Alien: Covenant leaves much better lingering questions than Prometheus

In 2012, the science-fiction / horror film Prometheus brought Ridley Scott back to the film franchise he launched in 1979 with Alien. There have been many Alien sequels, spinoffs, and multimedia franchise additions over nearly 40 years, but Scott’s return to the series was big news. It raised fans’ hopes that the series could return to its earliest, most chilling roots. But Prometheus left a lot of questions behind. Many of the biggest ones were just exasperating plot holes: how does a geologist get lost in a cavern system he just electronically auto-mapped? Why is the best xenobiologist money can buy stupid enough to try to pet a snarling alien in the middle of an obvious threat display? Why does a woman bred for brilliance try to run...

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