Was it the casting or characters that were terrible?

The cast was fine, IMO. I thought Fassbinder and Rapace were standouts. They had to do and say ridiculous things, especially considering they were supposed to be scientists and professionals. Hard to make that believable, I guess.

I thought Noomi Rapace was excellent.

The only character/actor I didn't like was Holloway. He totally made up for it in Upgrade though :)

Really, the only thing terrible was they ditched this storyline to make Covenant a more traditional style Alien movie.

The cast had great potential, all decent actors....... but it was the script that let them down.

I guess you could say the actors let themselves down, because they put working with Ridley Scott and being in an Alien movie above actually checking out the script.

It's a shame because when Ridley is on form, he directs stuff like The Martian which I found to be excellent.

Both. It's an awful movie from just about every angle. Acting, writing, story... There's some ok ideas, but most of the movie is terribly executed.

The cast was ok, EXCEPT for fassbender, he's always terrible.

the really annoying characters, the boyfriend, the two left behind for the night, were killed off, so i can't really tell if they were supposed to be terrible so we can enjoy them getting killed or were also terrible actors.

I liked Fassbender, Theron, Elba and Pearce. I think Elba and Pearce were largely wasted though, I enjoyed watching Guy Pearce giving his 2023 TED speech much more than his old man role in the movie.

Here it is here if you’ve never seen it: https://youtu.be/E4SSU29Arj0

Absolutely garbage. Why is the archaeologist acting like he should be in Fast and the furious? Why is there hardly any character interaction or development throughout the story? Each characters' actions are senselessly written and acted.