Alien: Covenant

Ridley Scott podcast with Empire magazine;

My thoughts on the film:

- It's better than "Prometheus"

- Depending on how you feel about "Alien: Resurrection", this is probably the third best "Alien" movie of the franchise

- It's still well below the quality of the original "Alien" or James Cameron's terrific sequel "Aliens"

- I'm not sure if explaining the background of the Xenomorphs is really the way to go, Stephen King famously said that you should never explain the Big Bad too much because explaining it takes away part of what makes it so terrifying

^

I agree about them over-explaining.  Part of the origins should be left to the imagination.  Cosmic horror is all about the unknown.  There are a lot of concept art online now.

Not much of it worked for me while it was rolling, but certain things grew on me the more I thought about them afterwards. There's a full-on Frankenstein story starring David, there's a decent exploration scenario involving random crew members getting themselves killed, there's a mostly pointless prologue about the terrors of a storm and there's a final act where they whip through virtually every trope from the Alien franchise, but at about three times the speed. All of which made for a very flawed but not uninteresting watch.

I think what struck me most about it was just how much the xenomorph plays second fiddle to David. It feels like Scott has become less interested in the aliens themselves and the horror they bring, and more in artificial intelligence and the impact it has on humans. So much so that he seems to have started trying to weave the synthetic android themes of Blade Runner into the Alien mythology.