Covenant with Hell

"Alien: Covenant" is a 2017 film directed by Ridley Scott and the latest installment in the apparently never-ending "Alien" franchise. It´s considerably better than "Prometheus" from 2012, to which it´s a sequel. Both "Prometheus" and "Alien: Covenant" are considered prequels to the earlier films in the franchise. 

While "Prometheus" made a half-baked attempt to answer various in-universe questions, "Alien: Covenant" is a more typical Alien film, concentrating on the action (and the androids). The only question it really answers is "where did the xenomorphs come from". But then, we sort of knew that already: these undead and probably unhanged monsters hail from the mysterious black goo created as a bio-weapon against humanity by the so-called Designers introduced in "Prometheus". 

In "Covenant", the Nazi-looking android David goes full Übermensch (even digging Wagner´s music), exterminates everyone at the Designer home world with the help of xenomorphs, and sets himself up as "ruler in Hell", creating more and more bizarre xenomorph morphs (pun intended) as he goes along. It turns out that he killed Elizabeth Shaw from "Prometheus", using her dead body as raw material for the Frankensteinesque experiments. I´m probably not the only one who saw parallels with both Hannibal the Cannibal and Jeffrey Dahmer! Yes, "Alien: Covenant" - while less scary than, say, the original "Alien" film from 1979 (we´re used to the xenos by now) - is nevertheless deeply disturbing on a number of other levels. This is how I fancy the world to look like in my darker moments, a world that deserves to perish, while the faithful remnant returns to the Pleroma...

But OK, that´s me.

As for the plot, it´s strikingly similar to that of both "Alien" (1979) and "Prometheus" (2012), with all the usual franchise tropes: the ion storm that makes communication impossible, the crescent-shaped space ship, the clueless away team, the treacherous android, the xenomorph that sneaks onboard the mothership... 

The main difference is that it doesn´t have an (ostensibly) happy ending, since crew member Daniels is tricked by the android at the very end. The storyline cries out for at least one other prequel-sequel, explaining why the space ship Nostromo in the original film was sent out on its deadly mission to retrieve a live xenomorph in the first place. Is a "new covenant", so to speak, waiting in the wings?