Buckets of gore and action but remarkably few chills: review of Alien: Covenant and the week's other big releases

How unfortunate, then, that Covenant doesn’t deliver. It features a return for the famed, A-list monster, the "xenomorph", buckets of gore and action thrills – but remarkably few chills. The director has simply forgotten how to scare us. As a result, the series feels lost in space.

In the previous film, the Prometheus expedition optimistically went in search of mankind’s makers, only to find that the same race was also responsible for a biological weapon designed to destroy its creation. It ended with sole human survivor Elizabeth Shaw and the android David flying off to find out why.

Ten years later, the colony ship Covenant is travelling in deep space. As with the recent Passengers, an accident forces an early wake-up call, this time for the crew – all except the captain (a pointless cameo by James Franco) who’s ignominiously fried in his pod. With nervous replacement Oram (Billy Cudrup) at the helm, the team fix the ship and prepare to continue their journey, when they receive a surprising signal from a nearby planet.

Rule number one of science fiction: never answer distress calls or other unexpected transmissions. Of course, Oram ignores that. Other rules will also be broken in quick succession – don’t take almost your entire crew onto an unfamiliar planet, don’t walk alone at night in a dangerous new environment, don’t fire powerful weapons inside a space ship, don’t stick your face into a mysterious hatching egg. With every dumb and ill-fated decision, you can feel a scriptwriter ticking a box.

It turns out that the signal came from Shaw’s crash-landed ship. There’s no sign of her, but David, again played by the excellently creepy Michael Fassbender, is now cutting a Prospero figure on the planet, a veritable mad scientist with a god complex.

Scott is making a valid attempt to combine the philosophising of Prometheus and the horror of Alien, with the creation theme given an ironic or gruesome spin at every turn. A prologue features an ominous chat about the nature of creation between David and his maker, the inventor Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce). The Covenant’s own android, Walter (also Fassbender), reveals that David’s troublesome individualism has been programmed out of the latest models. There’s poignancy in the fact that the crew (presumably like their colonist cargo) is made up of couples – all the better to propagate the race, all the more horrible when they start dying. And the reveal of David’s pastime on the planet and the fate of Elizabeth Shaw is positively Grand Guignol.

At the same time, the director and his team dutifully provide all of the fan favourites – the eggs, the facehugger, the chest-burster, the xenomorph, as well as a new, sleeker variant, and a return to the action heroine template created by Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, now ably played by Katherine Waterston’s Daniels.

But with so much going on, the film can’t settle into any kind of groove. And the déjà vu is stultifying. As Scott rushes from one predictable set-up to another, characters despatched by rote, he denies the film the slow pacing and genuine atmosphere required to build tension and fear. The easily guessed sting in the tail is an undeniable sign that he really should call time on his alien baby.

Also released:

Miss Sloane (15)

The corrupt and cut-throat world of Washington politics is laid bare in this smart and racy thriller. Jessica Chastain plays the hotshot lobbyist whose icy persona and dubious methods make her a surprise choice to fight for a gun control bill. Chastain’s compelling performance keeps us guessing about her character’s true nature and what, if anything Sloane has up her sleeve to trump the all-powerful gun lobby.

Frantz (12A)

Absorbing mystery, set in a German town after the First World War, where a young woman, Anna, is mourning her soldier fiancé, when a Frenchman appears claiming to be a close friend. As the bitter town turns on the “victor”, Anna falls in love anew. But is the stranger exactly who he says he is?

The Levelling (15)

Small but perfectly formed British drama stars luminous up-and-comer Ellie Kendrick (Game Of Thrones) as a student vet who returns to her family’s Somerset farm after her brother’s suicide and struggles to deal with both her grief and her difficult, distant father.