Stomach-bursting, face-sucking Fassbender fabulousness

Michael Fassbender in Alien: Covenant

Alien: Covenant is the eighth movie in the 38-year-old sci-fi horror Alien franchise. Following 2012’s Prometheus, the financially successful but fan-loathed prequel, Covenant tries to walk a fine line: The film throws enough red meat to ravenous Alien fanboys with stomach-bursting, face-sucking, don’t-go-in-the-basement grotesquery to get away with continuing Prometheus’ much-maligned, but wildly ambitious origin story of both the aliens and the human race. But while I appreciate the bloody legacy of Alien, I’ve seen those monsters be monstrous in the same manner, seen the humans make the same dumb fateful mistakes, now eight times. The only thing new is the mythology, and thankfully the great actor Michael Fassbender is the one making those myths.

Covenant starts 10 years after the end of Prometheus, when Elizabeth Shaw, last survivor of a research vessel, and her team’s android David (Fassbender) fly off into space in the spaceship belonging to giant human-looking beings dubbed the Engineers. The Engineers had both created life on Earth and created an alien-incubating virus that, it seems, they wanted to use to destroy humanity, and Shaw and David were traveling to find the Engineer’s home world and ask them why.

The new film begins with a totally unrelated ship named Covenant in the middle of a many-year trip to colonize a distant planet. Walter, an android that looks exactly like David, is watching over 15 sleeping crew members, 2,000 sleeping colonists and dozens of drawers of frozen human embryos. A random neutrino burst damages the ship and wakes the crew (killing the captain played by James Franco). While they’re repairing the ship, they hear a bizarre radio transmission, which they determine comes from a planet even more hospitable to life than their original destination, as well as seven years closer. Over the objections of Daniels (Katherine Waterston), new captain Oram (Billy Crudup) changes course.

This is the first of many, many mistakes this crew makes over the next hour and forty-five minutes. You can’t have a horror movie without careless or dumb characters doing something death-wishy, but the crew of Covenant seemed to have lost a substantial number of brain cells while they were asleep. Only Daniels and Walter have a healthy suspicion of the planet, but that’s not enough to prevent the snowballing doom when they arrive and we discover they’re on the planet Shaw and David had been looking for.

Fassbender was the best thing about Prometheus; David is one of the creepiest androids in science fiction, resourceful like Star Trek’s Data but also wily and unhinged like Westworld’s Maeve. As both the less problematic later model Walter and as David, Fassbender gets to act with one of the best actors in the world, himself. And he has a lot of fun, particularly as the effete David slowly reveals himself to the crew of Covenant and to the audience to be more than just a little over-programmed.

The rest of the cast, which includes Danny McBride, Demián Bichir, Carmen Ejogo and Jussie Smollett, does a good job being fierce, scared or determined. Aside from Fassbender, only Crudup and Waterston have complex emotional and intellectual lives, which is a shame. McBride and Bichir are too talented to be wasted as simple cogs in the narrative machine. But to make a sci-fi epic, director Ridley Scott needs those cogs, the mandated conventions, and overdone tropes. Still, Scott makes genre films that are gorgeously shot, art directed with inspiration and never boring. But whether the Alien fanboys will give credit where it’s due is less predictable.

Alien: Covenant
Directed by Ridley Scott
Written by John Logan and Dante Harper
Starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston and Billy Crudup
Rated R

Originally published in LGBT Weekly

The family that fights mercenaries and fascists together stays together

Rocket Raccoon and Baby Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2

Part of why people loved Guardians of the Galaxy so much when it came out in 2014 was how surprised they were: The Guardians are not well-known characters outside of diehard Marvel Comics fans; no (at-the-time) major starred in the movie and few knew of writer-director James Gunn beyond his screenplay for Scooby Doo.

There was not much to expect. But Guardians of the Galaxy was a massive hit because it was thrilling, funny, nerdy and it featured Chris Pratt’s arrival as a major star. It’s considered by many to be the best or at least one of the best Marvel movies. So, Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 had a lot to live up to. And while I couldn’t be pleasantly amazed again, I was still impressed by how much fun I had. The movie does all the things tent-poll comic book movies are supposed to do while doing something very few of them manage: be completely character driven.

The Guardians are comprised of their wise-cracking, Earth-born captain Peter Quill, or Star-Lord (Pratt), green-skinned and humorless warrior Gamora (Zoe Saldana), rascally racoon-looking Rocket (voice by Bradley Cooper), oafish strongman Drax (Dave Bautista) and the tiny, talking tree toddler known as Groot, whose only words are “I am Groot.” (The phrase can mean anything and only Rocket knows how to interpret it.) The film begins with the Guardians killing a space monster for a gold-skinned race of fascist humanoids called the Sovereign in return for a prisoner of theirs: Nebula (Karen Gillan), the angry, blue-skinned sister of Gamora .

But as the Guardians leave the planet, the Sovereign attack; they are enraged when they discover Rocket has stolen a few of the Sovereign’s super-powered batteries. The Guardians escape but only because a mysterious, absurdly powerful man named Ego (Kurt Russell) incinerates the Sovereign ships. It turns out Ego is Peter’s long-lost father – who is also a millions-of-years-old god-like being called a Celestial. As Peter bonds with his dad, Gamora and Nebula fight, Drax has hilariously deep conversations with Ego’s empath companion Mantis (Pom Klementieff), while Rocket and Groot deal with the bounty-hunters and pirates called the Ravagers and their erstwhile leader and Peter’s former guardian Yondu (Michael Rooker).

There are a lot of characters and a lot of plot threads, and Gunn handles them expertly. He develops each character, giving them motivation, conflicts and almost complex emotions. The plots are created by the characters working to resolve these emotionally oriented problems, almost all of which revolve around how they create and sustain their families. In each case, these tough and rough heroes are resisting the connections right in front of them and seeking out the wrong goal, and they confront this error when they must fight a bunch of bad guys all at once. It’s a surprising moving and surprisingly sweet plot for a movie full of space explosions and weird-looking aliens.

The soundtrack is full of hits of the 1970s (ostensibly all found on Peter’s cassette tape Awesome Mix Vol. 2), and they are not used as ironic background noise but as commentary on the action: from “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” by Looking Glass to “Father and Son” by Cat Stevens, from “My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison to “The Chain” by Fleetwood Mac. “Brandy” is used particularly powerfully, with Ego explaining that he is like the sailor in the song: “But he made it clear he couldn’t stay / No harbor was his home.” It’s a romantic notion, but it’s also a sad one.

By the end, Peter realizes that nothing can replace the loss of his father, not even a God. But a family of space swashbucklers might come close.

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2
Written and Directed by James Gunn
Starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana and Kurt Russell
Rated PG-13

Originally published in LGBT Weekly