Creatures of the Fright: ALIEN: COVENANT

The dictates of blockbuster franchising have taken Alien, Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece of a claustrophobic spaceship creature feature, and expanded its grim point of view. Each iteration sends a crew of humans into space never to return, devoured inevitably by the memorable, acid-dripping, body horror-manifesting, otherworldly beasties. Through sheer repetition and accumulation of incident, this is now a rigorously cold and isolating perspective for a popular film series. It says humans are capable of great things – space travel and sci-fi tech and all that stuff – but that we will invariably mess it up. We’re doomed, essentially. Our species will bump up against our cognitive and sociological limitations to die alone in the cold emptiness of outer space. Fitting that the franchise which began with the tagline “In space, no one can hear you scream,” has only made the sentiment darker, sadder, and more disturbing.

After largely enjoyable sequels helmed by a rotating director’s chair of popcorn auteurs (James Cameron, David Fincher, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Paul W.S. Anderson), Scott took control once more with the 2012 prequel Prometheus. That brilliantly austere film asked big philosophical questions about creation and existence in cold frames and cool designs while still managing a pulpy monster movie sending an all-star cast to their memorable dooms. A direct sequel to the prequel, Alien: Covenant doesn’t manage the balance quite as well, but Scott is a consummate craftsman, able to navigate complex sequences and ambitious design for an intelligently crafted picture. It may just be another Hollywood spectacle riffing on images from once original concepts long since passed into brand deposits. But would that all such productions be made with such considered design and calculated awe. Here is a movie made by filmmakers at the height of their powers, executed with tension and dread, heightened by a sense of the eerie and sublime. At one point, it packs a mind-bending epic into a short, evocative flashback – images of spinning spaceships raining Black Death on an old future world – wrapped in 19th century poetry intoned by an inscrutably villainous android. Talk about handsome pulp.

The film follows a predictable pattern, first introducing a large crew on a colonization mission to a distant planet. Something goes wrong mid-flight and they awake to hear a distress call slightly off their course. They check it out, and are immediately imperiled by mysterious creatures who latch on to their anatomies and don’t let go – not just the series’ famous facehuggers, but spores that bore into nostrils and ear drums, and embryonic aliens birthed by splitting men in two with geysers of gore. The screenplay by John Logan and Dante Harper does not ask much of its famous faces, but the welcome likes of Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demian Bichir, Jussie Smollett, Carmen Ejogo, and Amy Seimetz go a long way to selling the weary professionalism and increasingly frazzled nature of deep space dilemmas slowly morphing into all-out survivalist horror. Best is Michael Fassbender as the crew’s android Walter, a kindly protective useful thing, and David, the older model abandoned on a dead world with a human survivor (Noomi Rapace) after the events of the previous film. He’s now becoming something of a mad scientist with an ego to match. The dual role plays between a new, perfectly manicured robot built to serve and an old robot who has unsettlingly developed eccentricities and long shaggy hair. Any movie that can stop dead in its tracks for twin androids to practice playing the recorder and maintain the film’s core creepiness is alright in my book.

Scott designs the movie with a tension between the wild sci-fi scope of his gods’ and monsters, intelligent design, dark, space epic and the tiny, drooling, chamber piece horror as the characters are confronted with the terror of the unknown. We see in the robots and spaceships – and the long, loving, detailed effects shots of the technology in action – hints of Kubrick’s 2001 and Scott’s own Blade Runner, but he’s mostly riffing on his own franchise at this point, feeding plots and images back into the ouroboric endeavor of big-screen mythmaking. We’ve been here before, but never exactly like this. It has humans capable of traveling into the unknown only to be brought down by their own hubris, caught between forces beyond their control – nature – and those which they begat – technology. The universe doesn’t care. Either way, they’ll die. It’s the exact opposite of his last feature, The Martian, which said all outer space problems can be solved through science, teamwork, and determination. Here he’s ensured his flagship franchise is an entertaining and deeply pessimistic one, encompassing killer robots, drooling monsters, ancient aliens, and intergalactic genocide. The deliberate one-by-one slasher pace set against the backdrop of vast mysterious vistas and beguiling futurist detail this time finds its cast a mere facet of the production design, a routine but ponderous formula that works well enough again.

Alien Origins: PROMETHEUS

Prequels are tricky things. Give the audience exactly what they think they want and they might be superficially satisfied at first, but your film is ultimately a trifle that explains away the original film’s mystery. Throw the audience a curveball and they’ll be frustrated and discontent. The trick is finding the right balance, which is precisely what director Ridley Scott and screenwriters Damon Lindelof and Jon Spaiths have set out to do with Prometheus, a film set some years before the events of Scott’s 1979 film Alien, that classic of science fiction horror. What Scott and his writers do here is not describe the backstory of Alien, showing what created the distress signal that led a space freighter and its crew to certain doom from extraterrestrial infestation, but to layer on extra mysteries. This is an engrossing production that operates from a similar stylistic point of view – stately and patient pacing and carefully detailed design – but, aside from a shared fictional universe and a plot that loosely sets the stage for the franchise that follows its events, Prometheus is very much a work that creates an identity of its own.

Part of what made Alien so great was the way it was about characters who had a job to do and set out doing it. They just happened to be interrupted in a spectacularly frightening and entertaining way. Similarly, Prometheus follows a crew of professionals aboard a spaceship (also called Prometheus). They’re off to sort out the mysteries of the universe. It’s a routine exploration, or so the crew assumes. In the group of seventeen are scientists, doctors, pilots, and security. We come to know some of them as the spacecraft arrives at its destination and the hibernation chambers open up. There’s an all-business, sharp-tongued company leader (Charlize Theron), a grizzled captain (Idris Elba), and an ensemble of mostly likable researchers and technicians (character actors Sean Haris, Rafe Spall, Emun Elliott, Benedict Wong, and Kate Dickie). Watching over them as they slept, ensuring nothing went wrong with the ship, was the android, David (Michael Fassbender), who moves with stiff precision and speaks in a way that’s not quite flat. During the trip, he was taught information pertinent to the expedition. Now, he’s eager to help. He’s programmed that way.

Leading this team, at least on the scientific front, is a couple of archaeologists (Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green), partners scientifically and romantically. They’re the ones with the theories that have convinced trillionaire Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) to fund this exploration into deep space based on a theory that involves a lot of research a big leap of faith. All around the world they have found hieroglyphics from many cultures depicting giants pointing towards a planetary grouping in the sky. These researchers have somehow extrapolated a map through the universe that they’re sure will lead them to the origins of the human race. They think they’ll find the “engineers” of humanity, but that’s just one possible outcome. When the crew is informed of their true mission, they’re skeptical, but get down to business. The movie proceeds as a terrific rush of jargon, a jumble of pseudo-scientific, quasi-spiritual, pop-philosophical inquiries as the explorers land on the planet and find a structure that is most definitely not naturally occurring. It’s filled with cavernous, craggy halls and echoing chambers filled with massive carvings, oozing containers, dusty control panels and, most frightening of all, large alien corpses.

The film follows the exploration as it slowly, inevitably, falls to pieces through human error, hidden agendas, clashing personalities, and, of course, the mysterious things lurking in the shadows. It doesn’t all make sense by the end; push a little against the plotting and it starts to unravel around loose ends. But the characters are so convincingly acted and with personalities so clearly drawn that I didn’t interrogate their decisions in the moment. I was eager to see what they would discover and how they would react to shifting conditions and information and grew worried for them as new dangers arose. While the film was rolling, it caught me up in a spell of masterful filmmaking. I found it gripping, creepy, and mostly fascinating. This is an intense movie with a slow, inescapable crescendo of suspense played meticulously, soberly and earnestly.

That’s the approach that Ridley Scott has brought to so much of his work as director and a big reason why the quality of his output is so spotty. For every Alien or Black Hawk Down there’s a G.I. Jane or A Good Year. With Prometheus, though, he’s back working in the genre for which he’s most beloved and which he hasn’t been seen since 1982’s Blade Runner. Sci-fi is a genre suited for his detailed approach of complex visuals and serious-minded skimming across the surface of deep topics. (This film’s thematically complicated, or maybe just muddled.) It’s a film about the origins of the universe, but is really only interested in that topic insofar as it provides the opportunity to show off incredible imagination, riffing off the iconography of Alien to find its own great images.

This is an attractively photographed film, a powerful feat of visuals. It’s without a doubt one of the best looking blockbusters in recent memory. It feels out-of-time in style and approach in the best possible way, a cold melancholic 70’s sci-fi mood (a bit of Silent Running, perhaps, or, further back, 2001: A Space Odyssey) in a story told with modern tools. The cinematography from Dariusz Wolski is lush and gorgeous, with impressive 3D depth and a steady sense of space and scale, drinking in the wholly convincing effects work from a small army of artists and Arthur Max’s intricately detailed production design. These images are allowed time to resonate, to be absorbed into the larger texture of the piece in a satisfying way. (See it on the biggest screen you can find!) It’s so dissimilar in approach to the shaky-cam chaos cinema technique so popular over the past several years, even among Scott’s own films, that to see such restraint, such lovingly displayed visual skill, is some kind of marvel.

That’s why, as much as I retroactively doubt my response to the film as I sit here poking through some of its flimsy plotting and unexplained character motivations, especially in the last twenty minutes or so when the aftermath of a virtuoso sequence of body horror goes curiously unacknowledged for a while, I can’t shake the feeling that the movie had a powerful contemplative undertow. The robot man, so scarily, perfectly inhabited by Fassbender, is a created being fully aware of that status, observing humans who are embarking on what is perhaps a futile and, in this case, self-destructive, search for their own creators. There’s a powerful exploration of creation myths stirring half-formed under the gripping style and enthralling pace of Prometheus.

The wordless opening sequence, striking, beautiful, horrifying, could be taken as metaphor or dream or literal truth. The camera soars over a seemingly untouched wilderness until it finds a pale pure-white human-like being standing over a waterfall. This humanoid slowly begins to tear apart at the molecular level and topples over into the water, drifting away as a black mist dissolving into the water. Only then do we jump ahead into the film proper. So, real or imagined within the world of the film, what’s going on here? Is this a creation story? It seems to fit the expedition’s thesis. This immediately arresting curtain raiser announces the film as one that’s out to slip around audience expectations. By the end, though, it’s sure to please those out looking for xenomorphic clues, while still becoming something all its own. It’s a non-prequel prequel that uses a franchise’s groundwork without using it as a crutch, and sets off to explore its own massive ambitions. It doesn’t quite realize them to the extent that perhaps it should. (I might change my mind upon a second viewing, which will happen very soon.) But there’s no use denying how stunning, absorbing, and effective a piece of filmmaking it is. 

Outwit, Outlast, Outplay: SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS

I remember being surprised by how much I found myself enjoying Guy Ritchie’s take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes when it showed up two years ago. It was the kind of big holiday season spectacular that rolled in, made a bunch of money, and rolled away leaving nary a trace. I remember only the sensations, the charm Robert Downey Jr. brought to the title role, and the surprising score. I looked back on what I wrote about it at the time and found that I called it “a mostly enjoyable experience, a big-budget, slightly goofy, action-thriller-mystery driven forward, and kept afloat, by its cast, its production design, and the charmingly off-kilter score by Hans Zimmer that recalls The Third Man’s zither in its unexpected instrumentation.” So, there you have it. It was a fun movie, but, aside from distinctive aspects of design, casting and score, not especially memorable on the plot level.

Going into Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, I was ready to be disappointed. Once again, I emerged surprised. It’s a fun, slam-bang adventure in the spirit of its immediate predecessor, hardly the patient mystery of past Holmes, but still a rush, and I mean rush, of deduction that often leads to loving photographed destruction. It’s a slicker follow up to a film that was itself very slick. Ritchie directs with a bit more of a more confident style and a wider screen, speeding his characters through a convoluted, yet ultimately simply twisty, plot set amidst fantastic production design. The 1890’s bric-a-brac is lovingly presented as it sits ready and waiting to be blown to bits. The costumes themselves are sheer delight. This is a movie that has an old-school period-piece glamour that it zips through with action sequences sped up, hacked up, or slowed way down. It’s a collision of approaches that can be quite bracing.

The plot this time around concerns Dr. Watson (Jude Law) checking in on his good friend Holmes (Downey Jr.). The detective has been consumed with his research into a series of bombings that have plagued Europe in recent months. The opening sequence, involving the beguiling Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) from the first film, causes Holmes to start drawing connections. These bombings, blamed in the press on anarchist groups, must be circuitously connected to the devious Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris, most recently found on TV in Mad Men). But before the investigation can continue, it’s Watson’s wedding day. Too bad the poor bloke won’t get much of honeymoon, though. Moriarty is onto Holmes’s investigation and targets the two men in order to take them out of the equation. No loose ends can be had, you see.

The film becomes a continent-crossing adventure that takes Holmes and Watson from London to Paris, from Germany to Switzerland. They even pick up a helpful gypsy (Noomi Rapace, so good in the otherwise awful Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) who sneaks them across borders and helps them decipher some crucial clues while Sherlock’s brother (Stephen Fry) helps them decode the treacherous political climate that has Europe on the precipice of war. For most of its run time, the script by Michele and Kieran Mulroney keeps the set pieces big and action-heavy. The rapport between Holmes and Watson still shines at times, but more often than not they’re getting involved in shootouts and fisticuffs that occasionally turn into chase scenes and extensive use of explosives.

But right before I was about to declare myself warn out by the film’s bigger-is-better attitude, it pulls back. The climax thrillingly foregrounds the mind games that Holmes and Moriarty have been playing over the course of the last couple hours or so. Theirs is a game of wits and skill, misdirection, obfuscation, and surveillance. I wish the film could have let us in on the game a little earlier, giving us clues instead of relying on rapid-fire flashback inert shots that show us all the little details, even moments of earlier set-up, that only Holmes saw earlier. Downey Jr. and Harris are a good match, though. They’re believable charming and intelligent and bring to their roles a nice amount of playful danger. They clearly hate each other, but are relishing the opportunity to clash intellect with their equal and opposite.

It all provides a good time at the movies. The movie is a light, accessible romp through late-1800’s Europe, and a thunderous, stylish, red-blooded adventure with little comic flourishes. There are even some good set-ups and pay-offs and some nice winks at original Holmes lore. (I particularly appreciated the use of a waterfall late in the picture). It’s hardly essential, but with both of these Sherlock films Ritchie’s doing some of the best work of his career. These are stylish, reasonably well done crowd-pleasing popcorn films, with mostly satisfying mysteries, puzzles worked out with some degree of wit amidst the gunfire and explosions. 

Quick Look: THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, the third and final film from the Swedish series based on the wildly popular Stieg Larsson novels, is about as interesting as 150 minutes of thumb twiddling. I haven’t liked the other films and thought the book was the weakest of Larsson’s installments, so why did I choose to see, let alone type out a few words about this last effort? I guess I just wanted the full experience to fully judge the upcoming Hollywood versions. Besides, what’s the point in reviewing only two out of three? I need to complete my trilogy of negative reactions to this trilogy. Anyways, in this version director Daniel Alfredson and screenwriter Ulf Ryberg pick up right where the cliffhanger ending of The Girl Who Played With Fire left off. They methodically set out trying to find every loose end the series has accumulated and tie it up tight. The plot sidelines its greatest asset, the great Noomi Rapace as the distinctive Lisbeth Salander, confining her to a hospital bed for at least half of the film. Luckily, the plot still manages to feature more than enough gratuitous sadism. There are also some dull thriller elements and a repetitive courtroom circus thrown in as an attempt to keep things interesting. But every time the film threatens to burst forth with excitement, the filmmakers dutifully steer safely clear of the opportunity. Each film in this inexplicably popular art house franchise has gotten progressively worse. This is the worst. It’s not merely bad; it’s deadly boring. The series concludes the same way it began, with exposition and a shrug.

Diminishing Returns: THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE

When experiencing a novel, the reader controls the speed. In the case of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl who Played with Fire, I found skimming to be the most enjoyable way to read the absurdly specific prose. In this novel, characters don’t simply drive; they take this type of car going south on this particular street so many kilometers and then turn left next to the small grove of trees next to a gas station. Characters don’t simply make a phone call; they pull out a particular brand of cell phone and dial a certain number. With the magic of skimming through the text, I still found the book to be lumpy and a slog, but I arrived at the occasional flashes of excitement much faster. It’s a mildly enjoyable summer tome.

In the theater, watching the movie version slowly slide through the projector, I wished for the same freedom to breeze past details. I didn’t much care for it’s film predecessor, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, either, but I found myself yearning for its comparatively greater pleasures. The Girl who Played with Fire doesn’t have anything that made me as mad as the earlier film at its most exploitative, but by the end I wish had a felt something other than boredom.

Sure, Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist are back as Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist. They do a great job inhabiting these characters that are certainly striking in their details. The thin, short, pierced and inked hacker Salander, especially, is worthy of the praise that has been thrown her way. She’s a memorable construction, to be sure, but I can’t be the only one who wishes that she were given more to do.

In this installment she’s kept off screen for quite a while, and when she does emerge to impact the plot it’s in ways that seem too pat and predictable. Most of her scenes in the film involve her sitting and smoking or, if we’re lucky, she’ll be reading or writing on her laptop. I understand that research is important to the plot, but it’s hard to get excited about so much typing. Salander is the one striking aspect of the whole film and she’s nearly overshadowed by scene after scene in which hastily described characters flow in and out of the plot with little explanation. It’s a complex plot that’s blurrily, ploddingly, and confusingly told. By the time the film reached its climax with sordid discoveries and cliffhanger showdowns, it was too little too late.

Thrillers work best when they move like clockwork, effortlessly moving character and plot in perfect synchronicity. Here director Daniel Alfredson, working from the screen adaption by Jonas Frykberg, is content to show us where each gear is and then close up the clock forgetting to put the hands on the clock’s face. I can hear the plot ticking away, but it’s of no practical use.

Swedish Schlock: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

What an odd weekend at the movies. First, I wasn’t outraged by Kick-Ass and now I’m confronted with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in which there is not one, not two, but three completely unnecessary scenes of sexual assault and rape that are dropped in to the first half of what is just a standard serial-killer mystery. It’s almost as if some higher power needed to make sure my sense of moral indignation still worked. There is no reason for these rape scenes other than that they can be found in the bestselling book by the same name from the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson. In print, though they are just as unnecessary, they can be skipped or skimmed. Although I still found them off-putting in my reading experience, I still managed to finish the book. (I feel like an outlier when I say I found the novel to be just “okay” overall). Literalized and dramatized on the screen, they are uncomfortable and ultimately unbearable. I loathed them with an intense fury.

I suppose the movie rebounds from such miserable lows about as well as any movie could. It helps when the basic story is fairly solid. In this Swedish thriller there’s a disgraced journalist (Michael Nyqvist), who’s hired by an elderly tycoon (Sven-Bertil Taube) to research the 40-year-old unsolved disappearance of his niece, and there’s a slim, tattooed and pierced hacker (Noomi Rapace) who crosses his path and may or may not help them solve the case. It’s thrilling at times, even exciting at least once, but mostly it’s a jumble of names, documents and photographs that we’re told point towards a mystery’s solution. This all works on the page where there is room to develop such a mystery and let us simmer in the details, but director Niels Arden Oplev leaves nothing untold that could, and usually will, be shown. It’s a depressingly literal-minded adaptation from screenwriters Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg that isn’t helped by such square direction.

If there’s any material that could soar with all kinds of impressive filmmaking, it’s mysteries involving missing persons and scary murders. Look at Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs for two fairly recent (to the extent the 90’s are still recent) examples. They share only a similar desire to scare and shock while delighting audiences with a slowly unraveling mystery. Here, the movie is content to plod and drag along for well over two hours, constantly allowing characters to endlessly speechify, reminisce, and explicate. It moves at such a relentlessly grinding pace that I felt worn down by the dullness of it all. At least when I was being repulsed by the film I was feeling something. It’s a film to endure more than it is a film to see.

Here’s hoping that the forthcoming American remake does something more exciting with this material. Maybe less devotion to the source material is called for. But is it too much to ask that the studio tries to get Noomi Rapace for the same role? Here she plays an interesting character interestingly, and yet is constantly undermined by a film that doesn’t realize how awesome a character she could be. But that’s the film’s nature: to constantly make ordinary what could be extra. Unless, of course, that extra involves rape.