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 - September 24, 2018

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, a film which gives lie to the old expression about how the sausage is made.

All the Money in the World (2017)– A year or so from its release, it is a shame that the most interesting – and distracting – thing about All the Money in the World remains the ballyhoo surrounding the replacement of Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer in the role of billionaire J. Paul Getty. It’s unfortunate because the film is otherwise quite fine, neither a triumphant masterpiece nor a mordant trainwreck, but in every scene with Plummer there’s a macabre curiosity about what Spacey, beneath mountains of Gumby makeup, had done with the part, whether we’ll ever see any of the footage that necessitated the speedy and expensive reshoots. Plummer is doing masterful work, as he always does, and I have no doubt that he gave a more engaging performance than Spacey, who was exceedingly distracting in the prosthetics-laden trailers. Michelle Williams, as the mother of the abducted Getty grandson, is equally compelling, heartbreaking in the frustration we share with her at the immovable object of Plummer’s Getty. Mark Wahlberg, however, is disruptively miscast as the CIA operative turned Getty advisor Fletcher Chace; Wahlberg plays Chace like a scrappy everyman, albeit without the sobered gravitas needed to believe that this man is dangerous and capable of anything. (One almost expects him to tell an OPEC sheik, apropos of Andy Samberg, “Say hi to your mother for me.”) But the suspense of the film, a true story, falls somewhat tepid with knowledge of how the facts turned out, and the continual reminder of the film’s tumultuous gestation gets in the way of two very solid performances. Then again, I would much rather director Ridley Scott make films like this instead of persist in reinscribing the Alien mythos to the point of murky exposition (after Prometheus, I’ve still not hauled myself in front of Alien: Covenant, and I consider the prospect leavened with dread.)

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

Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014)

During the Christmas season, we tend to see an uptick in New Testament movies, largely focused around the birth of Christ.  Early this year, we saw the Old Testament get a little representation with Noah, and now we’re turning to the second book with Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings. But where I appreciated Noah’s steps away from the source material (odd though the rock monsters may have been), Exodus turns out to be too devoted to the text without taking advantage of the technical and narrative innovations the film teases.

Christian Bale stars as Moses on the eve of his step-brother Ramses’s (Joel Edgerton) ascension to the throne of Egypt.  After the revelation that Moses was born a Hebrew slave leads to his exile, a visitation from God (“I Am,” in the persona of a small boy) compels Moses to return to free his people, with ten plague-shaped assists from the heavens.

The first thing about Exodus is that it’s very competent. Scott’s direction of the action scenes recalls his good work on Gladiator, and the plague scenes are terrifying for their computer-generated precision.  And of course Bale is doing his usual top-quality work in a performance as Moses that sees him undergo at least two distinct physical changes, two major philosophical paradigm shifts, and frequent conversations with thin air that lack no conviction.

Edgerton is a great Ramses, as well, and the scenes leading up to the plague of the first-born are highly effective.  It’s a shame, though, that some of the editing in the film turns his public executions into punchlines, compromising a more nuanced performance by equating it with mustache-twirling villainy.  Exodus recovers with a strong supporting cast, including Ben Kingsley, Aaron Paul, Sigourney Weaver, and John Turturro as Seti I.

These are all great performers, but they’re not given terribly much to do.  Kingsley is basically shorthand for gravitas, meant to lend weight quickly to the Hebrew elders, and he manages to check off another ethnicity on his career’s bingo card without having much to do outside of two or three scenes.  Ditto for Paul, whose role as Joshua should have been the Robin to Bale’s Batman, so to speak, but he’s mostly set dressing with an unconvincing accent.  Weaver and Turturro are out of the movie in about twenty minutes; a subplot in which Weaver wants Moses dead peters out rather quickly.

The idea that Ramses’s mother is plotting behind his back to assassinate her stepson is a fascinating one, but the film doesn’t know what to do with it.  This is actually a major problem with Exodus because it has so many opportunities to make an original stamp on the Moses story, but it never commits to any of those.  The apparent emphasis on the brother relationship between Moses and Ramses seems like the centerpiece of the film, but it too fades away, never really delivering on even the basic comparison of the two men as leaders of opposing armies (teased by an opening shot of a priestesses reading offal).  Even the idea of God appearing as a small boy is a neat riff, but it’s never more than set dressing when it could have been the defining element of the film (similar to how Noah replaced God for a more sci-fi being called The Creator).

The most interesting subtext in the film is a broader allusion to the history of the Jewish people.  In one scene, assassinated Hebrew slaves are burned en masse, while elsewhere slaves are forced to hide under their homes to evade Egyptian search parties. In these moments, it seems Scott is building an analogy to the Holocaust, and the film’s conclusion, gesturing toward nation-building, seems to weigh heavily on the side of the Israelis in the contemporary conflict over the Holy Land.  A film more dedicated to this analogy would have been an amazing inflection of the story we all know so well, but three scenes in 150 minutes isn’t enough on which to hang a comprehensive interpretation.

Exodus: Gods and Kings isn’t a bad film (a tremendous improvement from the last Scott film I saw, the dismal Prometheus), but it is disappointing for how little it pushes the story beyond what we already know. For anyone who knows the story, even in its broadest strokes, the film won’t hold much suspense or even any emotion beyond a feeling of obligation as events proceed unremarkably.  For all the technical skill at work in rendering lifelike plague sequences, what’s missing is a sense of spectacle, something we saw quite successfully in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.  Despite the dated Technicolor and the mild doses of camp, DeMille’s original epic had a scope and a pervading attitude of wonder that Exodus is sadly lacking. Exodus isn’t a big-budget remake of The Ten Commandments, just a more precise, condensed, and slightly better-acted version of the same story without the grandeur the narrative demands.

Exodus: Gods and Kings is rated PG-13 for “violence including battle sequences and intense images.”  The standard bevy of plagues is seen here, with boils and insects being particularly grotesque; some combat scenes feature violence without any blood.

Monday at the Movies - August 20, 2012

Welcome to Week Thirty-One of “Monday at the Movies.”  With the summer blockbuster season officially closed (I, The Cinema King, decree it – so let it be written, so let it be done), and in the wake of Prometheus, it’s time for that long-promised look at the “Alien Quadrilogy.”

Alien (1979) – Ridley Scott has been mostly canonized for Alien, and not without reason; more than thirty years later the film remains frighteningly effective and gruesomely imaginative, even with the lights on (how wonderful this film must have been in a full darkened theater!).  The story, a hybrid of science fiction and horror tropes, mutates frequently, much like its eponymous creature, so that the audience never gets a comfortable handle on things; instead, we’re put on edge at every twist and turn.  The cast doesn’t do Oscar-caliber work, but they too are pivotal in subverting expectation, particularly Sigourney Weaver, in a star-making performance as the heroine Ripley, and Ian Holm, in brilliant creepy form as the shady scientist Ash.  As with Prometheus, this is a film that functions as much on a visceral level as an intellectual/aesthetic one, with a pervasive feeling of suspenseful dread over the whole affair.  Scott wisely knows how much to show and how much to conceal, such that the creature might even be behind your sofa (you’d best make sure it’s not).  But unlike its prequel successor, Alien never aspires beyond its ability; we don’t need to know why the crew of the Nostromo is in space, nor do they have any goals but survival – nor, in this case, do they need them.  This is an insular and claustrophobic film which feels as taut as its scope.  Kudos especially to H.R. Giger, whose sexualized designs pervade the film and give it an offbeat sensibility that quickly and efficiently distances Alien from those other spaceship movies while setting an aesthetic tone for the future of the filmed future.  Effective and intelligent, Alien deserves its status as a cultural icon.

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

Prometheus (2012)

Like the titan Prometheus, Ridley Scott is sometimes treated like the man who brought science-fiction fire to the American cinema, if only for his impressive one-two punch of Alien and Blade Runner.  With Prometheus, Scott returns to his roots and, so to speak, mankind’s in a sci-fi epic that finds its protagonists exploring the genesis of man.  But while the scale is epic, the result is somewhat lukewarm, successful on many levels but in other places suffering from its servitude to its own mythology.

Funded by elderly tycoon Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), a team of scientists led by archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) travels to a distant world after disparate hieroglyphics point to humanity’s origins.  In search of “The Engineers,” mysterious beings that may have seeded Earth with the potential for life, Shaw and her colleagues soon discover that their destination is filled with horrors, and that Weyland employees Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) and the android David (Michael Fassbender) have their own agendas.

While Scott protested (perhaps too much) that Prometheus wasn’t quite a prequel to the Alien franchise, he later compromised by conceding that Prometheus was linked to Alien and contained prequel-like elements, insisting all the while that Prometheus needed to be taken on its own terms.  Since I’ve only seen the original once, when I was perhaps too young (indeed, my best memories of the film come from its place in Disney World’s “Great Movie Ride”), I can appreciate Prometheus as its own entity but can’t help recognizing how the movie very nearly falls apart because of its connection to the original series.

Screenwriter Damon Lindelof caught a lot of flak for ending Lost (with Carlton Cuse) without addressing much of the series’ mythology, instead focusing on the characters and their story arcs.  It seems that Lindelof is pulling the same trick here, introducing a mythology which the characters pursue but which the audience never quite comprehends.  Case in point:  the film begins with an Engineer planting the genetic seeds of human DNA on Earth millennia ago, yet the rest of the film abandons this premise in favor of Engineers who want to destroy Earth.  While the audience doesn’t need to be spoon-fed answers (although that happens a few times in the movie, often when characters say “Listen to me” or “You mean to tell me...?”), it’s insulting to the viewer when characters literally leave the confines of the film to seek answers, presumably in a sequel.

But wait! you cry.  Doesn’t it matter more how the characters are affected by their quest for answers?  Well, sure, except in Prometheus characters enter the film with questions and leave it to pursue those same questions, with no discernible development in between.  The only catharsis in the film comes in a last-second jump moment that finally and explicitly concretizes the connection between Prometheus and Alien.  While it’s a recognizable payoff, it’s more Easter egg than satisfying conclusion, as if we’re meant to cheer and not to recognize this isn’t an ending but rather a tease for Prometheus 2.  (A comparison:  it’s the same thing as if The Dark Knight had ended with Batman chasing after The Joker – cut to black – before showing us that Bane was breaking into Wayne Manor at that moment; end credits.  Thank heavens the Nolans are smarter writers than Lindelof.)

It’s unfortunate that Rapace, the ostensible star, has been given so little to do in this and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, her American blockbuster debuts, since she’s probably a very qualified actress (I’ve never seen her Girl with the Dragon Tattoo but have only heard promising things).  Indeed, the only actor who distinguishes himself in the cast is Fassbender, who does fascinating work as David.  While an android is supposedly emotionless and inhuman, Fassbender imbues David with several very subtle characteristics, including his fan-worship of Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence of Arabia and his burgeoning disdain for his xenophobic (and robophobic) fellow travelers.  He’s a bit like Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, seemingly unfeeling but ultimately saying everything with a twitch as potent as a sob.

All of this would seem to suggest that Prometheus is a terrible movie, downright rubbish with only a Fassbender in the rough to redeem it.  Surprisingly, such isn’t quite the case with Prometheus.  Rather, this is a film that succeeds by being bizarrely compelling, if only as a spectacle.  Much of this is due to Scott’s dexterity as a storyteller; even if the story signifies nothing in the end, it’s told not by an idiot but by a skilled craftsman who knows exactly where to deploy his sound and fury.

If I were to sum up the one emotion I felt during the film, it’s “dread.”  Not dread of a bad movie without a refund, but dread – fear – terror – for the characters I shouldn’t have cared about.  Like a great horror/thriller ought to, Prometheus managed to get me to murmur, “No, no, that’s not good.  Don’t do that” time and time again as, perhaps predictably, the humans make a series of bad choices that leads to their inevitable extermination.  There’s no jump moment to rival the “last supper” scene in the original Alien, although an invasive surgical procedure got me squirming and led the guy two seats over to abandon his place in our row until the worst had passed.

Though I felt cheated by the way I hadn’t been given a full movie (much the same reaction I had to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, the reason I waited to rent Part 2), what prevented me from asking for a refund was that the story, while incomplete, was well-told.  Though Lindelof drops the ball a bit, Scott swoops in for a save and turns Prometheus from a fumble to a field goal (but a touchdown it ain’t).  If nothing else, it's ensured that this will not be the last time you see the world "Alien" on this site.

 Prometheus is rated R “for sci-fi violence including some intense images, and brief language.”  The terrors that await the crew of the ship are not for the faint-hearted, and such terrors include (but are not limited to) (POTENTIAL SPOILERS) entanglement, impalement, asphyxiation, smashing, decapitation, bludgeoning, incineration, and evaporation.  I can’t remember any off-color language, although Idris Elba has a hilarious verbal seduction scene with Charlize Theron.

Robin Hood (2010)

One can always count on Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe, and historical epics to combine for a reasonably solid summer blockbuster. And that's precisely what Robin Hood is: reasonably solid.

As a concept, the "truth behind the legend" genre is starting to limp on its last legs; King Arthur was a bit of a dud, and prequels in general are often a bad idea. But with Scott directing Crowe as the famous outlaw before he donned his famous hood and led a band of merry men in Sherwood Forest, something clicks. In this incarnation, Robin Longstride is an archer in the army of crusade-happy King Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston). When things take a turn for the worse, Robin and his comrades return to England in time for Prince John's (Oscar Isaac) coronation as the new king. Posing as a knight, Robin meets Marion (Cate Blanchett) and her father-in-law Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow) before becoming embroiled in a French invasion scheme piloted by the nefarious Sir Godfrey (Mark Strong).

In a nutshell, Robin Hood can be boiled down to "Gladiator meets Braveheart." It's a facile comparison, and it's not particularly thorough, but you get the point. Robin Hood takes all the classic Ridley Scott themes and imagery - one man at the epicenter of national political crisis, with dazzling explosions and battles that encompass an entire populace - and throws in that Braveheart-esque battle cry of "FREEDOM!" There's nothing particularly surprising about the film - we know Marion and Robin will fall in love, even if they don't - but it's staged well, even if it doesn't play by the normal rules.

The film plays fast and loose with historical fact and with the legend itself, but it's all in good fun and none of it is too disconcerting. The Magna Carta plays a pivotal role as a kind of MacGuffin, though it gets a new backstory. There's a French invasion which doesn't quite jive with the history of Anglo-French conflict, but the only problematic creative liberty is Marion's presence on the battlefield during the climactic fight scene; it's in there to appease the PC crowd, to be sure, but it's distracting and feels incredibly forced. The film also casts Robin Hood as a kind of Jack Bauer figure - a perfect shot, always right, and distrusted by most authorities until he's proven to be always right. But for the most part the story is the one we know; Kevin Durand plays a streetwise Little John, and Mark Addy is perfectly and impeccably cast as Friar Tuck.

What's refreshing about Robin Hood is the presence of a new villain, Sir Godfrey. It's become almost a cliche to pit Robin Hood against the Sheriff of Nottingham, so it's a breath of fresh air when Matthew Macfadyen stumbles onto the screen as an inept Sheriff who is helpless in the face of farmers who won't pony up their (un)fair share of taxation. Enter Mark Strong, who's become awfully popular in the past few years - mostly as a villain, as in Kick-Ass, Sherlock Holmes, and RocknRolla, to name a few. His Sir Godfrey is menacing in the first degree, with a penchant for brutal sacking and a battle wound that gives him a perpetual sneer. As the climax hurtles toward us, it's impossible not to cheer for him to meet vicious vengeance.

There is a significant misstep, however, in the middle of the film. In true Ridley Scott style, the film opens and closes with knockout battle sequences, but the middle third of the film slows to what appears to be an actual halt in the narrative flow. As Robin is introduced to Nottingham, the film becomes an odd combination of Dark Ages domestic sitcom and bawdy soldiers-on-shore-leave humor, such that one almost expects Cyndi Lauper to come in on the soundtrack with "Archers Just Wanna Have Fun." All the while, the merriment is tempered by continued reminders that "The French are coming! The French are coming!" as personified by William Hurt's character William (easy name) Marshall, who seems to exist only to give an emotional tether for the audience to the political drama. But it doesn't quite work because we don't know who William is when we meet him, nor is his plotline particularly gripping. Of course, at this moment, Robin's plot isn't going anywhere at all, since he's nowhere near outlaw status in Nottingham just yet, and so the film falls into about a twenty-minute lull.

But the film rebounds nicely. Just as it opened with a bang, Robin Hood closes with an even bigger one. It won't be spoiling anything to say that the film closes with a (fairly obvious) nod toward a sequel, but the conclusion of the film wraps up all the major conflicts in an abundantly satisfying manner. Robin Hood is, I'm sure, the best new release out this weekend (really, competition from Letters to Juliet and Queen Latifah's Just Wright? Please.). A solid cast and crew turn out a solid production which might not be particularly memorable but at least is more than enjoyable.

At any rate, it's better than that 1991 Kevin Costner trainwreck Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which could only boast the combined presence of Morgan Freeman and Alan Rickman.Robin Hood is, fortuitously for moviegoers with younger kinfolk, rated "PG-13 for violence including intense sequences of warfare, and some sexual content." The violence is standard stylized Ridley Scott fare, though most of it plays out bloodlessly and involves more clubbing than slicing; arrows fly quickly and almost never miss their fleshy targets. As for sexual content, bawdy dialogue (as is typical in most Middle Ages flicks) ensues but might fly over the heads of some young'uns.