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.

Monday at the Movies - January 8, 2018

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, we inaugurate 2018 with its first movie reviews as we charge headlong into the seventh year of “Monday at the Movies.”

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) – I had real reservations about this film, the first of five in a prequel series to the beloved but occasionally laborious Harry Potter franchise. My misgivings ultimately proved unfounded, though it took me a year to surmount them; I found the film to be a self-contained narrative with a conclusion, and I found it to be immensely cheering. Returning to writerly duties, J.K. Rowling remembers to keep the whimsy in the wizard’s world with a clever and fun film to which a disservice is done when we brush it off as merely a prequel to Harry Potter. Eddie Redmayne stars as the wide-eyed Newt Scamander, whose bigger-on-the-inside briefcase full of magical creatures pops open in 1920s New York, drawing the attention of former Auror Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) and biting a No-Maj (no-magic, played by Dan Fogler) on the neck. The film takes its time building a world – at once recognizable but simultaneously quite fresh in its exploration of wizards in America – and it’s to Rowling’s credit that I went from Hogwarts fatigue to genuine enthusiasm anew for the mythology. (I plied my moviegoing companion and tested her saintly patience for nearly forty minutes of exhausting detail about nifflers, no-majs, and school houses.) Moreover, the film contains at least one genuinely surprising turn, about which I am probably the last man in America not to have been spoiled. David Yates shows no signs that this is his fifth directorial outing in the Potterverse, bringing a renewed energy to the project and restoring that Spielbergian sense of awe. As someone who had previously regarded the prospect of Fantastic Beasts with cynical dread, I now say, roll on the sequel (The Crimes of Grindelwald, due in November).

Would You Rather (2012) – If the Marquis de Sade hosted a dinner party and invited the cast of Saw, it’d be something like this joyless film. Brittany Snow stars as a woman down on her luck and caring for her ailing brother; she accepts an offer to play a mysterious game on the promise of untold riches if she wins. Naturally, the invitation conceals the horrific nature of the game, a sadistic version of “would you rather.” I’ve seen this film lauded for its “restraint” within the torture porn genre, and it’s true that the film is surprisingly not gory for the number of violent acts that transpire, but it would seem that the restraint applied to Steffen Schlachtenhaufen’s script, which is the very definition of thin; everything in the film is designed solely to get bodies to the dinner table so that they can slice, electrocute, whip, and drown each other. The script sacrifices character and plot for easy scares and drops all its Chekhov’s guns for a tawdry Twilight Zone ending. If there’s any glee to be had in the film, it’s from Jeffrey Combs, who turns each line of dialogue into a fine slice of honey-baked ham as Shepard Lambrick, the game’s host, he of indeterminate wealth and profound amorality. As Lambrick’s son, Robin Lord Taylor turns up with a performance that anticipates his sociopathic Penguin on Gotham, but the film seems less interested in him as the runtime progresses. Only Combs seems to understand that he’s in a C-list horror film and elects to have the most fun possible, bathing (as Kenneth Branagh would put it) in a river of ham. By no means is this a good performance by technical standards, but it is a delight to watch in a film that is utter, utter dreck.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!

Inherent Vice (2014)

Since the debut of the Thomas Pynchon book on which the film is based, Inherent Vice has invited the admittedly somewhat clever pun “Incoherent Vice.”  What this appellation suggests, however, is that incoherence itself is incapable of being a virtue, a distinction I don’t think is fair to a film like this.  While I can’t yet vouch for the rewatch value, I found myself more than spellbound for the ride, regardless of its coherence.

Joaquin Phoenix stars as Doc Sportello, a drug-addled private detective out to thwart his ex-girlfriend’s lover’s wife’s lover’s kidnapping plot.  Only it might not be a kidnapping at all?  It might be a real estate scheme, a government brainwashing trip, a narcotics underworld power grab, or maybe – just maybe – all in Doc’s head.

For those who don’t know Pynchon, Inherent Vice feels very much like The Big Lebowski, which is quite a high compliment coming from someone who’s only a mouse-click away from ordaining himself in the Church of Dudeism.  Taking a page from the slacker noir gospel of the Coen Brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson gives us that same bewildering sense that grand mysterious proceedings are afoot, if only our narrative guide were sober enough to perceive them. Indeed, Doc Sportello spends significant moments in stoned unconsciousness or blunt trauma-induced comas, trudging through the case compelled more by genre than by duty.

Throughout, a stellar ensemble cast drifts in orbit around Doc.  Where Anderson had recently proven himself with small-cast character studies like the riveting The Master and the incomparable There Will Be Blood, Inherent Vice demonstrates his dexterity with multiple moving parts.  A-listers like Josh Brolin, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio del Toro are here, as are comparative newcomers like Katherine Waterston as Doc’s ex.  Brolin in particular, in a role somewhat analogous to John Goodman’s in Lebowski, plays the heck out of a blustering cop with aspirations to act amid his own crisis of masculinity – the “motto panukeiku” scene, eliciting laughs as it does, also layers on a deep understanding of the character when Brolin reveals he comes to that particular restaurant “for the respect.”

For those familiar with Pynchon, though, Anderson captures quintessentially the novelist’s depiction of the experience of incomprehensibility, the disorienting sensory overload in postmodern America and the struggle to find meaning therein.  Viewers who report themselves feeling alienated may, I feel, have missed the point.  Inherent Vice is not the sort of film in which you can find yourself in one of the characters; this is a film not to be experienced but to be perceived, to be (dare I say it?) overwhelmed by.

Inherent Vice is delightfully overwhelming, if a bit overlong near the end of the film, but Anderson is a filmmaker who’s proven himself well enough to earn my playing-along for 148 minutes.  It is not the kind of film that will be embraced by everyone, but those of us who enjoy a bit of quirky surrealism starring some top-notch performers are in for something of a treat.

Inherent Vice is rated R for “drug use throughout, sexual content, graphic nudity, language and some violence.”  Nearly every scene involves at least one illegal substance being abused, as well as dialogue littered with obscene dialogue of one variety or the other.  In one extended scene, a woman is seen fully nude while delivering what might be important expository dialogue, while a few other sequences involve fistfights and gunfire.