Alien: Covenant

Alien: Covenant would probably be considered a better movie if it weren't part of the Alien series, if it were not being judged against insurmountable odds: being worthy of the original Alien (1979), the masterpiece of this franchise, or even the 1986 sequel, Aliens, which is junky yet consistently entertaining. Judged on its own merit, Alien: Covenant (the first Alien sequel to be helmed by Ridley Scott, who directed the original) is passable science fiction. This time around, the crew of a spaceship, bound for some outlying planet, is awakened after a malfunction kills 47 embryos. (Their ship is carrying over 1000 human embryos which will be harvested to populate this earth-like planet, a new colony.) When the crew receives unknown transmissions from another planet in their path (one that also may be habitable), they decide to investigate. We as the audience know exactly what's going on: This is a ruse to get them into harm's way. The movie unfolds rather predictably after that, as various crew members wander into dangerous situations and are picked off in ghastly ways by the alien creatures. Michael Fassbender, reprising his role as an android from Prometheus (the 2012 Alien prequel), figures prominently here; he's as cold and inhuman as you would expect an android to be, and he figures into a rather ingenious plot twist. And even though the ending is bold for a big budget thriller, ultimately, one grows weary of Alien: Covenant, and of its the idiotic characters, very quickly.

With Katherine Waterston, Danny McBride, Carmen Ejogo, and Billy Crudup.

Ridley Scott’s pop space adventure “The Martian” has the heart that all of his previous films were missing.

As much as I love Alien, I’m not much of a Ridley Scott devotee. Blade Runner has put me to sleep at least twice, and many of Scott’s other films are cold and clinical, which Alien kind of is too (only somehow, with Alien, it works). That’s why I was so pleasantly surprised by The Martian, Scott’s follow-up to his enormously self-plagiarizing Prometheus (2012). With The Martian, Ridley Scott seems to have stepped into an invigorating ray of sunshine that’s loosened him up as a director. This movie is a crowd-pleasing space epic in the best sense, with an irresistible performance by Matt Damon, our current cinematic Everyman.

The Martian is essentially science porn: it’s a movie about a stranded astronaut named Mark Watney who must rely on his scientific training—he’s a botanist—to survive on Mars for four years while he awaits a rescue mission. We watch countless scenes of Mark using his mad science skills to preserve his life and communicate with the outside world. In one of these process scenes, Mark builds a garden—using the exceptionally dry-looking red dust of his current planet—inside his headquarters, and then does some other scienc-y things to create and sustain a crop of potatoes.

Normally, this kind of movie bores me to tears. But Ridley Scott and Drew Goddard deftly weave together two exciting, suspenseful narratives: one of the lone astronaut, the other of the NASA scientists and PR people back on Earth, who initially believe Mark is dead, but who soon discover photographer evidence to the contrary. Their rush to build a payload of supplies—to send to Mark so he can subsist while the rescue team comes—is yet another opportunity to show us the brilliance of science and the processes of scientists. This movie is essentially a plug for the scientific method and the apparently boundless possibilities of science.

There have been several pro-NASA movies of late, and several noteworthy space thrillers too. This year, the uneven comedy-drama Aloha (from director Cameron Crowe) lamented the death of NASA and used that historical moment to craft a darker narrative about space exploration falling into the hands of greedy private enterprisers. Last year, there was Christopher Nolan’s high-minded space opera Interstellar (also featuring Matt Damon), which was a humorless and fatty cinematic experience that tried to out-Stanley Kubrick Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Before that we had Alfonso Cuarón’s magnificent but stressful (and overly sentimental) Gravity. Between the three of them, The Martian achieves the most balance: it’s emotionally affecting without resorting to cheap dramatic tricks, and its obvious admiration for NASA and science as a methodology does not inhibit our enjoyment of the film. It also takes itself less seriously without sacrificing the sense of galactic and human awe it evokes.

Matt Damon, of course, is the heart and soul of The Martian. When he faces the reality of his situation and the likelihood of his death, he takes a sober breath and simply utters, “So, yeah…Yeah,” and with those simple words, and with Damon's look of utter acceptance-cum-vulnerability, we experience the weight of mortality. There are few actors working right now more capable of winning us over than Matt Damon, and Ridley Scott understands this. He lets Damon do the work of pulling us into the film’s emotional journey, and it’s this which anchors The Martian to firm ground, narratively speaking. Even when the film begins to grow a little wearisome (I would have liked it to be 20 minutes shorter), we’re still ultimately with this movie and willing to be taken for its ride.

Scott has also assembled a fine supporting cast, most of them playing astronauts or scientists: Jessica Chastain, giving a surprisingly warm performance (for her) as the captain of the Mars mission that inadvertently abandoned Mark; Jeff Daniels as the head of NASA, managing to be glib, tactical, and likable all at once; Kristen Wiig as NASA’s public relations analyst, proving once again that Kristen Wiig is a tremendously engaging performer capable of both comedy and drama: she has some lovely, funny little moments, and conveys exasperation quite effectively; Michael Peña as the pilot of the spaceship Hermes: he exudes the charm of a good-natured ex-military pilot; Chiwetel Ejiofor (best known for his performance in 12 Years a Slave) as Vincent Kapoor, one of the NASA heads trying to manage both an impossible rescue mission and a public relations nightmare.

The film looks gorgeous, I should add. Mars never looked so beautiful in all its orange-red dusty glory, although the movie doesn’t focus as much on the sheer grandeur of space as it might have. It’s far more interested with practical things, but in a way that keeps us hooked to the screen (mostly). And even though I can appreciate arty space movies like 2001 and Alien, there’s something befitting the more practical, humanistic touch with which Ridley Scott imbues The Martian. This is a populist space movie, an almost sap-headed love letter to the idea of can-do spirit and human achievement. But Scott is a competent director, so The Martian successfully walks the lines of sentimentality and histrionics. It’s immensely satisfying entertainment.

With Kate Mara, Sean Bean, Sebastian Stan, Aksel Hennie, Donald Glover, Benedict Wong, Mackenzie Davis, Naomi Scott, Nick Mohammed, Eddy Ko, and Chen Shu. Music by Harry Gregson-Williams. Cinematography by Dariusz Wolski.

Thelma & Louise

A blockbuster about the friendship between two women is rare. Not because they can’t make money, but because studios think of them as risky. Thelma & Louise (1991) isn’t always successful as a movie, but it is successful as a study of two women who’ve been burned one too many times by the men in their lives and the men who run the world. Thelma and Louise take it on the lam after unexpectedly committing murder (that of a rapist pig) and most of the film dramatizes their trek through the West toward Mexico as the police struggle to keep up with them. 

Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis are perfectly cast, and it is their performances and the bond that develops between these two characters that breathes a real vitality into what is really a very conventional Hollywood road movie. It’s nowhere near as groundbreaking as Bonnie and Clyde was in terms of violence, and yet, it’s tremendously groundbreaking in the way it portrays women who, once they’ve tasted freedom from the shackles of their former lives, finally start to feel alive. It’s somewhat surprising to see a movie like Thelma & Louise come from a director such as Ridley Scott, even though he did give us such a strong female character in Alien (Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley). But this is a different, deeper approach to exploring the lives of women on the screen, and the film is bolstered by many loose scenes of the two ladies talking, laughing, or in some cases, just looking at each other and communicating whole worlds of expression. That dynamic is what makes Thelma & Louise an important film, even if the parts of the movie are better than the whole. The affection that we as an audience feel for them is also very deep and true, and, like Bonnie and Clyde before it, the film thus succeeds in getting its audience to root for the “bad guys.” 

So much of what happens to Thelma and Louise is filtered through a lens of experience that is all too believable: Women are not just bossed around by men, they’re controlled by them in a much deeper way that creates in some women a need for the prisons that men create. They become victims of Stockholm Syndrome, if you will. We see it in the early scenes of Thelma & Louise, especially with Geena Davis’s character, whose husband neglects her, mocks her, and belittles her, and demands domestic labor of her, all the while carrying on affairs. 

As the movie progresses, the two women transform from their dowdy, frumpishly dressed former-selves, so weary of the world, into more confident, sexually aware (but not self-exploitive) and powerful women. Susan Sarandon never looks more radiant than with her hair framing her face or blowing in the wind as she pounds away at the dusty highways of the American West. And Geena Davis's Thelma, who is so inept at first and so afraid to do anything that might exercise her own agency, becomes incredibly self-assured. These transformations are indeed fascinating, and they make the film’s legendary ending all the more poignant and, strangely, satisfying. 

Thelma & Louise actually has more in common with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It is after all a buddy movie that tries very hard to transmute its tragic elements into comedy. (In the case of Thelma & Louise, this works intermittently, more consistently in the last half of the movie.) With Harvey Keitel as an Arkansas cop investigating the murder and subsequent flight of the two suspects; Brad Pitt as a sweet-talking hitchhiker; also Michael Madsen, Christopher McDonald, Stephen Tobolowsky, Timothy Carhart, Jason Beghe, and Marco St. John. Written by Calli Khouri; music by Hans Zimmer; cinematography by Adrian Biddle.   

Alien

There are few horror movies as good as Alien (1979). That’s probably why the director of Alien, Ridley Scott, made Prometheus. He wanted to revisit one of the highlights of his career. But unfortunately, Prometheus was a big, shiny, beautiful failure, and by comparison Alien looks better and better with every passing year. As an example of effectively deliberate pacing, Alien remains unmatched. And as an example of a scaled-down, good, old-fashioned scare movie, it’s in a very elite camp with maybe nine other horror pictures. Even though some of Alien’s depictions of technology seem out-dated or just plain off, its keen awareness of the computer as control freak marks the film as a perennially relevant piece of horror filmmaking. (And...Sigourney Weaver.)

If we put Alien in context, we see that it was somewhat responsible for starting a new cycle of big monster movies from Hollywood. This is probably not a good thing, ultimately, as most of them are crap. But it’s at least a testament to Alien’s power as a film. (I hope…Perhaps it’s merely a testament to Alien’s box office success.) What were the noteworthy science fiction and horror films that immediately preceded Alien? Going back to 1968, there was Stanley Kubrick’s pretentious but magnificent 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its many self-congratulatory shots of futuristic man and his interstellar voyages. And more recently the genre was being re-routed with space operas and reverential aliens-are-wonderful-and-mysterious flicks such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Really, Alien was the first big-budget monster film of the modern era. The only other movies that compare are Jaws (1975) and the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) by Philip Kaufman. Kaufman’s movie is a masterpiece in its own, but for some reason it’s Alien that has stuck around in the culture. (That’s a shame. You should absolutely go and watch Body Snatchers `78 because it’s fantastic and it stars Brooke Adams, an under-appreciated leading lady of the period. It also stars Veronica Cartwright, who went on to play Lambert in Alien.)

Alien is certainly a throwback to the classic monster films of the 50s, but featuring the up-to-date-with-a-vengeance special effects of the 1970s. The great horror/scifi films from this period remind us how convincing practical effects can be, even when CGI is technically “better” looking. Somehow, there’s always something unreal about CGI. For some reason.

There’s an excellent documentary on Italian filmmaker Mario Bava that discusses in some detail how Alien essentially ripped off his 1966 film Planet of the Vampires. The documentary posits that director Ridley Scott likely didn’t know of Bava’s film, but that Alien’s writers, Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, did. If you watch just a few scenes of the astronauts—in funky 60s-style space suits that were later copied in Prometheus—exploring the vampire planet, you can recall the images of Tom Skerrit, John Hurt, and Veronica Cartwright as they investigate the alien spacecraft that lured them onto a lonely planetary system while their spaceship the Nostromo drifted peacefully towards Earth.

But Ridley Scott’s film may be the first outer space movie that genuinely scared the living daylights out of people. There are other greats, such as the Howard Hawks-produced The Thing From Another World (1951), and Don Siegel’s original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Some people have likely made the Hawksian connection to Alien because it features a strong female lead, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), but actually Hawks may be more ahead of his time than Scott. Hawks’s female leads were tough and smart and sexy and they knew it. The characters in Alien don’t really have biographies or that kind of awareness that characters do in a Howard Hawks movie (such as The Big Sleep). There is a deliberate attempt in Alien to reduce the characters to the bare bones as a way of comparing them to the machines that operate much of their lives on board the Nostromo. The computer that ultimately runs the Nostromo is called Mother (a clever tribute to HAL in 2001). When Tom Skerrit goes into the little control room, which is dotted with yellow lights from ceiling to floor, he types the question, “WHAT ARE MY CHANCES?” into the computer. He’s about to go into the air ducts of the ship to try and corner the slimy, shape-shifting alien creature that has boarded the craft. “Mother” responds with “does not compute.” And then we realize how helpless they are at the hands of their modern technology. It sounds all too familiar.

The humans are almost dehumanized for much of the film, and yet there are scenes of real feeling between them and for them. Much of Ridley Scott’s work is somewhat cold and calculated, but this quality kind of works in Alien, and the actors are still able to convey something of a sense of camaraderie between the crew members, even if they don’t all like each other all of the time. Besides, how could you not feel bad for people trapped in outer space by a slimy, sharp-toothed alien that bleeds acid and has a habit of harvesting babies inside human stomachs?

Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley is credited as the first genuinely modern female character in a horror movie. That’s probably true, and yet I’m not sure how much it did to advance women in movies, or horror movies, or society. I’m certainly happy that Ellen Ripley is strong, and even happier that Sigourney Weaver gained a career by her tough-as-nails performance. There were plenty of films that followed Alien’s lead. George Romero did in his 1985 Day of the Dead, finally offering up a tough female character, but this was also an apology for setting the women’s movement back several decades with his catatonic female lead in 1968’s Night of the Living Dead.

Sigourney Weaver is a marvel. She carries this picture--her first starring role--with grace and strength and confidence, and is the heart and the soul of Alien. And near the end, when Weaver is walking around the escape pod in her panties, it feels like a cheap reversion to some old-fashioned male chauvinism until she dons a spacesuit and goes head-to-head with the alien creature. Perhaps they knew what they were doing, or perhaps it was just a happy accident that the makers of Alien--and Weaver herself--gave us such a strong performance. I am inclined to think that Sigourney Weaver knew what she was doing. 

But there are still a lot of dumb characters in horror movies, and in fact, there are some dumb characters in Alien. As fantastic as this movie is, it relies on several cheap tricks to generate quality death scenes, like when Harry Dean Stanton is searching for the cat, or when two other crew members encounter the alien and—in customary Italian splatter movie fashion—stand absolutely still in sheer, passive terror. It’s a marvel that somebody thought to make Ripley as tough as she was, considering how ineffective most of her crew members were in a crisis.

But it’s hard to begrudge Alien for its little faults. It’s such a fun piece of outer space trash, so expertly made (capped by that subtle, sinister music by Jerry Goldsmith) and so deliciously rotten in a way, with all its cynicism and its nasty characters. And no, Aliens is not better.

With John Hurt, Ian Holm, and Yaphet Kotto. 

Blade Runner

Years ago I fell asleep during a screening of Blade Runner (1982) in a college class called Art of Cinema. Last night I finally sat down to give it another go, and lo and behold, the same problem reared its head. For all its lush, grandiose production design, Blade Runner is a bore: a beauty with no personality. Harrison Ford, usually capable of carrying a movie when it's not so hot, wanders through Blade Runner a prisoner to its massive size. That bigness ends up sinking both the actors and the plot: they're crushed under the film's dead weight.

Director Ridley Scott tries to utilize the same deliberate pacing he employed so effectively in Alien, but it doesn't translate well to Blade Runner, because there's no pay-off, and we're just waiting, waiting, waiting, occasionally admiring the film's artistic prowess, even shaking our heads that the movie got some of its prophesies--it's set in a wastelandish Los Angeles future (2019 to be exact)--right (such as the increasing specter of advertising in our lives, although I suppose that wasn't so different in the early 1980s).  

Alien is one of the slowest movies I've ever seen, and yet I find it absolutely riveting. The whole movie has a palpable tension running through it because you know something is going to happen, and while Alien is a visually stunning film in its own right, it also practices a kind of economy that makes its pace and its characters (about whom we know very little, and dare I say, care for even less, at times) work for it. Blade Runner has both the slow pace and the unlikable characters, but it's saturated in a kind of artiness that works against it: you feel immersed in the murky surroundings of the neo-gothic urban decay and it fills you with dread. The synth score by Vangelis provides the final sheen of heavy-handed excess. (And yet many people seem to see in Scott's second major film a masterpiece.)

Scott seems intent on conjuring up the American movie past in Blade Runner. One of his heroines--Sean Young--is made up to resemble Rosalind Russell from a Howard Hawks movie, and it's pretty clear that Harrison Ford, who plays a robot bounty hunter (the robots are called replicants because they are such perfect imitators of humans--down to their memories and emotions--and he's called a blade runner) enlisted to assassinate four robots that have illegally returned to earth to exist among the humans. Ford's mission is complicated when he falls in love with one of the replicants and feels guilty for killing another. We're supposed to ponder deep philosophical questions about what it means to be human, and while these are interesting questions, they're not enough to sustain a movie that feels so intentionally important. I didn't have to work to enjoy Alien. Blade Runner demands that I appreciate how significant it is.

Based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Adapted for the screen by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. With Rutger Hauer (who's an impressive, captivating actor just to behold; he commands the screen when he's in front of the camera), Daryl Hannah, Edward James Olmos, M. Emmett Walsh, William Sanderson, Joe Turkel, and Joanna Cassidy. ★★

Prometheus

In Prometheus, there are a few scenes where the crew members are wearing black jumpsuits with red lining along the edges. It's a designer's nod to an old Italian science fiction movie, Planet of the Vampires, which was directed by Mario Bava. People have often accused Ridley Scott's Alien of stealing from the oh-so-cheesy Bava film. Alien was thought up by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, who were never deliberately coy about their borrowing inspiration from any number of science fiction movies, novels, and short stories. Now, with Prometheus, Ridley Scott is stealing from himself. He offers up a prequel-cum-remake of Alien that contains essentially the same scares and the same characters and situations.

The magnificent special effects are there to woo us. They aren't overpowering until the end. When the movie gets claustrophobic, you start to really feel the Alien kinship. It's almost the same damn movie at times. In fact, Prometheus feels like the accumulation of every science fiction movie and book and short story and painting ever concocted. And I say this not having all that strong a knowledge of the genre, but only based on what I am familiar with: Alien and Aliens, bits of Planet of the Vampires, The Thing From Another World, Forbidden Planet, et al. That's not to say it's not entertaining. Much of it is fun in a nasty sort of way. You get a kick out of the characters falling prey to what they encounter on the planet they're exploring. (It was however, irritating, to see some old cliches employed to help facilitate the horror. Movie characters never seem to get smarter with age.)

The plot involves two scientists searching for the beings that created the human race. They journey to another planet where they make some decidedly historic discoveries, but, as you might have imagined, not all of them are good, and pretty soon death enters the spaceship on which they traveled. It's not exactly like Alien from there on out. Scott is really trying hard to capture a sense of wonder amidst the horror he wants to create. So this might be a mixture of Alien and 2001: A Space Odyssey (or Solaris). It certainly grasps at the pretentious, although not as firmly as Stanley Kubrick did in 2001. Scott's got an action movie sensibility. His movies get distracted from the bigger ideas that often weighed Kubrick down.

Michael Fassbender, who plays a polite, super-smart robot on board the ship (thus making another connection to the Alien movies), resembles Keir Dullea from 2001, and his voice resembles HAL's. Guy Pearce is unrecognizable under CGI-generated make-up designed to age him significantly. The two scientists are played by Noomi Rapace, who's a pretty good lead, and Logan Marshall-Green. Charlize Theron plays the woman who presides over the ship like an ice queen. She owns the company that's funding the mission. Her character isn't particularly well thought out (none of them are, actually), and we never really know why she's so domineering. You get the feeling that the movie's going to make more use of her but nothing comes of it. Idris Elba seems to have the most humanity among the crew. He plays the ships' captain, and the only person with a sense of humor, which endears him to us more than most of the other dispensables on board. (Remember how it was impossible to tell who was getting killed in Aliens, and then you realized it didn't matter because there had never been much attempt to introduce them either by face or by name in the first place? The same thing happens in Prometheus, a little.)

The script is by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, both sci-fi junkies who keep the movie interesting as they rip off everything they've ever watched and read. Prometheus is fun for about three fourths of the way, but the ending feels too anti-climactic, too deflated, to be exciting or compelling. The movie's still trying to hold on to both the "marvel and mystery" of the origins of life and the horror of the beings discovered on the distant planet, and so it just feels like any other outer space epic, one you might have caught while watching the Sci-Fi channel late one night.

With Sean Harris, Rafe Spall, Benedict Wong, Kate Dickie, and in a small role as Rapace's father, Patrick Wilson (seen in a dream sequence.)

Body of Lies

This twaddle about terrorism and the CIA is mixed-up and convoluted. It's the kind of massive, dull, film that makes you think the occasional explosion or torture scene is climactic, when really it's just a minor interruption to the plodding rhythm of a movie that's too high-minded and pseudo-intellectual for its own good. It's proof that two respected actors and a well-known director (Ridley Scott). can pick a bummer.

I've never been completely sold on DiCaprio anyway. He's certainly got talent (and he shines in the right part, such as in Catch Me If You Can), but he often fails to be convincing in the roles in which he's cast. Did anyone really forget it was Leonardo DiCaprio they were watching rather than Howard Hawks in The Aviator? Blame it on the youngish face that has kept him looking 25 even at 35 (and older). You're always aware that he's acting.

On the other hand, Russell Crowe looks and sounds better than he acts in this movie. He becomes immersed in the character at the surface level, but he never gets the delicious breakout scene we're expecting. There's no meltdown. Even when DiCaprio's character pushes him out of his chair (a funny scene that gets underplayed, even dismissed, because this movie is too serious to really care about humor), Crowe's character reacts with phony finesse, and lifts higher our anticipation that he'll blow a gasket sooner or later. It doesn't pay off. Crowe puffed himself up to play DiCaprio's sleazy and slick good-ole-boy boss, a doughy Southern scoundrel who's too much of a coward to do anything but pull the strings and push the buttons. He's placed with the obvious intention of conjuring up the image of any number of politicians in recent history. but his character has nothing likeable.

This is a movie that's bungled by its own high-falutin aspirations, not to mention its relentlessly sluggish pacing. It's trying to be hip and complex, and as a result, its true intentions are too cloudy to be clear. The movie fails to resonate with the viewer. Actress Golshifteh Farahani breathes some life into the muddle for a while, as DiCaprio's Jordanian love interest, and Oscar Isaac registers well as one of DiCaprio's partners. (He played the scummy Prince John in another, better, Ridley Scott-Russell Crowe movie, Robin Hood).

Based on a 2007 novel by David Ignatius.

Robin Hood

Russell Crowe and director Ridley Scott reunite for a rousing update of ROBIN HOOD. Your trusty reviewer doesn't usually go for epic movies, but is willing to put a little trust in the hands of the director of ALIEN and the star of L.A. CONFIDENTIAL. Cate Blanchett makes for a strong but soft Maid Marian, who agrees to give aid to the illusion that Robin Longstride (Crowe) is her dead husband Robin of Loxley returning from 10 years battle (in order to keep her land and ensure the livelihood of the many subjects who work it). But trouble is afoot, within and without England, as the sleazy King John (Oscar Isaac) sees little value in the liberty of his subjects, but must depend upon their fighting skills to save England from being overtaken by the French, led by his backstabbing chum Godfrey (Mark Strong). William Hurt as a British chancellor and Max von Sydow as Marian's ailing but noble father-in-law lend just the right amount of British upper-custiness to this swirling epic, a tale that proves it is worth retelling, particularly in light of 1991's ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES and its notoriously appalling casting choice of Kevin Costner in the lead. Audiences may determine if a sequel is in order (there's certainly room for more, provided they do as good as this one). With Mark Addy (as Friar Tuck), Danny Huston, Eileen Atkins, Matthew MacFadyen, Kevin Durand, and Scott Grimes. ★★★½