ALIEN: COVENANT - King David

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Director: Ridley Scott
Writers: John Logan, Dante Harper, Jack Paglen, Michael Green
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride
Runtime: 122 mins.
2017

Can one consider Alien: Covenant in a vacuum? Half of the movie is a dogged continuation of the slapdash philosophical noodling that Ridley Scott brought to the franchise with Prometheus, and the other half is a herky-jerky course correction towards a more classic Alien styling. This is indicated first and foremost by the title, which hearkens desperately back to the original run of films. It is also indicated by Scott himself, this quote about the backlash to Prometheus coming to mind:

. . . we discovered from it that [the fans] were really frustrated. They want to see more of the original [monster] and I thought he was definitely cooked, with an orange in his mouth. So I thought: Wow, OK, I'm wrong. The fans, in a funny kind of way--they're not the final word--but they are the reflection of your doubts about something, and then you realize 'I was wrong' or 'I was right.' I think that's where it comes in. I think you're not sensible if you don't actually take [the fans' reaction] into account.

It is strange to see Scott make such a boneheaded remark. Not only is it a shocking misunderstanding of his own work, but it's a misrepresentation of audiences' very valid complaints about Prometheus, of which lack of Xenomorph tended to be low on the list. I can only really grok this comment by assuming that Scott was being defensive and a bit petty about unfavorable responses to a passion project.

That pettiness worms its way into the DNA of Covenant, which trots out Xenomorphs with dutiful regularity. The now entirely CGI Xenomorphs (or Neomorphs, I think this iteration is called) are gratuitous. It's not that they don't fit the plot per se. It's that these Aliens swagger through the film like slasher villains. In fact, the Alien-heavy half of the movie behaves very much like a schlocky slasher, right down to the utterly disposable characters who make baffling choices and ultimately get dispatched whilst having sex in the shower.

PROMETHEUS: Dumpster Fire from the Gods

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Director: Ridley Scott
Writers: Jon Spaihts, Damon Lindelof
Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Logan Marshall-Green, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Guy Pearce, Sean Harris, Rafe Spall, Emul Elliott, Benedict Wong, Kate Dickie
Runtime: 124 mins.
2012

Unless you're specifically writing a comparative piece, a critic must strive to engage with a film as a standalone artifact. Drawing parallels and making value judgments based on other films is a slippery slope. It can lead one to commit the cardinal sin of criticism--not approaching the art on its own terms. It is with that in mind that I have been frustrated by my tendency to see the Alien sequels through the prism of their progenitor, Scott's 1979 masterpiece Alien.

On the other hand, it may be that such purity of critical lens is unattainable. What else is a franchise but a demand that you consider a certain work in conjunction with others? There are countless ways to sequelize a property, but one thing they all have in common is a link, however obvious or obscure, to the original.* Although one wants to respect the agency of a sequel, its ability to tell a coherent story is often predicated on some narrative or thematic information that cannot be found in the domain of its own runtime.

*With the rare and deranged exception of something like Troll 2, a "sequel" that has no discernible connection to Troll, including a complete absence of trolls.

What emerges is a difficult balancing act of acknowledging the expectations that come with being a part of a larger franchise without being bewitched by them. Then there is the additional can of worms of whether a sequel retroactively changes the meaning of an original. (It certainly does in our cultural consciousness, though perhaps it need not for certain critical endeavors.)

Believe it or not, all this discourse is germane to discussion of Prometheus, Ridley Scott's return to the franchise he birthed thirty-three years previous. One of the more interesting aspects of this return is the tortured relationship it has to its own standing within that franchise. On the one hand, it's clear that Scott wanted to distance Prometheus from Alien as much as possible. Where Alien was a lean thriller, Prometheus aspires to be a grand epic exploration of the Big Questions of life--with a heavy garnish of horror imagery. On the other hand, some of the most desperate-to-please moments of Prometheus involve feverish Alien references and mystique-destroying prequelicious explanations. The film even has the gall to end on a bit of fan service utterly transparent in its desire for the audience to feel a base swell of nostalgia.

ALIEN: RESURRECTION - Metastasis

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Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Writers: Joss Whedon
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Dominique Pinon, Ron Perlman, Gary Dourdan, Michael Wincott, Kim Flowers, Dan Hedaya, J.E. Freeman, Brad Dourif, Raymond Cruz, Leland Orser
Runtime: 116 mins. (theatrical cut 109 mins.)
1997

I am here reviewing the extended edition, which this time around is a bit worse than the theatrical cut. Not enough is added to make a significant difference: two jokes that I absolutely hate and a cool but pointless altered ending, in which Ripley and Call crash land outside of a ruined Paris.

It has taken me until the final movie in the original quadrilogy to realize the Alien series' fundamental guiding principle: Each film must be a direct and biting refutation to the film that came before it. Let's recapitulate.

James Cameron's Aliens took the simple, elegant narrative of Alien and blew it up to epic proportions. We are made to believe (and convincingly so) that the unstoppable antagonist from the previous film could be defeated en masse by the love that Ellen Ripley feels for her companions.

David Fincher's ALIEN CUBED took that love and crumpled it into a dirty little wad before incinerating it and stomping on the ashes. Then it paraded around town with those ashes just to make sure everyone understood how pathetic they were. Having no time for Cameron's sentimentalism, Fincher dumps his audience into a broken world where everyone and everything you love are dead, and there is no longer the slightest reason to remain alive. Killing Hicks and Newt offscreen remains a colossal refutation to Cameron's happy ending (one that a lot of people hated and Cameron himself called a slap in the face), but the film only doubles down from there by corrupting Ripley's body and forcing her to choose death over misery.

Now we are come to Alien: Resurrection, a movie that finds its own bizarre way to exist as the antithesis to ALIEN CUBED. For A:R not only half-assedly undoes the grandiosity of Ripley's sacrificial gesture that culminated the themes of ALIEN CUBED and, in some ways, the entire franchise; it does so flippantly. Had I been tasked with designing the antithesis to Fincher's film I certainly wouldn't have come up with this, but I can't offhand think of any inversion that would be more emblematically discordant.

ALIEN³: Hell Hath No Fury

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Director: David Fincher
Writers: Vincent Ward, David Giler, Walter Hill, Larry Ferguson
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Charles Dance, Charles S. Dutton, Paul McGann, Brian Glover, Ralph Brown, Lance Henrisken
Runtime: 145 mins. (114 mins. theatrical)
1992

Rather than the theatrical cut of Alien³, I watched (and will be reviewing) the "assembly cut" first released in 2003. For most films, the only difference between the theatrical and extended cut is that the latter is a bit shaggier, but for Alien³ it makes all the difference. After an endless mire of pre-production, dozens of abandoned scripts, and millions of wasted dollars, Alien³ was always going to be a hot mess. It's just that the theatrical cut, cobbled together after David Fincher stormed off the project, is hotter and messier than it needs to be. All manner of connective tissue is stricken from the theatrical version, including a stellar opening sequence that sets the mood and establishes the world. The assembly cut, even with the added bulk of thirty-odd extra minutes, flows smoother than the original. Their final scores would be notably disparate.

Were I to go into the details of Alien³'s notoriously hapless production cycle, this review would turn into quite an extensive history lesson. Suffice it to say that unlike Aliens, in which Fox delayed production so that James Cameron could make The Terminator, Alien³ is a case study in bureaucratic obstruction. Creatives were fired, factions were split, actors were artistically manhandled*--all manner of horsey nonsense.

*As Ralph Brown tells it, his character Aaron was originally supposed to be savvy and resourceful, but his intelligence got nerfed in the rewrites. When he complained about playing a dummy, the writers gave his character the disparaging nickname "85," after Aaron's officially reported IQ.

So it is quite an achievement, and a great testament to the talents of then-undiscovered visionary David Fincher, that Alien³ (the assembly cut, mind you) is compelling and worthwhile in a number of ways. This is as good a time as any to admit something dastardly. Although by any and every objective standard Cameron's Aliens is the superior sequel, I prefer what Fincher is up to in Alien³. Specifically, I'm a fan of Alien³'s most controversial and besmirched decision: the immediate, ruthless, offscreen deaths of Aliens heroes Hicks and Newt. The chipper happy ending of Aliens, though perfectly earned, has always struck me as dissonant with the heartless fatalism of Alien. The extermination of Aliens's happy ending is an inspired statement of intent, both setting the tone for Alien³ and kicking off Ripley's darkest arc.

ALIENS: One Bad Mother

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Director: James Cameron
Writers: James Cameron, David Giler, Walter Hill
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Carrie Henn, Michael Biehn, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, William Hope, Jenette Goldstein, Al Matthews
153 mins. (137 mins. theatrical)
1986

This is a review for the director's cut of Aliens which adds about sixteen minutes of footage. Although the pacing is bogged down by unnecessary pre-alien footage of the functional colony, the cut includes some worthwhile backstory about Ripley's daughter and a really excellent sequence involving remote turrets, so in terms of quality it's basically a wash.

As far as I'm concerned, the decades-old Alien vs. Aliens debate is clear-cut. When dozens of aliens can become cannon fodder, albeit terrifying cannon fodder, the mystique of the original is lost. Indeed, it is immediately apparent that Aliens is playing a different, and in my opinion inferior, game altogether when Ripley has a jump scare dream sequence involving a chestburster. Alien would have featured nothing so gauche as that.

Yet the more I think about it, the more I realize that it was genius of Cameron to shape the sequel this way. By shifting the genre and hyping up the tone, Aliens hews closer to his particular directorial strengths. This was the right choice; there would have been no way to improve upon the mastery of Alien had Cameron tried to replicate Scott's opus.

ALIEN: The Perfect Organism

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Director: Ridley Scott
Writers: Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto
Runtime: 117 mins.
1979

As the quote from Alien screenwriter Dan O'Bannon goes, "I didn't steal Alien from anybody. I stole it from everybody!" There is some certain truth to that, insofar as the blistering originality of Alien comes from being at the nexus of a myriad of influences while not being beholden to any single one.

O'Bannon got the germ of his idea after working with John Carpenter on Dark Star. The texture of the story snapped into place while working with several artists on the infamously scrapped Jodorowski's Dune. One of those artists was H. R. Giger, whose psychosexual monstrosities left their mark on O'Bannon long before Giger was himself signed on to design the alien. The script went through incremental development, gaining the alien's reproductive cycle from co-writer Ronald Shusett, and reluctantly picking up the android subplot from studio writers David Giler and Walter Hill. The title of the script was blessedly changed from Star Beast to Alien. Ultimately, the crux of the film fell into place when a wet behind the ears Ridley Scott signed on to direct.

Alien is arguably Scott's crowning achievement. There is a strict purity to its elements, from O'Bannon and co.'s script, to Giger's ruthless creature design, to Derek Vanlint's creeping cinematography, and so on. Yet a director's job is to tie elements together into a greater whole, and Scott does exactly that. Alien is a bereft sexual nightmare full of foreboding, menace, and isolation.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2: Leggo My Ego

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Director: James Gunn
Writer: James Gunn
Cast: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Michael Rooker, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Kurt Russell, Elizabeth Debicki, Sylvester Stallone, Sean Gunn, Chris Sullivan
Runtime: 136 mins.
2017

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 has lower highs and higher lows than its predecessor. It fixes some of the more obvious problems of Guardians, like painful expository dialogue, a few ugly underlit sequences, and a plot shamelessly centered around feverish MacGuffin-chasing. Vol. 2 is more visually arresting all around, and its villain is tied intimately to our protagonist. On the other hand, Vol. 2 struggles with the law of diminishing returns. It is impossible to replicate the joy of discovering all these bizarre and instantly endearing characters, so writer/director Gunn is tasked with keeping said characters fresh and interesting. Much like Age of Ultron, which similarly has a lot of interesting stuff going on but feels overstuffed and undercooked, Vol. 2 cannot quite capture the woozy highs of the first film.

There is one exception to this. I'm referring to the opening sequence with Baby Groot dancing to ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky" while the obligatory opening action sequence happens out of focus in the background. This is Gunnian subversion at its finest, trading off an indulgent CGI-fest for an expression of pure joy. The sequence is well-staged in one long, fluid cut that follows Baby Groot through adorable piecemeal interactions with each of the main characters. The film never recaptures the elation of its opening minutes, but the prevalent sense of fun is what makes Vol. 2 far more watchable than much of its ilk.

POWER RANGERS: The Morph the Merrier

Director: Dean Israelite
Writers: John Gatins, Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, Michele Mulroney, Kieran Mulroney
Cast: Dacre Montgomery, Naomi Scott, RJ Cyler, Ludi Lin, Becky G., Elizabeth Banks, Bryan Cranston, Bill Hader
Runtime: 124 mins.
2017

One of the first lines of Power Rangers is a joke about masturbating a cow. Power Rangers features three characters who are or have been dead, but never bother to dwell on the ramifications of that fact. The only straight white male on the Power Rangers team is the de facto leader, and he is told outright that his opinion matters more than the others'. In Power Rangers, wise mentor Zordon is an enormous cock, berating the Rangers constantly, acting needlessly petty, and manipulating them towards his own ends. Power Rangers ends the way Toy Story 3 would have ended if the toys actually did fall into the fire pit, and instead of getting burnt up, they inexplicably become one powerful Megatoy that kicks the purple bear's ass.

Power Rangers' version of Rita Repulsa is both sexy and grody, and she drips everywhere she goes. Power Rangers' version of Rita Repulsa goes a lot of places, yet she only seems to saunter casually whenever we see her on the move. Power Rangers' version of Rita Repulsa also straight up murders a bunch of people and eats their gold.

In Power Rangers, a building may explode despite being a jewelry store with no flammables inside. Power Rangers features an autistic character who figures out the location of an important MacGuffin using only maps and the power of his autism. The Power Rangers crew slaps a character so hard she flies into space. The CGI in Power Rangers is so vomitously designed that one can tell that the red ranger's Zord is a T-Rex, but the rest are pretty much a grab bag of prehistoric-seeming Transformers knockoffs. There are about ten scenes in Power Rangers in which the corporate franchise Krispy Kreme is either mentioned or attended.

KONG: SKULL ISLAND - Run Through the Jungle

Director: Jordan Vogt-Roberts
Writers: Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein, Derek Connolly, John Gatins
Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Brie Larson, John C. Reilly, John Goodman, Corey Hawkins, John Ortiz, Tian Jing, Toby Kebbell
Runtime: 118 mins.
2017

Twelve years ago Peter Jackson's King Kong was released. Hot off the monumental success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jackson tackled another passion project. The result was an overbloated labor of love, its failures symptomatic of Jackson's indulgent impulses, its successes clearly issuing from passion and immense skill. Its legacy endures thanks to the lavish attention Jackson paid to Skull Island. The film was swimming in Jackson's signature talent for all-encompassing dread. That mystique is embodied in Kong himself, as motion captured by the great Andy Serkis. Jackson/Serkis's Kong is a high mark for CGI creations. He is the soul of the film, a brute that exudes empathy, and one of a long line of Serkis motion capture triumphs.

PJ's King Kong exhibited all the strengths and pitfalls of the auteur-driven style of Hollywood filmmaking. Now a dozen years later we have a film that exemplifies the producer-driven model. For Kong: Skull Island is, to nobody's surprise, the impetus for a shared cinematic universe. Kong and Gareth Edwards' Godzilla are slated to tussle in 2020. To establish this universe Warner Bros. has tapped second-time film director Jordan Vogt-Roberts, no doubt a talented creator, and no doubt one who doesn't have the clout or the vision to stand up to the studios. Kong is an exercise in style over substance. It's clear that there are strong ideas at the core of the reboot, but they suffer from a backslide into generic blockbuster territory.

GHOST IN THE SHELL: A Pale Imitation

Director: Rupert Sanders
Writers: Jamie Moss, William Wheeler, Ehren Kruger
Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Pilou Asbæk, Takeshi Kitano, Juliette Binoche, Michael Pitt, Peter Ferdinando
Runtime: 107 mins.
2017

Ghost in the Shell is a thin movie, thinner than the white sheet that covers a spectral being. You suspect there is some substance beneath the surface, but once you remove the sheet and look at it directly you discover that there is nothing to be seen. The apparent substance was in truth the echoes of a long distant, watered down source material.

To be more specific about Ghost in the Shell's thinness: it's an adaptation of the then-ahead-of-its-time 1995 anime of the same name. The bare bones of the plot remains the same. Major (Scarlett Johansson) is a cyborg with a human brain. She's the centerpiece of a squad of variously-upgraded soldiers working for the Hanka corporation. They track down this cyber terrorist fellow Kuze (Michael Pitt) in order to assassinate him, but Major finds that he has answers to questions she's been asking about herself. In the original this interplay has a philosophical bent; in the new release, it's all profanely literal-minded.