It's a two and a half hour long fan-edit of both of Ridley Scott's disappointments: 'Prometheus' and 'Covenant'. The first one tapped into the 'Ancient Aliens' hype as peddled by the History Channel and the second doubled down on this cringe, driving a stake through the Aliens franchise altogether.
The fan-edit is a more clinical/documentary style adaptation of the available footage (including bonus material). It follows the synthetic 'David' and explores his motivations and character arc more fully. It removes much of the cringe, but does not manage to excise all the Hollywoke stupidity. E.g. the study of micro-organisms was apparently never developed in this universe, explaining the complete and absolute stupidity of the characters in removing their protective suits in a xeno-biological environment or never bothering to put them on in the first place (as is the case in the second movie).
It was definitely a good attempt and it even gave off vibes of the original 'Alien' movie, but it also had a lot of smaller narrative plot holes. But all things considered, it was still better than the original.
Yes.... and no.
I rewatched the director's cut a few years ago, and one of the key narrative hooks for how they burned through so many xenos so quickly was because they were using I think armour piercing explosive rounds. It's why in Aliens 4 they had such a hard time just killing one xeno, since they weren't using the same kind of ammunition.
Still, it made the xenos in Aliens seem like a cakewalk, even though technically it was due to their advanced weaponry. But yeah, I really wish they would have taken better time to showcase that without those kinds of weapons, humans were easy fodder. That was something they never really properly explored in any of the films, as opposed to say, Predator, where we at least -- multiple times -- saw how small arms fire barely did damage to the Predator and that it was more like annoying flesh wounds than fatal for them.
In the Aliens franchise they never outlined the consistency of just how hard the outer carapace was for the xenos (we sort of had hints of it in Alien 3, and again, a little bit in Aliens 4, but it was completely tossed away in Covenant).
The size always bugged me.
Every single film got the dimensions wrong on the xenomorph from Alien. They simplified the creature from Giger's vision into something more bland and easily reproducible. They also made them smaller and the heads much different.
Overall they turned it from a detailed, interesting, intelligent and efficient stalker into just rampaging zerglings.
I heard that theory a while ago about the weaponry in Aliens explaining their effectiveness against the xenomorphs but explosive or armor piercing rounds would have triggered the cold fusion chamber they were inside that required them to give up their mags in the first place.
They also infer that those sentry guns basically destroys hundreds of xenomorphs considering the population of the colony that was taken over.
Yeah that's why in that scene they were told to hand over those mags. They switch to basic ballistics and essentially most of them get wiped out in that very chaotic scene.
The only two who kept some spare mags were the smartgun pair (Vasquez and her partner), and they briefly take out a few xenos on their way back to the APC while most everyone else gets merc'd.
The problem is that that initial encounter is so chaotic it doesn't really make the xenos seem anywhere near as threatening as the one from the first film, and just more like a cluster of chaos and death.
They do use the armour-piercing explosive rounds later on during the defense against the xenos attacking them in the room, and -- to Cameron's credit -- he does show that the xenos are basically exploding when being impacted by those rounds. The only time we see that the weapons are mostly ineffective is when they get in the air ducts and Vasquez has to resort to a pistol, which has very little effect on the xeno until she pushes its head against the side of the vent and pumps an entire mag into it at point blank, which compromises and immobilises her in the process.
But you're right, they really did treat them too much like zegling ants as opposed to stalkers (which is odd, because they had that one guardian xeno in AVP take out two Predators by itself by stalking them and using the environment to its advantage, which goes back to the inconsistency in how the xenos are portrayed).
Yeah in the director's cut they just show them mowing down countless xenos until the turrets run out of ammo. This did and didn't bother me because the logic was that the queen knew there were survivors and was willing to sacrifice drones to drain the turrets dry to could get past the defenses. But I always wondered how did the queen have that many disposable drones when it seemed like the colony only had a few hundred personnel?