One of my biggest fears as a writer is that whatever I spend my time, blood, sweat, and tears on is no good… and because I’m so close to the product I won’t even know it.

Understand, my novels/stories are my babies.  I devote so much energy to them and love them to death while, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, try to look at them with as harsh an eye as I can to make sure that when they are eventually released, they’re the absolute best thing I could have done.

I also recognize opinions on entertainment are just that, and what to you may “rock your world” to some others might be a complete dud (I’ve pointed it out many times before that I loved Batman v Superman while so many savaged it and I found the original Guardians of the Galaxy complete crap, while so many loved it!)

Thus, I know that if someone doesn’t like any of my works (while, hopefully, a whole bunch of others do!), I can rest easy in the knowledge that I did the best I could at the time I wrote my latest work.  I scrutinized every chapter, paragraph, sentence, and word.  I checked and re-checked the plot and the delivery of the story.  If it didn’t work for you, it simply wasn’t meant to be.

But going back to my biggest fear: Because I’m so intimately involved in my stories/novels, there is the danger that I might miss something.  There might be this big plot whole right there which I’ve somehow missed, being so focused on a tree and not seeing the forest around me.  Or, worse, the story simply isn’t all that good, and I should probably let it go and do something else.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings us to the latest Ridley Scott directed Alien film, Alien: Covenant.

Mr. Scott created an incredible stir, and elevated himself into the pantheon of “A” list directors, with his original Alien film, released in 1979.  He would follow that up with Blade Runner, a not at all bad one-two combination for a then up-and-coming director.

Had Mr. Scott not released another film after those two, his legend would be set.  He continued though, amassing a mind-boggling amount of produced and directed works.  Some haven’t been terribly good while others have been outstanding (Blackhawk Down and Thelma and Louise are two which, IMHO, are among his better works).

Recently, Mr. Scott returned to the world he created in Alien, first with the 2012 film Prometheus, and now in 2017 with Alien: Covenant.

And I really, really wish he hadn’t bothered.

Prometheus was a gorgeous film.  It featured a powerhouse cast and scenes that you could stare at for hours.  It also featured a lackluster story, characters doing mind-bogglingly stupid things, and an ending that promised a far better story than the one delivered in this film.

Walking out of the theater when I saw that film, the writer in me thought Prometheus was little more than a prologue, something done away with in maybe half an hour and that the film proper should have started afterwards, when Noomi Rapace’s Elizabeth Shaw headed out to the stars, to find out what those pesky aliens were up to with their weird genetic works.

With Alien: Covenant, whatever story was supposed to happen afterwards with Shaw was almost totally jettisoned, which proves if nothing else how almost completely irrelevant the whole endeavor was.

Alien: Covenant plays out like three films smashed into one.  Given the lukewarm response to Prometheus, perhaps Mr. Scott realized his original grand vision of, who knows, five to six Alien films which would form a long saga had to be wrapped up much quicker and therefore we get a film that is chock full of story…

…which, unfortunately, is not very good.

Mr. Scott does away with Elizabeth Shaw’s character (don’t believe IMDB’s statement that she’s in the film… if she is actually in the film it was cut out of the theatrical version) and her search for answers in flashback and sticks us with yet another bunch of victims and potential victims on their way to colonizing a world but, after your by now cliched emergency, are re-routed to another, tantalizing world from which a mysterious signal is coming.

On this world they find David (Michael Fassbender), the android from Prometheus.  The crew has their own android, Walter (also played by Mr. Fassbender), which -how can I put this delicately?- only makes sense given where the story goes in the end.

It seems logical that if you’re going to create automatons that look eerily like people, you might want them to look different from each other, no?  I mean, your David is my Walter or Jim or Charlie.  Wouldn’t that just open things right up to a lot of confusion?

See where I’m going here?

Tell you who didn’t: The survivors of this wretched film.

So the crew of the Covenant (that’s the name of their ship) heads to the weird planet and is amazed at how it looks so good but you know things will go sideways soon… and of course they do.  But, like Prometheus, as an audience you’re once again marveling (if I could use that word) at the sheer stupidity of their actions.  They encounter David and ignore all the many megawatt neon lit “DANGER” signs flashing all over him and allow themselves to simply follow along where he takes them, then split up (idiots) to then be picked off one by one, leading to the “exciting” climax back on the ship with that one last alien you just knew would somehow mysteriously (and without explanation) get on board their ship.

I didn’t like Prometheus much.  I thought it was a misfire from a story standpoint but could admire the fact that Mr. Scott was trying, though ultimately failing, to do something new and different within the Alien universe.  With Alien: Covenant, my patience with the story he’s determined to follow (Let’s just call it what it is: David’s story) was at its end.  The now two part story is silly when its not cliched and the villain of this piece (who I suppose was becoming the villain in the first) is all the more annoying because we simply can’t root for the people around him… they’re so dumb you can be forgiven for hoping they get what they deserve.

And then there’s the odd casting choices, which make me wonder just how serious Mr. Scott was when making the film.

Why exactly was James Franco here?  I know he was given some actual “present day” dialogue in the “prologue” stuff that was released to the internet before the film’s debut but here he literally says nothing -except in a video- and his role maybe lasts like a minute, if that.

There’s also Danny McBride.  Known for mostly playing stoners and/or in your face morons (likable or not), I think he’s a good comedic actor and he certainly isn’t terrible in this film and in this more serious role but, like all the rest of the Covenant crew, he is a walking piece of cardboard and not a fully fleshed being.  Thus his role, like James Franco’s, screams stunt casting.  I could never quite remove myself from him being just a second away from lighting up and/or doing something silly.

Finally, there’s an opening scene involving Fassbender’s David and Guy Pearce’s Peter Weyland that, like was ultimately done in Prometheus, probably should have been left on the cutting room floor, even if it was visually striking.

Supposedly Mr. Scott plans to make a third, concluding chapter to his Alien prologue films.  Perhaps that one will finally be good, because the first two, in my opinion, haven’t been.

Yeah, count on that.

A pass.  A hard pass.