Alien: Covenant 8/10
4. Prometheus 7/10
5. Alien 3 6.5/10
6. Alien Resurrection 5/10
