Joseph Grammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "androids"
All the Wrong Things with Alien: Covenant
Yesterday I watched Alien: Convenant with my friends. We went to Chinatown in Washington, D.C., and the theater was pretty empty on a Saturday night. I was relaxed, comfortable, excited for a horror movie. Usually I avoid horror, but Alien was the first horror movie I ever saw, at age like six, and scared the fucking shit out of me. For weeks I thought monsters could burst out of your chest if you ate the wrong food, and I felt horrible when I thought about chewing meat. It was the first time I can remember feeling sickened, revolted, terrified by the possibilities of violence that the world could invent. I was pretty lucky that my first run-in with that feeling was through a movie, and not through war, domestic abuse, or anything like that. But at the time -- fuck.
*SPOILERS AHEAD*
So walking into Alien: Covenant, I was weirdly happy. Part of me expected some closure for my childhood space memories, which, although they no longer made me feel terrified or ill, definitely sat in my mind as a sort of fucked-up watershed for storytelling. In some ways, I compare everything I define as horror to Alien. It's like my shiny, black, hissy Ur-fear.
That said, the movie failed on all counts for terror. I've written before about Stephen King's discrimination among horror, terror, and revulsion, and it's safe to say Mr. Scott went primarily with revulsion for this film. Aliens burst out of spines, out of chests; they brutally claw holes in people and begin eating them. I was surprised at how easy it was for me to watch, but in a world where extreme violence is casually shown on cable TV, I suppose it's not an uncommon response.
Maybe one thing that affects this feeling of "meh" with the grossness is that the world knows about the Aliens by now. We know they worm their way into a human host, incubate, and explode in a gory pop of organs and blood. So by the first image of the film, we're perfectly aware some ignorant dude is going to die like this. We know the Aliens are going to stalk and maim people.
Does this mean Mr. Scott is fighting an uphill battle with regards to horror? Possibly, yes; his first movie hangs over this one like a cloud, reminding us of all the spooky shit that first frightened us, catching us unawares. Does that mean it's impossible to generate a true feeling of horror, of not knowing what's coming next? Of course not -- he can do that if he wants, or if he finds writers good enough to do it. But in this movie, there is no slow build-up to real horror, even if it checks all the boxes on the list:
Initial misfortune to set the tone of tragedy
Early mechanical issues that come into play later on
A familiar but kind of unsettling intergalactic message
Unrealistic optimism at a "too-good-to-be-true" scenario
Seemingly nice but baffling things, like wheat on a strange planet.
Dead silence (e.g., no birdcalls)
A creepy tunnel
You get the idea. This is horror-by-the-numbers, a fairly plodding and mechanical approach to storytelling. A great genre film can transcend its rigid structure by making us care about the characters, by giving us a rich atmosphere we can soak up, by offering some truly surprising twists we couldn't have guessed. Alien: Covenant doesn't do any of this: even its images, while definitely getting the feeling of vastness across, seem overly muted and somber, more depressing or even lackluster than scary.
It felt like I was watching this movie through a wall of ice at many points: the distance felt bloodless and clinical, even when we were up close in the action with people wildly firing weapons at a velocripator-like neomorph, which is basically a sickly white xenomorph that is marginally cuter.
Michael Fassbender is the actor everyone's been talking about for this film, with good reason. He plays two different androids, Walter and David, each of whom have different accents. He gets across the clipped steadfastness of Walter pretty well, as well as David's wounded, polished, grandiose insanity.
And Kate Waterston as Daniels was very solid; it was unfortunate she didn't get as much screentime, and she doesn't really start kicking ass until much later in the movie. Fassbender gets a lot of the spotlight here, which is nice -- but I would've liked to see more of Daniels' psychological state, to spend more time with her.
I can't forget this is a horror movie (or horror-action-thriller thing), so everyone is supposed to die. Not everyone does, but it ends on a (kind of weak) bleak note, and considering Eliazbeth Shaw's fate (the protagonist of Prometheus), Daniels' future isn't much brighter. So it's like, fuck, she's just going to be mutated into some horrible alien in the next film.
On a side note, it would've been cool to see any footage of Elizabeth Shaw, because we spent a whole movie getting to know her. And are we expected to go through the same thing for the sequel? Main female character dies, up pops a new one?
Okay, moving on.
It was hard to love the characters. We don't get a sense of their individual motivations and lives: why did they sign up for this colony mission? What are their pasts? We don't need ninety minutes of drama on each person, but even a fucking conversational scene about their lives would've been nice. I know the teaser/pre-release scene they showed gives us a sort of Last Supper element, which I really liked, but I wanted more of that in the movie proper.
The twist is obvious. Walter and David are identical-looking androids. Walter is good, David is evil. If you can't guess that there's going to be a switch-up with these characters, you're probably not thinking at all during this movie -- which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
The action isn't thrilling. I wanted to be horrified and awe-inspired at the same time, like my memories of Alien. Even discounting the nostalgia factor of the first movie, the action here doesn't hold up. Sure, there's wild gun-firing, and alien sneak-attacks, but it feels forced. The terror isn't palpable, even if the alien assaults are more brutal than before. We get more savagery on the surface, but less overall emotion, so we feel far away.
And since the characters aren't well developed (Danny McBride as Tennessee does a decent job of giving his Southern-American character some life at least, although even he is exceptionally understated), the stakes aren't high.
Oh, the random guard smoking a cigarette gets sick? Who cares.
Another guy with a beard dies? So what? We don't know these people at all.
I certainly sound callous, but I really want to be sad when a character dies. Make me yell or cry. Here, the characters were just fodder for the monsters, which was disappointing. I might be asking too much of a horror movie, but this is Ridley Scott we're dealing with. So come on, man.
Still, the fact that I'm writing about this at all means it produced some feelings in me. I've always liked the look of the Aliens, and Scott does a good job showing us how they move, skittering around like fucked-up cat-bugs. The CGI was better than I expected, even if one or two parts seemed slightly fake. The neomorphs in particular looked better than the xenomorphs. (What a goddamn sentence.)
I did like Daniels' and Tennessee's interactions together, even if they got a bit too jokey after both their spouses died. I also thought Daniels and Walter had a nice rapport, and Fassbender did a great job of being emotional and kind while also maintaining the feel of something slightly "other" than human. That was a sweetness I wish I'd gotten more of, because it balances the darkness and so highlights more.
This brings into question the pacing of the movie, which isn't a non-stop gore-fest by any means. It takes probably thirty minutes for bad shit to really go down, and after a brutal few minutes of alien stuff, there's a lull while everyone recuperates at the not-yet-revealed-to-be-psychotic David's house (which, incidentally, is the Engineer spaceship from Prometheus).
I really liked the robotic, narcissistic, possibly incestuous homoerotic tension between David and Walter when David teaches his updated counterpart to play a lute-type instrument. Also, yeah, they kiss each other. Obviously there are time constraints, and it was probably a big deal for Scott to invest as much time into the Walter-David relationship as he did (since that is time not spent murdering), but I would've liked even more of that dynamic. It oddly felt like one of the freshest and most real relationships, even though it's two androids both played by the same actor. And also, you might just like to see Michael Fassbender make out with himself. (Eh, it's just a kiss though.) Have fun with that, Internet fan fiction!
There is a middle twist, too, where we find out David is the one who creates the modern xenomorph by doing creepy mad-scientist experiments with the black goo shit from the Engineer planet. An android creates Aliens! I know that's supposed to be a big deal, but I don't really care. He's a creepy serial-killer android, which is cool, but ... eh. It's not exactly a "OHHHHH!" type revelation.
When it comes to other characters, I did like Demian Bichir's character as well; he's a good actor and put a lot of feeling into his role, even though they gave him like zero cool lines. When he gets his face burned by acid, his screams actually made me feel worried. I can't really say the same for anyone else who got alien-murdered, although Karine and Maggie's harrowing scene together with the first neomorph offered a good chance for some terrified screaming. I think that scene did pull me in, because it wanted me to be like, "OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!" when Karine was trapped inside with the horribly convulsing host-guard, and I felt exactly that. I actually wanted both of those characters to have more screentime as well, but ... death (aka Ridley Scott) is a fucked-up dude who doesn't care what I want.
And speaking of emotion, Kate Waterston does a good job bringing out the tears for a weak backstory, and she gets across her stoic (but not too stoic) sadness very well. And I've already mentioned Fassbender, but there are two scenes in particular where his David really gets to show some nice emotion. One is when he's explaining the (fictional) story of Elizabeth Shaw's death, and we see him show actual sorrow. Whether those are crocodile tears or not, I don't know, but it was cool to see. The second scene was actually really funny to me in a good way, and it's after the true xenomorph is born. Basically David tricks the captain of Daniels' ship, a religious guy named Oram, into stupidly looking down into a facehugger egg, and ... guess what. That wasn't surprising at all, but what was nice was David's smile of almost parental joy when the alien explodes out of its "host." He really gave us a look like, "Aww, I'm so proud."
So what is Alien: Covenant? A few nice emotional moments, some brutal hosting, and a decent alien fight at the end. Also, an extremely obvious twist where David assumes Walter's identity and then leads us closer to the timeline of the original Alien by stowing some alien eggs onboard the colonists' ship.
We end with Daniels and Tennessee frozen in hypersleep, and David listening to Wagner, calmly awaiting the 7 years until he lands on a new planet.
I'll probably watch the sequel on Netflix in like 2020, but I hope they do a better job on the writing/character development front. If they do that, and really try to nail the tension-building and horror (which is like the point of the movie), then I'll be spookily happy.
*SPOILERS AHEAD*
So walking into Alien: Covenant, I was weirdly happy. Part of me expected some closure for my childhood space memories, which, although they no longer made me feel terrified or ill, definitely sat in my mind as a sort of fucked-up watershed for storytelling. In some ways, I compare everything I define as horror to Alien. It's like my shiny, black, hissy Ur-fear.
That said, the movie failed on all counts for terror. I've written before about Stephen King's discrimination among horror, terror, and revulsion, and it's safe to say Mr. Scott went primarily with revulsion for this film. Aliens burst out of spines, out of chests; they brutally claw holes in people and begin eating them. I was surprised at how easy it was for me to watch, but in a world where extreme violence is casually shown on cable TV, I suppose it's not an uncommon response.
Maybe one thing that affects this feeling of "meh" with the grossness is that the world knows about the Aliens by now. We know they worm their way into a human host, incubate, and explode in a gory pop of organs and blood. So by the first image of the film, we're perfectly aware some ignorant dude is going to die like this. We know the Aliens are going to stalk and maim people.
Does this mean Mr. Scott is fighting an uphill battle with regards to horror? Possibly, yes; his first movie hangs over this one like a cloud, reminding us of all the spooky shit that first frightened us, catching us unawares. Does that mean it's impossible to generate a true feeling of horror, of not knowing what's coming next? Of course not -- he can do that if he wants, or if he finds writers good enough to do it. But in this movie, there is no slow build-up to real horror, even if it checks all the boxes on the list:
Initial misfortune to set the tone of tragedy
Early mechanical issues that come into play later on
A familiar but kind of unsettling intergalactic message
Unrealistic optimism at a "too-good-to-be-true" scenario
Seemingly nice but baffling things, like wheat on a strange planet.
Dead silence (e.g., no birdcalls)
A creepy tunnel
You get the idea. This is horror-by-the-numbers, a fairly plodding and mechanical approach to storytelling. A great genre film can transcend its rigid structure by making us care about the characters, by giving us a rich atmosphere we can soak up, by offering some truly surprising twists we couldn't have guessed. Alien: Covenant doesn't do any of this: even its images, while definitely getting the feeling of vastness across, seem overly muted and somber, more depressing or even lackluster than scary.
It felt like I was watching this movie through a wall of ice at many points: the distance felt bloodless and clinical, even when we were up close in the action with people wildly firing weapons at a velocripator-like neomorph, which is basically a sickly white xenomorph that is marginally cuter.
Michael Fassbender is the actor everyone's been talking about for this film, with good reason. He plays two different androids, Walter and David, each of whom have different accents. He gets across the clipped steadfastness of Walter pretty well, as well as David's wounded, polished, grandiose insanity.
And Kate Waterston as Daniels was very solid; it was unfortunate she didn't get as much screentime, and she doesn't really start kicking ass until much later in the movie. Fassbender gets a lot of the spotlight here, which is nice -- but I would've liked to see more of Daniels' psychological state, to spend more time with her.
I can't forget this is a horror movie (or horror-action-thriller thing), so everyone is supposed to die. Not everyone does, but it ends on a (kind of weak) bleak note, and considering Eliazbeth Shaw's fate (the protagonist of Prometheus), Daniels' future isn't much brighter. So it's like, fuck, she's just going to be mutated into some horrible alien in the next film.
On a side note, it would've been cool to see any footage of Elizabeth Shaw, because we spent a whole movie getting to know her. And are we expected to go through the same thing for the sequel? Main female character dies, up pops a new one?
Okay, moving on.
It was hard to love the characters. We don't get a sense of their individual motivations and lives: why did they sign up for this colony mission? What are their pasts? We don't need ninety minutes of drama on each person, but even a fucking conversational scene about their lives would've been nice. I know the teaser/pre-release scene they showed gives us a sort of Last Supper element, which I really liked, but I wanted more of that in the movie proper.
The twist is obvious. Walter and David are identical-looking androids. Walter is good, David is evil. If you can't guess that there's going to be a switch-up with these characters, you're probably not thinking at all during this movie -- which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
The action isn't thrilling. I wanted to be horrified and awe-inspired at the same time, like my memories of Alien. Even discounting the nostalgia factor of the first movie, the action here doesn't hold up. Sure, there's wild gun-firing, and alien sneak-attacks, but it feels forced. The terror isn't palpable, even if the alien assaults are more brutal than before. We get more savagery on the surface, but less overall emotion, so we feel far away.
And since the characters aren't well developed (Danny McBride as Tennessee does a decent job of giving his Southern-American character some life at least, although even he is exceptionally understated), the stakes aren't high.
Oh, the random guard smoking a cigarette gets sick? Who cares.
Another guy with a beard dies? So what? We don't know these people at all.
I certainly sound callous, but I really want to be sad when a character dies. Make me yell or cry. Here, the characters were just fodder for the monsters, which was disappointing. I might be asking too much of a horror movie, but this is Ridley Scott we're dealing with. So come on, man.
Still, the fact that I'm writing about this at all means it produced some feelings in me. I've always liked the look of the Aliens, and Scott does a good job showing us how they move, skittering around like fucked-up cat-bugs. The CGI was better than I expected, even if one or two parts seemed slightly fake. The neomorphs in particular looked better than the xenomorphs. (What a goddamn sentence.)
I did like Daniels' and Tennessee's interactions together, even if they got a bit too jokey after both their spouses died. I also thought Daniels and Walter had a nice rapport, and Fassbender did a great job of being emotional and kind while also maintaining the feel of something slightly "other" than human. That was a sweetness I wish I'd gotten more of, because it balances the darkness and so highlights more.
This brings into question the pacing of the movie, which isn't a non-stop gore-fest by any means. It takes probably thirty minutes for bad shit to really go down, and after a brutal few minutes of alien stuff, there's a lull while everyone recuperates at the not-yet-revealed-to-be-psychotic David's house (which, incidentally, is the Engineer spaceship from Prometheus).
I really liked the robotic, narcissistic, possibly incestuous homoerotic tension between David and Walter when David teaches his updated counterpart to play a lute-type instrument. Also, yeah, they kiss each other. Obviously there are time constraints, and it was probably a big deal for Scott to invest as much time into the Walter-David relationship as he did (since that is time not spent murdering), but I would've liked even more of that dynamic. It oddly felt like one of the freshest and most real relationships, even though it's two androids both played by the same actor. And also, you might just like to see Michael Fassbender make out with himself. (Eh, it's just a kiss though.) Have fun with that, Internet fan fiction!
There is a middle twist, too, where we find out David is the one who creates the modern xenomorph by doing creepy mad-scientist experiments with the black goo shit from the Engineer planet. An android creates Aliens! I know that's supposed to be a big deal, but I don't really care. He's a creepy serial-killer android, which is cool, but ... eh. It's not exactly a "OHHHHH!" type revelation.
When it comes to other characters, I did like Demian Bichir's character as well; he's a good actor and put a lot of feeling into his role, even though they gave him like zero cool lines. When he gets his face burned by acid, his screams actually made me feel worried. I can't really say the same for anyone else who got alien-murdered, although Karine and Maggie's harrowing scene together with the first neomorph offered a good chance for some terrified screaming. I think that scene did pull me in, because it wanted me to be like, "OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!" when Karine was trapped inside with the horribly convulsing host-guard, and I felt exactly that. I actually wanted both of those characters to have more screentime as well, but ... death (aka Ridley Scott) is a fucked-up dude who doesn't care what I want.
And speaking of emotion, Kate Waterston does a good job bringing out the tears for a weak backstory, and she gets across her stoic (but not too stoic) sadness very well. And I've already mentioned Fassbender, but there are two scenes in particular where his David really gets to show some nice emotion. One is when he's explaining the (fictional) story of Elizabeth Shaw's death, and we see him show actual sorrow. Whether those are crocodile tears or not, I don't know, but it was cool to see. The second scene was actually really funny to me in a good way, and it's after the true xenomorph is born. Basically David tricks the captain of Daniels' ship, a religious guy named Oram, into stupidly looking down into a facehugger egg, and ... guess what. That wasn't surprising at all, but what was nice was David's smile of almost parental joy when the alien explodes out of its "host." He really gave us a look like, "Aww, I'm so proud."
So what is Alien: Covenant? A few nice emotional moments, some brutal hosting, and a decent alien fight at the end. Also, an extremely obvious twist where David assumes Walter's identity and then leads us closer to the timeline of the original Alien by stowing some alien eggs onboard the colonists' ship.
We end with Daniels and Tennessee frozen in hypersleep, and David listening to Wagner, calmly awaiting the 7 years until he lands on a new planet.
I'll probably watch the sequel on Netflix in like 2020, but I hope they do a better job on the writing/character development front. If they do that, and really try to nail the tension-building and horror (which is like the point of the movie), then I'll be spookily happy.
