Covenant is a colony ship bound for a distant planet. A sudden energy flare disrupts their course and the crew members have to be woken from cryosleep. As they’re performing repairs on the ship, they receive a transmission from a nearby planet — a planet that seems to be so perfect in regards to habitability, that they wonder why they haven’t seen it before. They decide to take a detour and check it out willy nilly, because there’s no way in hell that’s a bad idea.
First off, how is everyone so stupid? The crew lands on the planet and immediately start trudging through the woods to find the source of the signal. They immediately start committing the most basic space exploration mistakes of all time, wading through muddy waters, poking and stepping on random shit with reckless abandon. Even idiots know that you can’t just wander onto an alien planet with absolutely no protective gear and start shoving your hands and your faces into everything. They’re just asking for it at this point.
So obviously the alien fauna on the planet release their poison and infect members of the crew. Minutes later, they’re already on their way to having their chests burst open by squealing, slimy, spiky dildos. The shit-for-brains pilot decides to have a gun battle with it inside of their only way out of here, causing their ship to explode along with their dreams of getting out of there.
This is where David comes in. You know, David, the perfectly coiffed synthetic from the last movie who had his head ripped from his body. He shows up, body intact, and saves everybody from their doom. He brings them back to his lair, which is later revealed as some sort of alien building. He and Walter (both played by Fassbender) have a freaky encounter where they “finger” each other and play mental chess. It becomes obvious that David has gone full blown Narcissus and has slotted himself into the role of mad scientist/God.
He makes up some cock and bull story about how he got there and why the planet is completely dead sans the dildo-aliens – a story nobody in the audience believes, but lo and behold, the idiot crew does. The crew gets picked apart one by one, either by David or the alien that seems to pop up wherever they go.
There’s a bunch of cut up action sequences, but the takeaway is that everybody you don’t care about dies in some gruesome kind of way. Walter and David make out and have a fistfight, and the scene cuts away just before you know who triumphs. Except, you know exactly who triumphs, because this movie isn’t nearly as clever as it thinks it is.
So fake-Walter and Daniels make it back to the ship, along with another infected crew member. The alien bursts out and kills all the other nobodies on the crew. Daniels, Danny McBride, and fake-Walter manage to blast the alien out into space. Hooray. Victory.
At the end of the day, the only two people the audience kinda gave a shit about — Daniels and Danny McBride — are the only ones left. Just as Daniels is about to enter cryosleep, she makes the realization that fake-Walter is actually David. To the surprise of absolutely no one.
The only expectation that I had going into this movie was that it would involve some serious body horror, but even then, it failed to really shock me. The film leaned way too heavily on gore instead of the psychological terror, which made the original films so good. There were too many chest-bursting scenes that it lost its punch towards the end.
What really drove me nuts about Covenant was how dumb everyone was. The only character that was truly of any substance and had a reason for acting the way he did was Walter, and he’s programmed to have a singular way of thinking. What’s everyone else’s excuse? If someone creepily tells you to come closer, clooooser, and stare into that bulging egg sac in the ground, DON’T. DO. IT. I’m looking at you, Captain Oram, you imbecile.