Following a decent opening weekend at the box office, the verdict is out on Alien: Covenant — and it’s that there is no verdict on Alien: Covenant.
The film was mostly panned by critics, who considered it a gore-heavy and shallow departure from the high-minded ambitions of its predecessor Prometheus. All the same, you can’t totally discount a body-horror escapade in space, and audiences have blessed the film with an ambiguous 64 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Maybe this is just what happens when your franchise’s narrative literally spans hundreds of years, and the only consistent character is a parasitic alien whose central plot function is to destroy humans in 1,000 gruesome ways. Anyway, the marketing team behind Covenant also managed to acquire a couple of cute xenomorph Twitter emojis to correspond with hashtags over opening weekend — you can only see them on Twitter — and audiences ran with it to describe their plethora of reactions.
It was good!
It was bad!
It was … okay.
Also, James Franco was there.
Alien: Covenant is in theaters now.
