Fear in short supply in Alien: Covenant

Katherine Waterston in Alien: Covenant. Image courtesy 20th Century Fox.

The biggest disappointment with Alien: Covenant – Ridley Scott's recent addition to the Alien franchise he kicked off nearly 40 years ago – is how little emotional reaction is earned from it. For a series that has, at its best, features staples in horror and action, Covenant gives little incentive for the viewer to grip onto anything for comfort. The things that go bump in the night in this franchise are no longer scary, or at least Scott and writers John Logan and Dante Harper can’t capture the elements that made these creatures so terrifying in the first place.

That concept of horror has been a constant for a franchise that has shifted dramatically in tone over the last four decades. Scott directed one of the best horror films of the '70s with his initial entry, while James Cameron used what Scott refined to craft an even better action flick with the sequel. Even Prometheus, the much maligned sequel and precursor to Covenant, is ambitious with its philosophical leanings and stabs at building a mythology for the featured beasts. But Covenant stretches the franchise's flexibility to its breaking point by trying to mix and match the tones of the previous films. Combining the philosophy that defines Prometheus with the horror elements of Alien and a little of the action aspects of Aliens doesn't mesh together as well as the filmmakers intended. The enormity of the ponderings about the meaning of existence aren't given enough time to develop nor gain the traction of the predecessor. What this film offers instead is limited to the mild musings of returning cynthetic David (Michael Fassbender), who shares his sentiments with a newer version of himself (also played by Fassbender) in an obviously onanistic function.

What really disappoints about Covenant are the attempts at invoking horror, the bedrock for the franchise and the aspect Scott himself mastered with the first installment. There is an inherent level of horror to the concept of Covenant, in which humans (played by Katherine Waterston, Danny McBride, Demián Bichir, Billy Crudup, Carmen Ejogo, and a collection of disposable parts) come across malevolent creatures far outside of their comprehension. It’s the fear of exploration, albeit one that is less terrifying as the idea of hateful gods depicted in Prometheus. Visiting a new land with hateful alien beings is disturbing; having one's creator actively turn against them is downright horrifying.

The existential fear never ascends to where it should, nor does the more primitive scares found in being trapped by a creature that goes bump in the night. This is horror 101, the fear of the monster under the bed and the reason why this franchise exists in the first place, yet Scott appears to have lost that ability to invoke those frights in 2017. The problems are fairly fundamental, easy to spot when compared with the original. The ship in this film, the titular Covenant, is a large, new starship built to traverse the stars to find a new planet, leaving ample room for the humans to run and hide if need be. Contrast that with the Nostromo from Alien, a smaller vessel that's been knocked around space for who knows how long. There are fewer places to hide on the Nostromo, more places for the monster to trap its victim and engage in acts of carnage. More problematic is how rushed the featured engagement is. Things go wrong quickly and are resolved even faster, the plan to rid the ship of the alien coming about too quickly and far too easily to offer actual scares for the viewer. The crew in Covenant is never given the opportunity to have the extermination plan go awry as they are in previous films, which cuts down on the film's ability to invoke some sympathy into their plight.

Most worrisome of all is the aesthetics for the aliens in Covenant. Scott and crew mess around a little with the design, essentially showing the creatures in several forms before finally settling on the classic creature, sort of like an expanded version of Alien: Resurrection. Several of them are doofy looking, lacking the creepy visual innuendo of the classic model and limited moreso by some less than stellar CGI. The digital divide between human and alien is clear and disappointing, missing those scenes in which the creature comes ever so close to tearing through the victim's flesh at any given moment. The monsters instead look cheap and act cheaper, leaving the viewer let down by the lack of innovation by the filmmakers.

Review: Two and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 122 minutes

Genre: Sci-Fi

Ask Away

Target audience: Anyone who have enjoyed the Alien series, including Prometheus.

Take the whole family?: The rating is a little strong – the violence isn't that much greater than some PG-13 movies and the sex is minimal – but still keep the really young kids at home.

Theater or Netflix?: Make it part of a Netflix evening.

How silly does this film get?: More than expected. The movie carries those bits of meta silliness from Prometheus that are kind of groan inducing. It is most notable in a scene featuring Michael Fassbender, Billy Crudup, a familiar looking pod, and assurances nothing bad will happen. The result is about what one would expect, and it makes Crudup's character look like a complete idiot.

Watch this instead?: Alien and Aliens are both great, and I'm still a defender of the messy and flawed but ambitious Prometheus. It is worth hitting up James Cameron's perturbing The Abyss.

Legend of the Sword lacks coherent vision

Charlie Hunnam in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

Any ability to take King Arthur: Legend of the Sword as a serious piece of cinema falls by the wayside once the enormous elephants of war come out of the miasma swinging their trunks like wrecking balls while destroying Camelot, which happens within the first five minutes. For many movies that would set the tone for a campy, goofy movie that entertains in spite of itself. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword shies away from carrying a singular tone forward consistently, more content to lob spaghetti on the wall and hope enough sticks to create a sticky, coherent piece of art.

This is really the major fault (although there are many, many others) that drags down King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Director Guy Ritchie and his cadre of writers have many ideas about how they want to interpret the King Arthur legend, but they don't select one to serve as the focus, instead creating an awkward action/crime/fantasy mishmash that never comes close to coming together.They start with a Shakespearean tragedy – a prince (Jude Law) killing his brother (Eric Bana) to become king – move to a low-level crime flick with Charlie Hunnam (acting a lot like Ritchie staple Jason Statham) as the future king Arthur but current minor crime boss, then toss in bits of magic courtesy a mage (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) who controls animal. They toss in a few action sequences, a little Djimon Honsou for gravitas, and some goofy sidekicks (Kingsley Ben-Adir, Neil Maskell, Freddie Fox, and Aiden Gillen) to reduce that gravitas, and what's left is something close enough to a movie to send out to theaters. A movie like King Arthur: Legend of the Sword doesn’t have to stick to any one of those concepts, but not deciding on one to drive the movie mucks things up for Ritchie and company. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword needed vision, some clear direction to follow to sort through all the muck and guide the audience to a satisfying conclusion.

Of the many films within King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, the best and the worst of the lot is the small-time crime drama depicted in the first act. This is clearly the area Ritchie and his fellow writers are most comfortable delving into. They get to engage in the banter and editing tricks that make movies like Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels as fun to watch as they are. The fascination with small time hoods and hustlers is obvious and justified based on how they're portrayed in those films and, to an extent, this one. Yet it also allows Ritchie to indulge in the bad habits he developed as a young filmmaker, most notably some wanton sexism. His earlier films reduced the problem by simply limiting the number of female characters involved, effectively creating one overarching problem that is more difficult to notice. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword has many female characters who contribute little to nothing to this movie besides serving as plot devices and dying when the plot deems it justified. That the only female character who does any fighting, Bergès-Frisbey's mage, commands her creatures from afar and doesn't join in on the brawling leaves a fair amount to be desired.

The rest of the elements are treated poorly, as expected. The narrative is infected by the disorganized tone, with little logic put into the plot machinations. Ritchie shows little talent as a director of large fight sequences – his battles lack cadence and rhythm – and even less on the use of special effects to supplement the action on screen. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is carried by digital renditions of creatures and action sequences, none of which look particularly well made or are good enough to be leaned on as a crutch, as this movie does.

The one point of optimism stems from the movie's messiness. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is such a cluster of poorly formed ideas enough weirdness sneaks through so it isn't completely dull. The giant elephants are ridiculous, as are the enormous snakes and bats that get tossed in during a Empire Strikes Back-inspired soul searching trip. Weird is workable in its own way, just enough to keep a bad movie from being dire so the viewing experience is neither painful nor overly dull. That the best compliment offered to King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is to describe it as remarkably silly doesn't speak very well for the film either.

Rating: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 126 Minutes

Genre: Action
 

Ask Away

Target audience: People who are down with Guy Ritchie, Jude Law, Charlie Hunnam and giant snakes.

Take the whole family?: Stick with the PG-13 rating, or at least within a year or two of it.

Theater or Netflix?: Feel free to skip it.

How old is Jude Law, anyway?: The answer is not old enough to be Charlie Hunnam's uncle. This isn't a movie in which Hunnam was a teenager when his uncle murdered his dad, either. Young Arthur is 2 years old when the movie starts, and using their real ages as a benchmark Law would have been about 10 when those events occurred. The lack of age gap is a bit distracting and something the movie never seems to account for.

Watch this instead?: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch represent Guy Ritchie at his best as a director. For something more King Arthur related, watch either the beloved Disney movie The Sword in the Stone or the classic comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail, probably the best cinematic take on the King Arthur legend.

Guardians 2 finds comedy in violence

Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) and Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) in Guardian of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Image courtesy Disney.

Writer/Director James Gunn sets the tone for his second entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, with an opening credit sequence featuring both a brutal brawl against a tentacled space creature and Baby Groot dancing along to Electric Light Orchestra's Mr. Blue Sky. The latter is Gunn's focus – watching the tiny version of the Vin Diesel-voiced Ent-like creature dance is adorable on so many levels – but the battle that causes Baby Groot to bust a few moves is never too far in the background. Even amid the laughs and the goofy tone Gunn has gifted his little franchise, someone somewhere is about to be or has already been murdered viciously, which somehow remains part of the joke.

This is essentially Gunn's modus operandi, as seen in films like Slither and Super, films that feature far more gore than what either Guardians of the Galaxy or Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 can offer. But Disney has granted Gunn a far longer leash than it has with the other MCU movies – no other Marvel film boasts a sequence as bloody as the one involving Michael Rooker's Yondu and his whistling arrow of death – and Gunn uses that leeway to put his stamp on what a Guardians movie can be. He revels in the fighting and bloodshed, reinforcing the comic book aspects of a medium that can pushes violence as a ritual. In many comic books, a hero isn't heroic until he or she has punched out a few bad guys for fun. Gunn does this with a wink and a laugh, mocking the very conventions and mores he promotes. Much of the violence is played for humor, like the opening credit sequence and especially the aforementioned Yondu path of destruction – setting such a bloody seen to Jay and the Americans' Come a Little Bit Closer is a strange bit of funny lunacy. The bloody mayhem and wanton shootings sometimes serve as build ups to punchlines, for Chris Pratt's Peter Quill and Bradley Cooper's Rocket Raccoon and Dave Bautista's brutally honest Drax. Gunn and crew never miss a sliver of a chance to insert a joke, making it difficult to take things too seriously.

That backfires a bit with the conflict between warring sisters Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Nebula (Karen Gillan), whose tragic childhood is lost in the shuffle of comedic elements. It also diminishes the quietly sad backstory for Mantis (Pom Klementieff), a being who exists solely to help the aptly named god Ego (Kurt Russell) get a decent night's rest. She's effectively a slave, and the melancholic nature of her existence is mentioned in passing. There are a lot of characters to service in the more than two hours Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 has to tell its story, so the movie inevitably skips on a few beats it could have hit.

Fortunately the misses are outweighed greatly by the hits. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 keeps its comedic flow going in moments both sad and triumphant – only a Guardian could get hit in the head with debris while calmly reflecting after winning a major fight. The Guardians are the losers of the MCU, the characters who are dumped on the most by their creator and thrown into situations well beyond their capabilities. Their success is rooted in the inevitability of their failure, their need to improvise a key testament to their characters’ respective resolves. Heroes like Captain America, Iron Man and Thor are less interesting to watch because their challenges are large but surmountable; the Guardians are thrown against a literal god and an armada of combat droids at the same time while using outdated technology. Even though the MCU won't allow the Guardians to lose, they come the closest to possibly succumbing to the impossibilities in front of them, which is a bit thrilling for a production company that talks about a third or fourth installment before film two is released. To paraphrase Don Delillo, Marvel and D.C. Are trying to prove there's little danger left in the new. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 at least tries to be a little newer than the rest of the stock, daring to open a film with a monster fight serving as a backdrop for a dancing tree. Gunn trades some depth for jokes, an exchange that ends up mostly in his favor.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 136 minutes

Genre: Action
 

Ask Away

Target audience: People who continue to follow the Marvel Cinematic Universe and need to complete all the homework assignments until next year's Avengers: Infinity War.

Take the whole family?: Considering there's an entire sequence where bodies are impaled in slow motion, I'd keep the really young kids at home.

Theater or Netflix?: This is totally fine for a theater trip, especially if you can catch a matinee screening.

How cute is Baby Groot?: Mostly all the cute. Still voiced by Vin Diesel, Baby Groot loses the strange sweetness of the adult version but gains a level of innocence that fuels the little guy's violence. He is a rather good encapsulation of the fun and frustration of a toddler, a creature that invokes chaos but gets away with much of it thanks to a hug or a slightly tender moment.

Watch this as well?: You can watch the first Guardians of the Galaxy to catch up on the series, along with a fair chunk of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Highlights include The Avengers, Iron Man, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier.