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cripplinganxietyflix · 7 years

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I saw Alien: Covenant.

I’m starting to notice a trend in a few of my reviews where I tend to clarify something about myself or my expectations in relation to the film I’m talking about. I guess I do this in an effort to illuminate certain things about why I like something or why I hate it in a way that maybe otherwise wouldn’t be evident from my words.

So let me start off by saying I’m a pretty devoted fan of the Alien franchise. I have Xenomorphs all over my office, I’ve owned several HR Giger yearly calendars and artbooks. My husband and I will likely name our firstborn in honor of Ellen Ripley.

And as of quite recently, I’ve never seen an Alien film I didn’t, at the very least, enjoy watching. I would prioritize the original Alien as the best film (as I assume most do). Aliens and Prometheus come in second place- in that I enjoy Aliens and think it’s a fine film, and that I greatly enjoy Prometheus as something I accept I have to turn off all critical thinking facilities in order to fully appreciate. I rank Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection on the same level; as films that I didn’t hate and can actually watch to gain some minor degree of pleasure, but also acknowledge their glaring flaws. I’ll even go so far as to say that I liked what David Fincher was trying to do with Alien 3. It had the guts to try something totally new like Aliens did, and had the balls to give the audience a giant, veiny middle finger right in the first few minutes. Admittedly, I haven’t seen Alien vs Predator or Alien vs Predator: Requiem since seeing Alien and Predator maul, disfigure and murder each other would feel like watching a full length film of dogs being kicked- and yes, I realize this is an issue that is likely unique to me. I truly haven’t seen an Alien feature that I didn’t like.

Until now.

What the fuck, Alien: Covenant? What the fuck, Ridley Scott? What the fuck was going on here?

I’m gonna start talking about the plot, so prepare your anus for spoilers. If you’re doubting the fortitude of your sphincter, skip past the next image. The basic premise of this film is that there’s a ship with couple dozen people as crew schlepping 2000 colonists out into deep space to start terra-forming a new planet. The crew consists of a lot of sexual partners and I assume that they are planning to help populate, but I can’t recall if that was addressed at all. Maybe in the future, spaceship crews are allowed to bring out the wife. Whatever. Anyway, an android named Not-David Michael Fassbender accidentally fucks the ship up and wipes out a little chunk of the crew. This fuck-up results in Captain James Franco getting incinerated in front of his wife inside a stasis capsule, before he ever has a chance to deliver a line.

In fact, had I not watched the promotional material beforehand (which features a scene that I assume precedes the one I’m talking about and also clarifies it better than the movie gave a shit to attempt), I don’t think I would have even known the schmuck getting torched by explosive oxygen in the capsule was James Franco. Nice.

This leaves the ship with a new captain, Passive Billy Crudup, who they mention a few times is a Christian, just like Dr. Shaw in Prometheus. The inclusion of his religion is even more stupid and pointless in this new iteration. He is also fairly incapable, which makes me wonder who put this booger-eater as second in line. This whole fuck up by Not-David Michael Fassbender is just a plot vehicle to get Danny fucking McBride outside the ship on a repair mission, where he receives a mysterious distorted transmission of a woman singing a John Denver song. The source of the transmission is traced back to a planet which happens not to be the planet that the crew is headed to to terraform.

Obviously, the crew decides to divert to the planet from which the signal came from instead of the planet that they are supposed to travel to, because why the hell not?

Like the idiots in Prometheus, the idiots in Alien: Covenant decide not to wear oxygen-fed helmets or PPE because who ever heard of aspirating deadly microbes and bacteria? However, this time, that’s addressed, and predictably two of the crew members manage to get infected by the flora on this planet within 5-10 minutes of setting foot on land. They become sickened and spew white baby Xenomorphs (not chestbusters, for whatever reason). Then the crew is dispatched unceremoniously as a pack of CGI Xenomorphs whip the shit outta them in ways that will be too fast to actually see. But aren’t you happy with 0.9 seconds of digital blood?

The remaining survivors are rescued just in time by a cloaked Actual David, who leads them back to his lair. Let me just say that Actual David confirms to one of the crew members that this lair is safe a few short minutes before a deformed Xenomorph casually enters and decapitates someone. Actual David pretends to be a bro, then makes it very clear he is NOT in fact a bro, and he carries on fucking up everyone’s shit until the end of the film, in a final twist that most viewers will see coming about 20 minutes in advance.

This installment of the series is a colossal pile of shit, and it really pains me as an Alien fan to lay it out like this.

The first issue I became painfully aware of is that there is no main character. Is the plucky captain’s widow the protagonist? Is it Danny McBride? Is it Actual David? Not only is there no attempt to establish a protagonist, there is little effort in place to ensure that you know the names of any of these people. How the fuck am I supposed to be horrified, disgusted and invested when these people are dismembered if I don’t even have a name to pair them with? I actually had to check the IMDb page to recall that Plucky Captain’s Widow’s name is Daniels. Nobody matters and I didn’t give a shit about anyone. I barely gave one for Danny McBride, who seems like a likable crew member but makes some really piss-poor risk/benefit analyses.

Because of the way Actual David’s underlying prerogatives were portrayed, I wish they hadn’t included him or anything from Prometheus. It’s become readily apparent that the only reason why this film ties into Prometheus or includes Actual David is because they couldn’t think up a fucking decent plot device to get these new people killed by an alien threat. Actual David’s story made me feel like I was watching an excruciatingly dull Star Trek: TNG three-parter where Data has some banal interaction with Noonien Soong because half the cast was on vacation that week. It felt cheap and like the screenwriters really had to push themselves over a massive hump to even write this trash. Instead of being a flawed and curious creation of sociopathic humans, Actual David becomes just another bad guy. There’s a really dumb scene where he’s trying to become friends with a Not Xenomorph that is given almost no explanation into. Did he kill all the engineers on the planet because he was mad at them for making the humans, and now he wants to be an engineer by creating inbred Xenomorphs? If they explained this, I wasn’t paying attention because I was bored to tears every time Actual David was explaining things to other characters.

After producing something like Prometheus, which I would argue has some of the best modern visual effects for its time, I can’t imagine how anyone thought Alien: Covenant was an acceptable final product. The Xenomorphs/creatures looked incredibly fake and were shown far too often. The digital blood and gore effects were wholly unsatisfying: not particularly graphic and shown only very briefly- maybe because they realized too late that CGI gore is completely unimpactful? People were screaming in disgust during the cesarean scene in Prometheus. I don’t think I heard a solitary gasp at any of the featured gore effects. I’ve read other reviews claiming “the gorehound will be sated” but I can’t imagine that unless the gorehound’s a 12-year-old with limited experience. The suits are ugly, the ship is unremarkable, and the CGI looked cheap and slapped together into the film by people who seemed to be generally unfamiliar with the franchise. I mean for fuck’s sake, if you’re going to give me a CG Xenomorph it better knock my pants off with a firm stream of shit.

I came out of this one feeling like I’d seen some cheaply-made bullshit teen-demo weekend matinee flick from the mid-2000s, like a Final Destination or an Anacondas: Hunt for the Blood Orchid. You know what I mean, the type of movie you go see and completely forget about after a week. This film wasn’t scary, it never gave me cause to feel invested. It was utterly inconsequential, whereas Prometheus felt like it was trying to build something new, fresh and mythical. In fact, my anxiety spiked as I was leaving the theater because I remembered that Ridley Scott took a fairly active role in the production of Blade Runner 2049. That fucking movie is going to have sexy, smoldering Ryan Gosling starring and extremely competent and capable Denis Villeneuve directing and this fucking orphanage fire of a movie has me WORRIED about it. If that doesn’t discourage you from watching Alien: Covenant, I don’t know what will. I can’t even recommend it as So Bad it’s Good because it is so monumentally boring. I could write a book of all the things I would have done entirely differently. Don’t pay any more than Wednesday matinee prices for this foul, backstabbing tripe. If you told me I’d be scoring this movie an entire half a star lower than the Ghost in the Shell movie I would have shat right in your mouth. You know what? This is what we get for electing Donald Trump.

★ ½

#alien #ridley scott #xenomorph #alien:covenant #film #review #movies

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ubourgeois · 7 years

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Best Films of 2016

It’s finally done, whew

30. Moana (Ron Clements & John Musker) - The best so far of this generation of Disney musicals, benefits a lot from its stripped-down narrative. Great songs.

29. Fences (Denzel Washington) - Far too literal of a stage adaptation, but the source material is strong enough to translate, and the ensemble's as good as any other this year.

28. Mountains May Depart (Jia Zhangke) - Third act flies way off the rails, but it's forgivable in a movie that made so many other ballsy structural decisions. First two acts are top notch, too.

27. Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick) - Slides even further down the Malick-hole, for better or worse. This means a sharp drop in narrative clarity but a rise in visual splendor. Worth it.

26. The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos) - Yorgos Lanthimos continues to justify his artistic career by making movies that only he would ever make. Style translates surprisingly well in English.

25. Sing Street (John Carney) - Super cute little film. The original songs are both believably corny and actually fun. Makes a lot out of a fairly thin and tired premise.

24. Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater) - Not quite the successor to Dazed and Confused it was supposed to be, but it's remarkable that Linklater crafted something so sensitive and pure out of what is basically a bro party movie.

23. Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho) - A kind of bloated but never boring political allegory. Lives and dies (but mostly lives) by Sonia Braga's incredible performance.

22. Elle (Paul Verhoeven) - Like the above, rests squarely on Isabelle Huppert's superhumanly capable shoulders. Verhoeven approaches his previous heights of provocation, as well.

21. Loving (Jeff Nichols) - A sweeter, more uplifting story than I thought Nichols had in him. Both very emotional and restrained, giving its subject the dignity it deserves.

20. Hail, Caesar! (Joel Coen & Ethan Coen) - The funniest Coen film in a while, with a lot of inspired sequences. What it lacks in focus it more than makes up for in razzle-dazzle.

19. Your Name (Makoto Shinkai) - I still doubt that Makoto Shinkai deserves the "Next Miyazaki" title people love to give him, but this is at least some compelling evidence to that claim. The best movie I've seen with the Freaky Friday setup.

18. The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer) - A bizarre and transfixing little movie with a great sense of kinetics. Makes me really eager to know if Royalty Hightower continues acting - she's film-justifying here.

17. Love & Friendship (Whit Stillman) - Do you want to like Jane Austen films, but wish they were less stodgy and faithful and more fun and loose? This is your movie.

16. The Wailing (Na Hong-jin) - Best horror movie of the year. Thoroughly lulls you into a false sense of security before delivering one of the most harrowing finales in years.

15. Midnight Special (Jeff Nichols) - Preempted Stranger Things' 80s scifi nostalgia and superpowered god-children, but wrapped them in a very different, more down-to-earth skin.

14. La La Land (Damien Chazelle) - Yeah, overrated, but there weren't many movies more fun or with a more charming leading pair this year. Knows what it wants to do and does the shit out of it.

13. Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) - It turns out if you wanna make a scene of a person sleeping interesting, you just need to add ambient noise and soothing colors. The rest of the movie's good too, but that sequence is a career highlight for Weerasethakul.

12. Aferim! (Radu Jude) - Remember when Quentin Tarantino tried to make a funny transplanted Western about the horrors of slavery and the absurdity of racism? This movie is what he failed to make, but in Romania.

11. Sunset Song (Terence Davies) - I struggle to connect with Davies films more often than not, but this is the single most visually stunning and inventive film of the year. Melodrama always works best when it looks dazzling.

10. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade) - Even after seeing it, it's hard to describe what's so compelling about Toni Erdmann, or how it pulls of its bizarre premise as well as it does, but there's almost nothing this year that can compare to its final climactic scenes. Truly eludes description.

09. Paterson (Jim Jarmusch) - Gentle and meandering even by Jarmusch's standards, but makes even its remarkably low-stakes drama compelling. A neat little film on the value of routine and the beauty of the everyday - a cliche that Paterson is so committed to that it brings new life to the idea.

08. The Red Turtle (Michaël Dudok de Wit) - The most beautifully animated film I've seen in a couple years, despite its very basic characters and setting. If its plot is a little bare-bones, that's just so there's nothing to distract us from the amazing colors and movement on screen.

07. Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra) - Powerful as anticolonial commentary, as psychedelic cinema, as pseudo-ethnography, as coming-of-age story, as Amazonian landscape showcase... There really is a lot to unpack here.

06. Arrival (Denis Villeneuve) - Has a specificity of concept (linguist tries to understand cryptic aliens) that much of the best science fiction has, and incorporates that concept in genuinely creative and illuminating ways. Some may find the "answer" of the film cheesy or contrived, but it works hard enough that it deserves its leap of faith.

05. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins) - What is there left to be said? It's great, all the performers are wonderful, the cinematography is unique and inventive, it has important subject matter, etc etc etc. It lives up to the hype. Let the critics have their darling.

04. Silence (Martin Scorsese) - A film that contends with the struggles of faith with a great deal of honesty and wisdom. Doesn't offer easy, or even strictly coherent answers where they don't exist. Cements Scorsese as the spiritual filmmaker he's always been. Also, Issey Ogata is great.

03. Manchester By the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan) - An uncompromising film about grief, and how sometimes there's no recovering from it, that manages to have a sense of humor all the same - and not in the cheap way, either. The movie ends with, broadly, an admission that closure may not be possible, but specifically with a glib, self-deprecating joke. That kind of works as the whole film in microcosm.

02. The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook) - There was not a single more wild film you could have seen in the theaters in the past year. Yes, it's hideously over the top, unrepentantly pulpy, and occasionally even a bit in poor taste, but that's the kind of game Park plays at his best - and he hasn't been in form this good since Oldboy.

01. Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt) - A really lovely collection of three short story adaptations about, well, some women. It's incredibly compassionate towards its characters and makes the best use of its beautiful Montana setting. It's difficult to describe its strengths in short - the three sections are all rather different - but suffice it to say that it does remarkably well with adapting the feel of a good short story and that no other film was as successfully itself in 2016.

#film #best of 2016 #best films of 2016

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