Alien Covenant Review - No More Engineers?

-Spoiler Review-

Do we get more of Prometheus?

Since i saw Prometheus in 2012 I was eagerly waiting for the follow up to that movie. I'm not saying Prometheus was a perfect movie, but it had some really interesting ideas, a good cast and the story certainly had a lot of potential for a sequel.

Now 5 years have passed and with Alien Covenant the wait is finally over. Just.. it is not Prometheus 2, as I hoped it would be.
I know, many people didn't like Prometheus, so they tried to shift the focus back to the original Alien monsters, but for someone like me, who really enjoyed Prometheus and the plot about the Engineers, it was quiet disappointing. But more to that further below.

Good visuals and special effects

I think Ridley Scott did a good job directing this movie and there are a couple of impressive scenes. The visuals are overall excellent and besides some well realized CGI, there are also some practical effects which look even better. I also liked the colors and general mood of the movie.

Among the actors the only one that really stood out to me was Micheal Fassbender, in a double role, who did an outstanding performance as usual. His scenes were also by far the best parts of the movie for me. The two androids had some interesting dialogue together and those moments reminded me the most of Prometheus.

Boring characters

I'm sorry to say it, but I didn't really like the rest of the cast... Especially Katherine Waterston was really bland and had no charisma whatsoever. It felt like they really wanted a Ripley lookalike and everything about her role seemed really forced. A big miscast in my opinion.

Also all of the so called scientists just kept making stupid mistakes, which was really upsetting after a while.

A disappointing conclusion to Prometheus

Then there is the thing with Prometheus, I was so curious to see what happened to Elizabeth Shaw and David as they flew off to the engineer planet, and yes, in a way we got an answer to that, but it was not at all what i imagined.

It's a shame that we couldn't see more of Noomi Rapace, who did a great job with her character. Also it was disappointing to see David just killing all of the engineers on arrival, instead of exploring the alien world and having meaningful conversations.

The engineers actually seemed very primitive here and different from Prometheus and it seems very unlikely that they would all just die from one single attack. Which makes me hope that we can see more of the real engineers later, but at this point it rather looks like they completely abandoned that plot...

Not scary enough as a horror movie

I really hope that Ridley Scott will show us more of the Engineers and a more interesting story in the next installment of the series.

But even if i would just try to enjoy Alien Covenant as a simple sci-fi horror movie it falls short. There is just not enough tension and every time something starts to get interesting, it just ends abruptly. You have to give the scenes enough space to breath and build up, the original Alien is a perfect example for that, unfortunately I couldn't find any of that here.

Bottom line

All in all Alien Covenant doesn't really offer a satisfying conclusion to the promising ending of Prometheus and it also is just not scary enough and lacks the interesting characters of the other Alien movies. So in the end, I was quiet disappointed. Although, if you like the Alien series or just sci-fi and horror in general, I think it is still worth watching for the visual trip.

I hope the next installment will be more interesting and answer some questions, which could possibly even upgrade Covenant a little.