First things first: like Prometheus, Alien: Covenant looks spectacular - all the way through, and especially in the middle section when they visit David's weird necropolis. Scott's vision of space here has a velvety, Gothic heaviness, as well as - obviously - being dark in every sense.
It's also gripping once the bad things start happening, rapid-fire bursts of suspense and action alternating with one or two phases of respite, and while the body count mounts in a way that is utterly preordained and generally without a great sense of meaning as one after another of the crew meets their grisly deaths, it's involving enough in how it whittles them down (having said that, I'm not one for nit-picking about either of these kinds of things, but: (1) given how it turns out the alien material penetrates the crew, in retrospect it does seem odd that they were all walking around on an unknown planet without any breathing gear - for fear of disease and infection even if the air had already been analysed as breathable; and (2) the shower scene was pretty gratuitous).
Of the crew, the most striking are Katherine Waterston, who made an impression in Inherent Vice and does so again here with a turn that's both a touch enigmatic and engagingly human, Billy Crudup, who always has an air to him but here feels just a bit underdeveloped (particularly the implications of his faith) and has an arc that basically involves behaving exactly the way that his first appearances lead you to expect him to (i.e. on their surface, with no development at all), Danny McBride (a bit one-dimensional but not distractingly so) and, in a likeably real-feeling performance, Amy Seimetz.
But actually, it's Fassbender's dual turn - as David and Walter - that's the most interesting of the lot, and which lies most at the heart of the film's concerns. There's a tip of the hat to Blade Runner when David exclaims 'That's the spirit' to Daniels' (Waterston) resistance - that it comes when she thrusts a nail into him is probably not coincidental to Roy's own nailing, nor, come to that, that one's own biblical referent - and the questions about the nature of creation, what it is to be human (or alive) and related are all well in play. The answers may seem likely to be nihilistic - but then who knows, perhaps in however many more films are to come in this intriguing franchise, the aliens might come to be imbued with a deeper symbolic significance...it seems just possible.
It's also gripping once the bad things start happening, rapid-fire bursts of suspense and action alternating with one or two phases of respite, and while the body count mounts in a way that is utterly preordained and generally without a great sense of meaning as one after another of the crew meets their grisly deaths, it's involving enough in how it whittles them down (having said that, I'm not one for nit-picking about either of these kinds of things, but: (1) given how it turns out the alien material penetrates the crew, in retrospect it does seem odd that they were all walking around on an unknown planet without any breathing gear - for fear of disease and infection even if the air had already been analysed as breathable; and (2) the shower scene was pretty gratuitous).
Of the crew, the most striking are Katherine Waterston, who made an impression in Inherent Vice and does so again here with a turn that's both a touch enigmatic and engagingly human, Billy Crudup, who always has an air to him but here feels just a bit underdeveloped (particularly the implications of his faith) and has an arc that basically involves behaving exactly the way that his first appearances lead you to expect him to (i.e. on their surface, with no development at all), Danny McBride (a bit one-dimensional but not distractingly so) and, in a likeably real-feeling performance, Amy Seimetz.
But actually, it's Fassbender's dual turn - as David and Walter - that's the most interesting of the lot, and which lies most at the heart of the film's concerns. There's a tip of the hat to Blade Runner when David exclaims 'That's the spirit' to Daniels' (Waterston) resistance - that it comes when she thrusts a nail into him is probably not coincidental to Roy's own nailing, nor, come to that, that one's own biblical referent - and the questions about the nature of creation, what it is to be human (or alive) and related are all well in play. The answers may seem likely to be nihilistic - but then who knows, perhaps in however many more films are to come in this intriguing franchise, the aliens might come to be imbued with a deeper symbolic significance...it seems just possible.
