Usually I'm not the person to complain about CGI in movies like others, but Rook's CGI face was distracting and looked like a terrible deepfake. They should've just put another actor in as the droid "controlling" Andy. David would've been amazing here if Michael Fassbender agreed to do it. Also the final boss CGI when he grabs her while attached to the bottom of the ship, that looked rough as hell too, kinda took me out of the moment. Great jump scare, poor CGI that looked like a 3D horror ride from Universal Studios more than anything.
The black goo introduction makes no sense, I get that they harvested it out of the Aliens considering David "created" the Aliens in Covenant, but the black goo has always been poorly explained, as to how it disintegrates Charlie in Prometheus (I'm going with that he was about to fall apart before Charlize torched him), as well as the Engineer in the beginning that took it, but it can also transform the other guy into a monster and also those maggots/worms into those parasites that killed the other scientist who tried to pet it, or the squished rat in the videos in this movie, why'd it become a monster? Maybe animals have different DNA so they're prone to transformation and insanity more so than humans? But then why was Rafe Spahl's character in Prometheus turned into an insane abomination? Just inconsistency on why it picks certain people to deform and create a monster, while others it just turns them into black dust as they fall to nothing. Including the Engineer colony that David dumped it on before the events of Covenant. Thinking too much about it so just be entertained and let it go, but Ridley really just introduced so many more questions and broken plot points with Prometheus and Covenant.
Speaking of Covenant, this movie's ending is exactly like Covenant. I didn't mind that movie's ending so I enjoyed this one, I enjoyed that she couldn't spray cooling material on the newborn because it looked like a baby, and that slight hesitation cost her valuable time to get rid of it. It's a dumb horror movie move for sure, but it makes sense. I wasn't a huge fan of how quickly Andy was dispatched, but I guess the same kinda thing happened to Bishop in Aliens, but at least Bishop was able to grab Newt and hold onto the grate, Andy is just down for the count. Felt bad for Kay, she just gets used for bait so much in this movie but I guess that's what you get when you inject an unknown substance into your neck.
Also last true gripe about this movie, but why did the Xenomorphs only get to truly kill one person in here, you can argue two of them die to the traditional Xenomorphs, but I would argue its that characters stupidity and Benny Hill like falling over that do that. But the Xenomorphs are taken out of this movie and one of my worries ahead of the movie proved to be true, you needed to add a few more humans as fodder to give the Aliens something to do here. Also they now wait longer than normal periods to kill characters, or probable kills, more suspenseful for the audience, whereas if it were the old movies those characters would be dead by now without specific reason, namely Rain in the shot of her in the elevator shaft with an Alien right in her face, she should've died right there. The Aliens looked so good in this movie too, was a shame that they're killed in the way they were at first, even though it produced the Acid in the zero gravity section. So you can't claim Mary Sue in this movie because she had aimbot, so the gun auto-aimed for her. The face-huggers shine more than the Xenos in this one, which is fine but not at the expense of time spent to them. You could've added more human sacrifices and roughly 10 minutes of screen time and made the Xenos the powerhouses and perfect organisms they deserved to be shown as and you claimed them to be.
It was a great movie, solid 7 or 8 out of 10, hope it gets a sequel just like Prey, but honestly just give us the Queen as the final act, enough of the end-game random movie monster hybrid stuff. We dont' need to let a third act devolve into the same repititious one person beats a new monster trope. You had a hive in this movie, technically you could've had Kay have a Queen inside of her and dispatched her that way and made the movie more like Aliens instead of more like Alien Resurrection, Prometheus and Covenant, at least with Covenant the final fight was against an Xenomorph. Good movie, will watch again when it comes to digital or rent, but won't see it again in movie theaters unless someone really wants to go in my inner circle.
