A L I E N : COVENANT

So   which  ALIEN: COVENANT  

movie did you want to see?  

This one?

                                                            

Or this one.

My point being, we each see the ALIEN movie we want to see.  Only to put a finer point on it, often exactly the movie we don't end up seeing--depending on who we are.  May we attribute this   to sudden offsetting factors in the moviegoing experience, occasionally?  (Yes, I am talking about a night out in a movie theater.) Such as, perhaps, unwisely choosing a very late show after a long day at work, or maybe, having just eaten a bit too much of that spaghetti dinner just before showtime.   See, some movies arrive with their big studio produced mini featurettes, dark and shiny candy-memes scrolling past consumer's eyes strewed along the moving pathway of our endlessly streaming news feeds while we're wasting our time online, and some movies are the virus.  Its like the whole thing's beginning to feed on itself, you follow? 

This is the poster I saw in the theater lobby.

So yeah I finally went and did it.  I saw Ridley Scott's second followunder to his classic 1979 paradigm shifter ALIEN. Today I'm ruminating that maybe Ridley never stopped to realize that even more ironically than the box office champion hit followup ALIENS by James Cameron being considered a deviancy from the premiere; so, too, may his own original film have been green lit by an industry back then ready for the next big thing.  I've always considered that John Hurt scene to be a sort of rupturing of movie audience's hymen of innocence, not to mention the psycho-sexual subtext inherent to the original H.R. Giger artwork upon which it was based.  

Thirty-eight years ago, mewling in gore spattered horror, a legend was borne in celluloid. Damn straight the entire thing's been feeding on itself ever since. By now I think it's pretty safe to say this seventh installment in the series is the inevitable manifestation of the virus itself unleashed on our mass consciousness in the shadowy infectious darkness of a movie theater.  I mean, who  really wants to see yet another Ripley heroine-clone calling the monster out as another "son of  a bitch" or engaged in a high profile post-industrial celebrity hardware death match?  The answer to that question is in the crowd who've come to join us, generations of which haven't experienced the original scenes which incepted those memes.  Whether you hated ALIEN: COVENANT   or  squeed with glee over it, the point remains, I'm just going to tell you what I thought and continue to think about it:   It's a notch down from PROMETHEUS, to begin with.  Spoilers to follow.

Don't Let This Be The One You See!

ALIEN: COVENANT was a real mixed bag, for me.  In that sense alone--it failed me, last night. I wasn't so disappointed with it that I wouldn't want to see it again; I'm just afraid a second viewing won't cut it. A significant Director's Cut might provoke enough interest in me to give that a shot. You should know I actually liked Prometheus enough to watch it a second time in the theater, and enjoyed it even more upon a second viewing. But even if something roughly equivalent to that occurs in a re-viewing of Covenant--it will bring it from a 6.5 or so to maybe a 7--still more than a couple of points below Prometheus itself (which earned a 9 from where I sit). 

What I liked about the first of these prequels was that it stuck to its own setting and characters. But in this sequel, we're given generous portions of rehashed scenes re-heaped on us, determined to either generate an appreciative chuckle from us older fans in the audience, or try to impress a new generation with the same old trick, it's hard to tell and why would we bother, when both options are less than desirable?

Yet interstrewn throughout these recurring tropes you couldn't beat anymore with a dead xenomorph, and after hearing from the director in recent interviews that he was trying to get away from the xenomorph in these prequels, we still end up getting a fully matured alien with a startling resemblance to the old xenomorph, in this film. As if we didn't already know from the incessant trailer campaign which revealed the majority of the movie's scope. So you see, that's why points must be subtracted from this film. This isn't a singular "movie" we're discussing here, this is the intractable adornment and highlight of an advertising campaign the likes of which whose scope itself would stagger our ability to fully digest, I'm afraid, even as it's already more than midway through the process of digesting us. It's a grossly distorted magnified product filtered through the lens of mass perception and focused by the brutal feedback of our base desires reflected back at us after a vicious cycle, and not just the solitary tailored result of a small team of devoted writers overseen by just one manager, anymore.  Much like part of its premise, this is something that has come to have been granted a life of its own.

I found it to be inferior to its predecessor, and that's saying something considering Prometheus had its share of hard-to-accept moments, involving a crew of humans who make stupid decisions, of course. The problem isn't that a viewer may choose which side of the argument to align himself with--to justify these scenes or condemn them--but simply that the viewer isn't being given enough credit to have wanted to dare watching something completely distinct and different than that which came before. That's the problem with commercialization, it just keeps feeding us "the hits." And it gets old.

But we're talking here  about  the very subject of mass marketability itself--aren't we? Isn't that what the society of post-industrialization ultimately leads to?  These movies?   Yes, you're looking in the scanner darkly, and what you're seeing is a distantly echoed reflection of ourselves.  

That's what these movies--like all movies, be they zombie films or not--really are.  Insanely distorted reflections  of our own wild selves.   Whereas I enjoyed certain aspects of ALIEN: COVENANT, others I found annoying and on more than a few occasions, drawn out scenes that bored me. At least throughout Prometheus I remained engaged until the end.  But with the telescoped action-we've-seen-before scenes not even trying to hide their predictability now, I think you can at least see how this is a big "no-no" with me.  I just wanted to get the negatives out of the way up front, now on to the good stuff.   

 

(This one's serious but which way will you take it)

There were a good amount of killer scenes in ALIEN: COVENANT. It's the sort of movie to be filed under "mandatory viewing," not based on its own merit of course, but for those of the franchise itself. While I'm using that worn out term, because it's not one I like to implement with one of my favorite series of movies ever, I have to face the reality now that this movie, promulgated by Ridley Scott himself into the same world he merely directed the 1979 movie ALIEN in, should by all means boast the very soul, that is the apotheosis of 'franchises', incarnated as a living viral meme machine which feeding on itself as we watch mesmerized in the dark only to have our attentions gripped into the meshing gears of its film reel teeth--oh it's eating us alright, even as we sit back in our deep cushion seats and relax with warm popcorn in our laps--consuming every drop and bite along the way. The picture perfect definition of 'movie franchise' would be the ALIEN series, and for damn good reason as you're easily beginning to see. 

Personally, I can see myself how some of my friends are calling this a masterpiece of escapist movie action while other friends are saying it's a piece of shit--I get it.  It's certainly a disappointment for me, as I've said, down a couple of notches and a half from its predecessor, but all in all with enough cinematic pleasures to at least having provided me with some good, interesting scenes.  Michael Fassbender steals the show, of course. His subsuming of the villainous role is quite wonderful. I think Danny McBride added the right sort of character to the movie as his analogs before him. And the monster scenes were mostly pulled off with wicked style. The reiteration of creationism getting caught up in its own echoing feedback is an interesting premise, which I'm sure will be milked aplenty in the two films to follow, assuming Scott doesn't drop the bar altogether in the next installment and derail the entire streamlined train.

Let's not forget how monumentally influential the first two ALIEN movies really are. James Cameron went on to continue influencing this recurring motif in cinema, from having echoed the Nostromo's crew with The Abyss, and thus setting off the same riff repeatedly seen in endless variations, from The Matrix through Pitch Black and beyond. Of course the classic space ship crew can probably be traced back to Star Trek. But we're dealing with a more nihilistic display of science fantasy, here.  

Coming back to Covenant, this movie poses a viewscreen riddled with holes.  What happened to James Franco's role? One gets the feeling that between the variant options by which to seed the advertising for this film--what with the featurettes like "The Last Supper" scene streaming online--and all the various competing shades of greed interfering with the mind of our host, it forces me to wonder if maybe Franco pissed Scott off in post production or some such minor debacle ensued which led to certain scenes getting scrapped completely--or maybe they'll pop up in the Director's Cut! As I've already admitted, I'm most willing to subject myself to it--perhaps that's where the movie can reach its stride and expand into something a little more epic. 

I'm onboard with Ridley's themes, that of creationism and artificial intelligence, and I'm prepared to take them in the darker context of a nihilistic view of the cosmiverse--because after all, I signed up for what's apparently being groomed as "science fictional horror," and that's fine with me, as it's one of my favorite genres. But, see what I did there?

Because that's really what these movies are all about now: subjecting ourselves to the mass altar of sacrificial art. All for the sake of our love for movies like ALIEN and even the sequels and imitations they spawn. I believe that in thinking he could undermine (rather than continue) the four movies which splintered off his own original, some of that is backfiring for Scott now in the form of original quality being subverted as the snake in Eden begins to eat its own tail.

 Which brings me to the end of my review, where I want to say that although Covenant is riddled with problematic aspects by which to render it the worst of the seven movies thus far--sure, I still liked it enough to be glad I took the time to see it for myself.  What you want to do with your own two hours and two minutes in a darkened movie theater being hypnotized by a shifting beam of light is entirely up to you.  Considering everything in the production, I'll give it seven (out of ten) stars.

This one says it all, don't it?

INTERSTELLAR

With the conception and execution of INTERSTELLAR, Christopher Nolan has a triumph on his hands, thanks in part to Kip Thorne and everyone else involved with hashing out the script.  In my view, movies are a great example in art of the importance of what is left unstated. INTERSTELLAR appears to be the most definitive statement that I've seen in a long time up on the silver screen about the nature of our spacetime continuum.  

If nothing else, the movie is certainly an exciting and completely thoughtful human drama about relativity, family, gravity, and our destiny in time among the stars. (I want to thank Christopher Nolan for making it unnecessary for me to take DMT now--because I think I just experienced it vicariously.)

To be real--this movie kept me thinking the entire time I was leaving the theater, piecing it all together in my mind. 

**Spoilers to follow**  

I think the character Matt Damon played was a terrific Judas figure, and the actor pulled his role off beautifully. I love how the movie played out its contradictions. The dichotomy between Cooper struggling to champion the quest into outer space in order to help save the human race against the alternative 'Plan B' directive was really handled well throughout the movie. The main question I had when the credits rolled was what exactly the Morse code message happened to be--was it to burn down the corn field and then establish a human emigration to colonize in orbit around Saturn so the remaining human population on Earth could eventually follow through the wormhole to colonize the third planet in the new system discovered there? I suppose so.

I gathered that 'They' who placed the wormhole there as an "escape route" was in fact not an alien race but humanity itself in the future. (Reminiscent of the so-called "aliens" at the end of Spielberg's gloriously problematic AI adaptation: those were not extraterrestrials at all, but rather our own evolved AI.) 

With INTERSTELLAR, I was left with the impression that the female astronaut Brand got stranded on the third planet initially, but due to Cooper's transcendent success in communicating with his daughter in the form of a living ghost, Brand's situation was transformed into being the first human colonizer; an Eve figure, if you will.  So when Cooper snuck into that spacecraft and escaped Saturn's orbit to join her, he was just leaping ahead and cutting to the chase to be with her, thus becoming the Adam prototype. 

So how did Cooper, with the help of his mobile computer unit, manage to wiggle the second hand on his daughter's wristwatch, then?  Something to do with string theory, I suppose. Well I loved  how within the striation of the wicker woven singularity under the skin of the black hole's peripheral gravitational edge, Cooper could find all things in existence, arranged around him in a cage of criss-crossing perspectives, like bandwidths, that he could zoom in on and manipulate slightly as if strumming harp strings.  

I remember wondering, at the beginning of the movie, what the intended significance of the rows upon rows of bookshelves must be.  (The first author I spotted, incidentally, was Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)  I also liked how the daughter's wristwatch was placed on the bookshelf in front of Stephen King's The Stand, and can't help but speculate if it's a sly tip that Nolan may be involved in the forthcoming four-part movie adaptation.  

The surprise supporting cast (including Burstyn, Damon, and Lithgow in a brief though convincing role as Cooper's father) worked well with the ensemble.  All in all, INTERSTELLAR delivered far beyond my own expectations in that it seems to also double as a readily comprehensible model of relativity for the layman's edification.  Being a layman myself, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, and am very pleased I saw it in the theater. There were plenty of truly glorious panoptic screen shots and stunning visuals that in my mind, all fit rather accurately into our current scientific observations.  A welcome departure from both the DC comic book universe of Batman as well as the more esoteric dream realm of Inception (though I enjoyed all four of those movies, as well).  

In short, I consider INTERSTELLAR to be Nolan's highest film achievement thus far. I'm looking forward to his handling of the forthcoming adaptation of the real life Dunkirk evacuation during WWII. I'm getting the sense that the depiction of realism will become this director's forte.