Alien: Covenant (2017)

After I saw Prometheus in 2012, ostensibly returning director Ridley Scott’s prequel to Alien, I had such a viscerally negative experience that I’ve never gone back and rewatched the film. It worked on an instinctive level, with enough scares and dread, but the meandering narrative left me unfulfilled. It was a film without an ending, a prequel without a need to participate in the same universe. 

In fact, Prometheus was such an overall negative experience for me that it took me four years to watch its sequel, Alien: Covenant, which came out in 2017. At least this time, the film is unabashed about its ties to the Alien franchise, but it is so unbearably ponderous, and it takes far too long for much of anything to happen. By the time the film hits its strongest notes, most in the audience may have long since fallen asleep.

 

Android Walter (Michael Fassbender) awakens his ship of colonists after a solar flare damages their vessel. Once the repairs are complete, Captain Oram (Billy Crudup) and his second Daniels (Katherine Waterston) discover a mysterious broadcast that leads them to a planet perfectly suited for their settling mission. The planet, however, is home to a giant storm, a few mysterious creatures, and another android (also Fassbender) who appears to be the only survivor of a doomed ship ten years ago.

 

Alien: Covenant begins with a lengthy sequence between Fassbender’s robotic David and his human inventor, played by an uncredited Guy Pearce. The dialogue is laborious and painstakingly self-serious, as though this is the first time that such a scene has been presented between creator and creation. Pearce and Fassbender limp their way through dismally tedious monologues about creating life, and just when you think the scene can’t verge any further into cliché, Fassbender begins playing, of all things, Wagner on a conveniently adjacent piano. It’s guaranteed to induce a hearty groan from anyone who’s seen a science-fiction movie in the last forty years, yet this prologue is so sententious that it casts a dour pall over the rest of the movie.

 

It’s another forty minutes or so before the plot of the film really gets going, after taking much too long to introduce a crew of no fewer than nine characters – half of whom, don’t worry, will be alien fodder before too long. You’ll have to wait nearly an hour before seeing so much as a hint of an alien, which is a bit of a problem, especially because the alien hijinks in Covenant aren’t anything we haven’t seen before. There are blundering humans who unwittingly infect themselves with alien spores, alien eggs that ought to ring a bell for fans of this franchise, and things that go bump in the dark. There’s even a familiar piece of heavy machinery that plays a significant role early in the film’s climax; it’s not the cargo-loader from Aliens, but it’s close. 

 

Indeed, Mark Kermode has rightly called Alien: Covenant a “greatest-hits” collection, reprising so many recognizable moments to diminishing effect. One senses that Ridley Scott is re-staging them with all the dramatic flourish of the original King Kong, as if to say it’s all been building to this – ta-da! Yet we’ve been down this road once or twice already; we’ve seen it all before. There’s an instinctual fear of the darkness and of sudden scares, and Scott is deft at manipulating the audience into being startled, but at the same time any eagle-eyed Alien fan will probably spot some of these jumps coming. (Cautionary tale: if you’re in space, never ever go into a medical bay.)

 

Just about the only fresh thing the film does is to cast Fassbender as the dueling android twins David and Walter. Fassbender shines in these twin roles, not least of all because of the different accents he employs. He manages to make both characters visually distinctive in their mannerisms and bearings, yet Alien: Covenant finds a way to wear out your patience in a few navel-gazing sequences where the two androids explain the plot to each other before – and I cannot make up this level of narcissism – kissing. It’s a perfect metaphor for how enamored the film is of itself and its own weighty, needless mythology. 

 

You sense that the makers of Alien: Covenant are trying, really trying. Katherine Waterston is a fine update on the Sigourney Weaver archetype, and the film gives her enough room to carve out a unique take on the role. But no one else is quite trying at the level of Fassbender and Waterston, and the film is mired in its own reflection. There are things that will always work in an Alien film, but that doesn’t mean you can string them together time after time for a guaranteed winner. It took me four years to watch Alien: Covenant; maybe I should have waited a little longer.

 

Alien: Covenant is R for “sci-fi violence, bloody images, language and some sexuality/nudity.” Directed by Ridley Scott. Written by Jack Paglen, Michael Green, John Logan, and Dante Harper. Starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, and Demián Bichir.

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

If you asked me to explain the multiple alternate and parallel timelines at play in The Terminator and its sequels, I’ll quickly change the subject. I don’t fully understand them myself, nor do I believe any of the filmmakers have tried to keep the continuity house in order. What’s more, though, all these disparate timelines are far and away the least interesting thing about any Terminator film, which are at their best when they mash up impressive action sequences with an unstoppable metallic killer whose immortality may as well be lifted from a slasher horror film’s antagonist. 

Case in point, Terminator: Dark Fate, which ignores most of the sequels and pretends – just like its predecessors, Terminator Salvation and Terminator Genisys – that only the first two Terminator films “actually” happened. For a franchise that continually rewrites itself, Dark Fate is an oddball legacy sequel (or legacy-quel, if you will) that works much better when it’s not sidestepping its own prismatic past.

 

Years after Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) averted Judgment Day and the rise of Skynet, a new Terminator (Gabriel Luna) arrives in Mexico City to kill Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes). Assuming Dani will be the mother of some new future messiah, Sarah rushes to her side, only to find the cybernetically-augmented Grace (Mackenzie Davis) has already time-travelled to save Dani from the forces of the future.

 

What separates Dark Fate from the other Terminator sequels is the return, supposedly triumphant, of franchise forefather James Cameron, who had no hand in the preceding three films. Here, Cameron is one of six credited writers, but one senses that his voice rings the loudest. Each of the trio of protagonists is that very specific Cameron brand of Strong Female Protagonist – tough and resilient with only enough emotional complexity to feel human; indeed, their heroic prowess seems measurable by the size of their firearms, a Freudian insight which feels almost retrograde for 2019. What felt innovative for the 1984 original (and Cameron’s Aliens two year later) now feels familiar and perhaps overdone. It’s as though Cameron has returned to the franchise both to save it and to insist upon reminding us (however spurious the claim) that he invented tough-as-nails heroines. 

 

In short, it’s the girlboss Terminator, even if it doesn’t quite explore that concept until very late in the film, when we finally learn why Dani is essential to the future (in a plot twist that is telegraphed either effectively or obviously, depending on where you’re sitting). Dark Fate asks, “What if, this time, a lady helped a lady save a lady?” Points for finding a new angle on an old favorite, I suppose, and kudos to the trio of women anchoring the film for all doing a credible and watchable job. Hamilton’s return is ostensibly the centerpiece of the film, even more so than Arnold Schwarzenegger reinventing his role as an aging Terminator, while Davis is a clever update on the Kyle Reese archetype. The film does her a disservice, though, to focus more on her physicality than her personality, given a brief flashback that only teases what she’s really like.

 

Then there’s Natalia Reyes, who has the closest thing to a character arc in the film, and it’s because of her emotional attunement as Dani that the film’s third-act twist lands at all. The film asks her to be John Connor and Sarah Conner and her own person all at once, and Reyes manages to take the film’s thin character sketch and finds a way to track Dani’s evolution from factory worker to future hero. I’d be just as happy to see any of these three come back for a future Terminator film, though I would recommend audiences not get too attached. We’ve been down this road before, with Terminator 3 and Salvation and Genisys each promising a new direction that never came to pass. 

 

We don’t, however, come to a Terminator film for internal logic or amazing new characters. After decades of fits and starts, we keep coming back for the bang-up action sequences, and on that count Dark Fate truly delivers. The film’s first act includes a freeway chase that’s very nearly as good as the one at the heart of The Matrix Reloaded (though I’m sure the proper antecedent is in Terminator 2, which I haven’t seen recently enough to recall with precision), and the pace never quite lets up. We’ve also got a claustrophobic sequence within an immigration detainment center, with a climax set amid an expansive pursuit over land, sea, and air. Throughout, director Tim Miller is constantly recalibrating the bar, both raising it for effect and narrowing his scope to give this action film a welcome degree of versatility. 

 

Dark Fate is very seldom boring, and perhaps the only sense of fatigue in the film is the idea that we’ve been told four times now that, no, no, this is what a Terminator film ought to do. At the core of the franchise is an irresistible – and proven – premise, though the box office receipts seem to be a tale of diminishing returns. As these films often remind us, the future is not written – and nor, it seems, are the sequels this film had been hoping to greenlight. Dark Fate may have portended its own future with its eponymous subtitle, casting the franchise prospects into uncertainty. 

Terminator: Dark Fate is rated R for “violence throughout, language, and brief nudity.” Directed by Tim Miller. Written by James Cameron, Charles Eglee, Josh Friedman, David Goyer, Justin Rhodes, and Billy Ray. Starring Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, and Gabriel Luna.

Licorice Pizza (2021)

After a titanic and prestige showing in 2007’s There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson has somewhat returned to form – his particular brand of oddball character pieces driven by episodic plot happenings that seem to follow dream logic more than strict realism. In this way, Anderson has become one of the directors in whose brain I’d most like to rent a room, curl up with a blanket, and snuggle in for a few hours. His latest, Licorice Pizza, is precisely one such cozy dream, a meandering fantasia of late-70s Los Angeles that comfortably finds its groove, if not its purpose.

Child actor and high school entrepreneur Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) falls head over heels with Alana Kane (Alana Haim), a photographer’s assistant nearly twice his age. While Gary tries to convince Alana that the age gap doesn’t matter, he embroils her in his myriad schemes, which include selling waterbeds, opening a “pinball palace,” and jump-starting Alana’s own budding Hollywood career. Her showbiz path takes her into the orbit of a gin-soaked legend (Sean Penn) and his director (Tom Waits), mayoral candidate Joel Wachs (Benny Safdie), and blustery film producer Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper).

 

The plot of Licorice Pizza, such as it is, meanders between the twin itinerant protagonists and their respective trials to find meaning and purpose. While Gary Valentine moves from hustle to hustle, Alana works fame like the gig economy, first modeling then auditioning before moving into politics. This episodic structure makes Licorice Pizza feel a bit plotless, but in the compelling and oddly comforting vibe of other recent Anderson films like The Master and Inherent Vice. Perhaps, if Alana and Gary are not the protagonists of the film, Los Angeles is; not unlike the underrated Shane Black film The Nice Guys, LA is here a place of mystery, but it’s an ineffable, unknowable mystery rather than a mystery to be solved.

 

Licorice Pizza is not quite a bildungsroman, insofar as its protagonists don’t seem to have changed all that much by the end of the story. But it’s a film more about a journey than a destination; it’s a love story where the love is peculiar, unlikely, and largely unilateral. At 15, Gary is in love with Alana, who finds his romantic fixation amusing but never reciprocates his frequent professions of love, recognizing them for the immature infatuations they are. This is not a story of predators and prey, but rather one of arrested development; despite being 25, Alana is the youngest and least mature of her sisters, with little in the way of career or romantic prospects until she finds both, such as they are, in Gary. It’s to the credit of the performers that this dynamic never feels creepy. Instead, it’s understandable, human, and perhaps even a little sweet, despite being completely impossible and inherently ridiculous.

 

Indeed, Anderson invents a world without imposing a moral judgment on it, leaving it to the audience to discern that, yes, some of these people are outlandish and absurd. John Michael Higgins, for example, plays a restaurateur fetishizing Japanese culture to the point where the joke is on him, not his Japanese bride(s). Anderson trusts we can figure it out, that the humor is in Higgins’s failure to recognize the irony of his inability to speak Japanese. The others in the film are all in a sense using Alana, projecting their own desires onto her. It’d be spoiling to say what any of those desires are, but never is the tableau clearer than when Bradley Cooper quite literally storms into the picture (leading a woman a few rows behind me to intone, in a momentous whisper, “This is the best part”). As real-life producer and Streisand beau Jon Peters, Cooper is sound and fury signifying only self-aggrandizement, building himself up by threatening the life of a mattress delivery boy while making the world’s most shameless pass at his driver. It’s not hard to imagine that this Peters is the same producer who would famously demand a giant spider in Kevin Smith’s aborted Superman screenplay.

 

There are moments of genuine pathos in Licorice Pizza, as when Alana learns why her mayoral candidate boss has asked her to dinner, that show Anderson is truly in command of a narrative that seems otherwise wandering. While I’m still not sure anyone can recount the plot of Inherent Vice (thanks in no small part to the deliberate illogic of its author, Thomas Pynchon), Anderson takes the same shambolic narrative anarchy but finds his own kind of odd purpose in it. What Licorice Pizza is “saying” is anyone’s guess, but we can feel what it’s doing, even if we can’t rationalize it. Anderson takes the framework of a Hollywood love story, builds his own chassis around it, and guides the plane in for a landing on a runway that looks like “happily ever after” but might not actually be.

 

Licorice Pizza is rated R for “language, sexual material and some drug use.” Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Bradley Cooper, and Benny Safdie.