In space, no one can hear you mandroid.

Back in 1979, ALIEN was all about the Aliens. Now it’s about the mandroids. And no wonder. The resident mandroid in ALIEN: COVENANT is Michael Fassbender.

And haven’t I always effused over Michael Fassbender’s magnetic onscreen presence? Unwittingly or not, he has become the focal point of the modern ALIEN saga. Since the last ALIEN installment, PROMETHEUS (2012), his “synthetic human” David has been searching for the purpose of his existence almost as sagaciously as his human crewmate counterparts. In COVENANT, he finds his truth. The hissing, stabbing, disemboweling titular Alien xenomorphs are mere stepping stones in his path to robot redemption…

And I love it! I can already hear the whining that this particular story tack does not serve the greater ALIEN universe, and I can surely see the problems inherent in trying to pass this movie off as mid-part of a trilogy that is prequel to the original ALIEN movie, however, writer-director Ridley Scott (though he creates connectivity with ALIEN through the gradual appearance of the opening titles, camera techniques, sound design and creature design) opens a compelling hive of ideas in making Mankind’s ultimate fate decided by Mankind’s own creation.

This ain’t your daddy’s Bishop…

ALIEN: COVENANT is a majestic, foaming, throat-rending serpent of a film with concepts that will blow your mind as well as your chest cavity, production values that stun with their technical detail, shot through with a stark, madness-inducing soundtrack (by Jed Kurzel) that is not so much music as steel teeth on shoulder blades.

It is 2104. On her seven-year journey to the nearest habitable planet, the colonization starship named Covenant, transporting 2000 hypersleeping humans and 1000 embryos, with a crew of 15. Woken from their slumber by a solar flare, the crew receives an emergency transmission from a passing planet. They detour to investigate… (hmm, this sure sounds like an ALIEN movie, like, you know – ALIEN).

A malfunction in their sleeping pods burns their captain alive (James Franco cameo) and makes the crew uneager to resume their hypersleep to the distant planet, so, discovering the passing planet is habitable, they ponder on putting down roots. Until something in the air infiltrates two crew members and bursts fully-formed from their spines. Until something comes screeching from the dark to take chunks out of their hides. Until something leaps onto someone’s face and drives its feeding tube down their gullet…

In a prologue, we meet Fassbender as android David, already cultured and educated at his “awakening” by his creator Weyland (Guy Pearce). He names himself when he casts his gaze over Michelangelo’s David. Last we saw of him, David’s dismembered body (and still-functioning head) was onboard a “horseshoe” alien craft piloted by Noomi Rapace, bound for the planet of the Engineers…

The spaceship Covenant also has its Fassbender, the same model android called Walter. (But – because it’s Fassbender – Walter has a different accent and demeanor to David!) As Walter helps the crew against a night attack by ferocious assailants, a hooded David comes to their rescue. One of the coolest moments in the film is when David pulls back his hood – and no one is surprised it’s a Fassbender android. Besides, what’s better than one Fassbender? Why, TWO Fassbenders of course!

David, his Iggy Pop hair long and stringy, gives Walter a curt “Hello brother,” as he passes him.

What incredible visuals! By the time David is leading the crew to a stony haven through a city of scorched corpses, we have already been inundated by so many jaw-dropping sights: the solar sail on the ship (as Sagan once predicted), seeing storms in the atmosphere of the planet as they descend, the landing pod coming in over the lake, between mountains; as the emergency beacon is neared, the scarred jungle and then – one of the most satisfying payoffs in recent cinematic history – the crash-landed horseshoe spaceship!

To say nothing of the subtle visuals – like the two Fassbender androids onscreen at the same time, where the camera is panning across and around them constantly, seamlessly; they both put their hands on a recorder to play it together, they fight in closeup, they – kiss! (Even Fassbender cannot resist Fassbender!)

Ridley Scott once again populates his crew with tough females, but their roles pale beside that of the android; they now seem like stock inclusions, vestigial ghost notes of Ripley. When The Fassbender is onscreen, no one is usurping his spotlight.

Katherine Waterston is Daniels, ad hoc Ripley. Billy Crudup is ad hoc captain, Oram. And in a daring bit of stunt casting, Danny McBride is Texan pilot Tennessee (replete with cowboy hat and toughguy cred). The rest of the crew (Demian Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Callie Hernandez, Amy Seimetz, Jussie Smollett) is here to provide breakfast, lunch and dinner for the Aliens. Viewers have complained that the ship’s crew being paired into married couples does not stir much empathy when their characters are never fleshed out enough to care. (Feasting Alien looks up: “Someone say ‘flesh out’?”) Thus, Daniels lost not only her captain in Franco but her husband. A shred of empathy peeks through, but not enough to– (Feasting Alien: “Someone say ‘shred’?”)

For those who complain ALIEN: COVENANT does not ask the “big questions,” there’s not much bigger than the origin of our species itself. And just like discovering the universe makes us small and insignificant, what humbling speculation to ponder on better genomes than ours inventing us as offhandedly as we would any robot, to entertain and serve at their behest, and then to discard without any compunction.

To us, David’s quandary may seem: Is he Adam, the first of a species, instilled with the right to spawn his own kind? Or is he Lucifer, the light bringer, the fallen angel ripped from heaven, bequeathed powers that he is exhorted not to use? (David: “Serve in Heaven or reign in Hell?”) His ultimate actions tell us David sees himself as much more celestial than those earthbound entities – he considers himself a god; hence, his amorality, when it comes to his part in the fates of the Engineers and Noomi Rapace…

As we, the creations, see ourselves as the heroes against our creators, the Engineers, Ridley Scott has re-framed the ALIEN franchise as peeking out through the eyes of the android, David, who sees himself as the hero against his creators, Humans. Endowed with the will to create, he has no time for empathy or frailty. He said in PROMETHEUS: “Sometimes to create, one must first destroy.”

Here, with his secret Alien breeding experiments, he has graduated to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.” He does well to quote that poem, for the rest of it details the ruins of a colossal monument, around which nothing survives.

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As COVENANT ramps toward its rendezvous with 1979’s ALIEN, we see more connections – the computer is called Mother again, there are corridor scenes following blips on a radar that recall ALIEN, the Aliens start to look humanoid – and we discover WHY these interstellar Aliens mimic our physiognomy. The clues were in ALIEN 3 and ALIEN: RESURRECTION; when that Alien burst from the Rottweiler and assumed a bestial stance, and when Ripley’s genes were combined with the Alien Queen birthing that humanoid monstrosity.

All due to… mandroid Fassbender. We can safely say it was Fassbender artificially selecting Alien-Human hybrids in 2104 that led directly to Sigourney Weaver getting down to her panties in 1979.

END

One Singular Serration…

One maximum security prison planet. One xenomorph extra-terrestrial alien. Let the screaming begin. That no one can hear you doing in space…

And well I should bastardize the original slogan for the original ALIEN (1979). After the shotgun-sequel ass-klownery of James Cameron’s ALIENS (1986), with hundreds of hissing, cavorting aliens cluttering the frame, the filmmakers of ALIEN 3 pull back on the reins and again give us just one. A choice that would prove to be brave, smart and suspenseful, artfully cancelling out the devaluing nature of Cameron’s bombastic creature-palooza.

Before SE7EN (1995) and FIGHT CLUB (1997), video director David Fincher made his bones with this impactful third entry in ALIEN canon. And – like the two male directors before him – brings out the raunchy femininity of his star Sigourney Weaver, not by getting her down to her panties, but this time, by shaving her head! (Something about keeping the lice down, but only succeeding at keeping flies down…)

ALIEN 3 is a back-to-basics thriller, more concerned with tone than bone; more intent on eerie claustrophobia than popcorn spectacle. Rust-choked passageways and slime-soaked crawlspaces; an abandoned lead refinery morphed into a prison, populated with an all-male contingent of rapists, murderers and religious fanatics. As with all the ALIEN films, production design is visually stunning; characters come fully formed and madly maladjusted, and performances are stellar from the mostly British cast. Mostly.

Weaver returns as Ripley, following the events of ALIENS, crash-landing on this planet in her escape module. In the decimated module, the bodies of marine Hicks, android Bishop and youngster Newt, all dead or deactivated. Only hibernating Ripley survived. Unwittingly bringing with her something more dangerous than rapists, murderers and religious fanatics (well, maybe not more dangerous than religious fanatics) – an Alien.

Into this XY-chromosome den of iniquity, mysterious murders start apace. Only Ripley suspects it is something more than repressed man-rage or the word of Christ.

Amongst the paranoid lifers and repressed death-dealers who have forgotten the scent of a woman, Ripley finds an almost well-adjusted ally in prison doctor Clemens (Charles Dance), and butts heads with the warden (Brian Glover, who loves his “rumor control” announcements) and his squirrelly first mate (Ralph Brown), trying to alert them to an alien infiltrator on their outpost. She finds out soon enough that not only did an adult xenomorph hitch a ride in her module – a babymorph is growing where no one can hear you scream…

Still based on H.R. Giger’s core design, the new Alien creature’s physical makeup reflects the organism it was birthed from – a prisoner’s Rottweiler dog; sleeker, faster, more bestial than its predecessors. Amongst the ochre corridors, it races like a canine beast, up and around the walls without stressing gravity. Victims are taken reminiscent of the beasts of Africa, plucked off one by one from the herd, struck at from blackness, dragged through hatchways, while seething acid blood scars through floors and panels.

Prisoners are hilariously British: there’s Pete Postlethwaite, as usual, eternally 50; there’s Chalky from QUADROPHENIA (Phil Davis); Danny Webb, crazy-eyed sole survivor… American Charles S. Dutton becomes informal leader of the prisoners once the warden becomes lunch.

In this simple yet effective story, the prisoners band together under Ripley’s stewardship to coax the creature into a liquid metal hell, using themselves as bait.

Meanwhile, The Company is sending an envoy to extract Ripley from the planet because, once again, their prime objective is the babymorph, with zero survival considerations for the human host. And they send – android Bishop! Hooray! (He prefers the term “artificial person” himself.) But it’s not another Bishop android – he says he’s The Real Thing. Lance Henriksen as Bishop employs his most velvety brogue to tempt Ripley into giving up the contents of her womb. He tells her he’s here to help, he’s here to “take it out of you” (replete with iconic hand gesture) and that he is the man whom the Bishop android was modeled on. The company thought to send a friendly face… But we know the truth. Lance Henriksen is an android. Hooray!

During the finale’s grand sacrifice, the majestic orchestral score of Eliot Goldenthal sweeps our senses to a bittersweet conclusion.

Like most franchises, ALIEN 3 truly was the conclusion of a trilogy. Even though it barely made its production budget back and was considered a financial flop, like most franchises that continue past their point of diminishing returns, its established audience worked towards its – ahem – “resurrection” five years later. All those fans and critics that couldn’t appreciate this more sober outing, were mostly those desensitized by the headrush of the previous film. Mostly.

END

A Little Extra Extra-Terrestrial.

The slogan for ALIEN is embedded in pop culture: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Even so, there’s an awful lot of screaming going on…

A deep space mining crew investigates a distress signal from an uncharted planet, and inadvertently takes onboard a malignant alien life form. What could possibly happen next, but grisly deaths, cattle-prod battles, flamethrowers, and chicks in panties?

Director Ridley Scott helms a horror movie that is actually horrifying, a space movie where the vacuum of space is treated with helmeted respect, a science fiction movie that is actually scientific fiction; blood-spattering us with an extra-terrestrial organism whose life-cycle is incomprehensible to human evolutionary idiom… everything about this movie is so alien to the Hollywood meatgrinder system, no wonder it’s called – ALIEN.

Aboard the mining vessel Nostromo (what a damn cool name!), leading the ragtag crew is unflappable Dallas (Tom Skerritt), dispassionate science officer Ash (Ian Holm), old Kane (John Hurt, eternally 60), weepy Lambert (Veronica Cartwright, whose constant screaming is so annoying it’s like – oh man! Y’know, I don’t even feel like rescuing you now with all that puffy-eyed crying and snot running down your nose…), journeyman mechanics Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton (griping about wages and overtime), and Lieutenant Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver, strikingly young and man-sexy, her lethal jawline smooth like a baby’s angular bottom). Unbeknownst to all of us at the time, this movie would rocket her to superstardom as a fem-dom icon, who would yet never lose her womanly allure. (Her salary alone for 1997’s ALIEN: RESURRECTION would equal the production cost of ALIEN – $11 million.)

And haunting the darkened passageways of the Nostromo, the intruder, the infiltrator, the Alien – a creature of sensual nightmare conjured by Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger. A creature with a lifecycle created from whole cloth by writers Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett – from egg to “facehugger” to “chestburster” to xenomorph, double-jawed and iron-clawed, with a steel-belted exoskeleton and acid for blood. Immediate lifetime membership in the pantheon of immortal screen monsters…

ALIEN would meld two classic genres: science fiction and horror, using a device as old as Vincent Price – the haunted house. And the stupid cat jumping out of nowhere.

The Nostromo reminds us of the best aspects of Monty Python set dressing: everything onboard looks worn and tired, well-used and wasted. A perfect setting for a haunted tale, where Dallas would go creeping through pitch black claustrophobic air ducts, with something on the radar blipping towards him… The ship is not a shiny technological marvel, it is a utilitarian warhorse, such an acclimated crawlspace for its crew they never exhibit that “soldierly” attitude toward being onboard a spaceship; they behave like they’re on a vessel at sea, with a camaraderie and familiarity that bespeaks this is not their first rodeo.

The breakfast scene where John Hurt is suddenly overcome by the “chestburster” is a marvel of naturalistic overlapping dialogue – and sudden gutshock terror, as a tiny, blood-meat thing squeals at the crew from Hurt’s innards. (The reactions of horror from the cast are apparently a result of them not knowing how ferocious this stunt was going to be.) The breezy performances also remind us of the best Spielberg movies of this era – CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, JAWS – where the acting sold the story as much as the plot and effects.

And ALIEN did not shirk on its effects. Ridley Scott was not going for space-battle action, but a sober and eerie reality: a spaceship that slowly spun for artificial gravity, only brief shots of the alien creature (inhabited by rail-thin Bolaji Badejo); the ship’s computer, nicknamed “Mother,” interfaced with all the green-texted “computers” (big-keyed typewriter-descendants that now look hokey); with H.R. Giger’s machine-flesh designs passim, from the ship’s innards to the elephantine “space jockey” discovered ossified in his seat in the horseshoe spaceship on the planet of the howling winds…

Let’s step back in time for a moment: Remember that feeling of awe seeing that elephant-skulled alien in that reclined seat? We had seen Lucas’s Cantina Sequence, we had seen Cylons and Sleestak and Kirk’s green-skinned bitches, yet Giger’s disturbing visual brought not only an otherworldliness to the production, but opened a million questions – “So are there other alien races that humans know of but choose to ignore?” “Was this extra-terrestrial just another miner or scientist?” “Do these aliens know of humans and Earth?” – and left them all unanswered.

A simple plot, but Darwinian in execution. We feel no pity for the Alien and it evokes no sympathy, but we realize it is killing because it is geared purely for survival. Ash tells us so, in another disturbing sequence where he is beheaded and discovered to be – a cyborg, hidden in plain view amongst the crew! His disembodied head is electrically charged back to pseudo-life and he reveals another layer of subplot – the mining corporation empowered him to bring back this death-dealing Alien species over the priorities of the human crew. And in a bizarre irony, Ash – oh, clinical, pedagogic Ash – reveals emotion. But not in the direction we’d expect. He lovingly praises the evolutionary primacy of the Alien species until Ripley interjects in horror, “You admire it!” He felt less empathy towards the species he was modeled after, his purely mathematical brain gravitating toward the species better equipped for survival and procreation.

The false reprieve – where Ripley gets down to her vulva-licious hip-bone panties – and then the full reveal of the Alien in a guttural climax will leave you shuddering in adrenaline, as the best-adapted creature wins out; the most ferocious animal the cosmos has ever birthed, the organism with the most ruthless killing skills against Man – Woman.

END

PROMETHEUS Unbound.

Shattering sound design, knife-edge visuals, a cerebral maelstrom of startling concepts that will trail you home like vagabond dogs… PROMETHEUS, like the Greek god it is named for, descends on your shoulders with the fire of knowledge and, like the deity’s act of perdition, will leave you curs-ed that your wish was ever granted.

Ridley Scott‘s PROMETHEUS, like James Cameron’s AVATAR, is not just a movie but a moviegoing experience; promoted as a prequel to Scott’s own ALIEN (1980), if you came for H.R. Giger’s hissing and spurting xenomorphs, you were misled. In a good way. On its face, PROMETHEUS is an old fashioned haunted house movie (a dark abode haunted by ghosts reliving their tragic destinies), but on a level deeper than DNA, the movie stalks the hallowed ground of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and CONTACT, as a group of scientists trek to the farthest reaches of the universe, chasing down messages left during Earth’s primitive history, seeking the origin of Humankind.

And when we do encounter alien creatures, they are once again terrifying, stirring in us that “alien revulsion” that is built into our species, that Scott captured in the first ALIEN, and that was leached out of our sensibilities in successive ALIEN films (until ALIEN RESURRECTION 1997).

Treading eggshell-gently on von Daniken’s Ancient Astronaut Theory (Hi Giorgio!), opening scenes show archaeologists in 2089 identifying various ancient tablets depicting the same star system. They regard this as “an invitation” into deep space. And that’s where it leaps away from the AstroNUT tree branch, grasping for a more science-stabled limb, as PROMETHEUS gives us cinematic art in its beautifully detailed production design – the spaceship Prometheus, holographic computers and astounding technology. Then we slip onto hard science fiction, as we are introduced to the stoic resident android (aligning us squarely with past ALIEN forays), and a metaphor for his existence when the scientists (Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green) eke out an origin tale of an intergalactic race they call “Engineers” who constructed Mankind then left for the stars. And that’s when the science-fictiony limb can’t hold our weight any longer and we crash onto the theology outgrowth. Because if their theories are proved correct, well, so much for Darwinism – the Creationists were right! (And so is Giorgio!) They’ve just been calling God by the wrong name all these centuries…

Like a writhing conceptual serpent, PROMETHEUS flails back and forth across religious and scientific theories, twisting our minds into shapes of Escher. The questions posed in PROMETHEUS of Mankind’s origin are not new – they’ve been reiterated in good and bad fiction through the ages, from Arthur C. Clarke’s epic Childhood’s End to the confused King James Bible, from Clarke’s and Kubrick’s senses-boggling 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) to the execrable MISSION TO MARS (2000), from the Sumerian poetry of Epic of Gilgamesh (2000 BC) to the Swiss snake-oil of Chariots Of The Gods? (1968), and even in director Scott’s own BLADE RUNNER (1982) – so these age-old postulations are a passe aspect of PROMETHEUS, but the execution of the journey for answers (by Scott and writers Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof) is as wondrous a thing to behold as a henge made of stone.

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Noomi Rapace is Ripley-raunchy (last seen as THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO; here with a real dragon under her skin, if you know what I mean), Charlize Theron is the schoolmarm-severe mission commander; Idris Elba is ragtag-jovial ship captain; Logan Marshall-Green is distractingly familiar (last seen in DEVIL as the Mechanic), and Michael Fassbender is android-cool as the “synthetic human” David, who is – like the other synthetics in the ALIEN series – working for the agenda of The Corporation.

Fassbender’s David is one of the best features of PROMETHEUS. We’re never sure how far to trust him, and even when we don’t trust him, we forgive him his sins because he is just so damn cool. He rewatches LAWRENCE OF ARABIA as his human charges are in hypersleep, fascinated by Peter O’Toole (a veritable doppelganger for Fassbender) snuffing out a flaming match with his finger (Prometheus inverted?). One of O’Toole’s flunkies tries it and screams, “It hurts!” and O’Toole’s reply: “The trick is not minding that it hurts.”

This theme will haunt the players in PROMETHEUS, as it haunts all of our greatest endeavors, including giving birth…

The corporate head is Peter Weyland, a name that runs deep in ALIEN canon (played by Guy Pearce in heavy centenarian makeup, and a performance that can only be fully appreciated when we see the deleted scenes of Weyland as a young man. Only in these deleted scenes do we realize Pearce is an actual alien – those painfully high cheekbones barely disguise his General Grievous endoskeleton.)

Though Scott has claimed this is a film unto itself, the ties with ALIEN run fierce and proud: ragtag crew in hypersleep, crew congregating around breakfast table, an android on the crew, disembodied head of android speaking, references to parentage (ALIEN’s computer was “Mother”; PROMETHEUS is overseen by “Father”), strong female leads, flat-bellied chicks getting down to their panties; the downed “horseshoe” spacecraft in ALIEN (this is the “haunted house” our adventurers explore), and those beings with the elephantine heads are revealed (they are the “Engineers” wearing helmets with trunk-like fronts).

The most unfortunate similarity though, is that of all the films in ALIEN canon, PROMETHEUS bears the most resemblance to the cheap spinoff with the interesting concept: AVP: ALIEN VS. PREDATOR! Sorry, Ridley, I’m just calling ’em like I sees ’em.

Where do I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got?
— Harrison Ford, BLADE RUNNER.

The unanswered question of why the Engineers made us and then changed their minds need not be profound, but as prosaic as human fickleness. As one scientist tells David the reason why humans built robots, “We made you because we could.” And creators have the prerogative to destroy their creations. With extreme prejudice: Great Floods, brimstone, Ragnarok, Armageddon, acid-blooded xenomorphs…

The answer doesn’t have to be in Akkadian legends and Babylonian perversions and Greek tragedies; the answer is as simple as every human relationship, “Why did we get together – and why did we change our minds?” I personally believe Humankind has always been a slugnaut on the face of the cosmos; destroying this hypocritical, contradictory piece of flesh will mean nothing to the grand scheme of things.

Enter the Engineers. In their elephant helmets. Bearing xenomorphs.

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The god Prometheus is a Jesus analogue (no matter how much Christians deny that their savior was stolen from Greek myth and other, earlier legends). Prometheus “sacrificed” himself for Mankind’s progress by bequeathing fire and other gifts; for his insolence in raising Man to the level of gods, Zeus punished Prometheus by “crucifying” him on a rock with an eagle eternally pecking at his liver in the same general vicinity as the Spear of Destiny supposedly pierced Christ’s side…

Of all the conjecture about what this movie’s opening scene means, the best explanation I’ve come across is that the Engineer who drinks the black goop and dissolves into the primordial stream (with the camera zooming into his DNA strands) – is the Promethean/Christ sacrifice: in seeding the Earth with his DNA (bringing “evolution” to this backward planet) he paid for it with his life. …So the Earth really IS 6,000 years old! Who knew that Pat Robertson was right and not a congenital imbecile?

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For all its eeriness and otherworldliness, PROMETHEUS has its pitfalls. There are 17 crew members; we just know then, that some of them have been brought along as expendables, like STAR TREK crew members who beam down to a planet with a different-colored titty-shirt (“Uh-oh! Why am I the only guy in a taupe uniform? Does Star Fleet even make taupe uniforms? Shit! Here comes the cheap monster–auugh!”).

When the scientists outline their mission as one of breathtaking wonder rather than clinical science, a mohawked, tattooed geologist (Sean Harris) pipes up, “Bullshit! We came all this way because of a map?!” Now we shouldn’t fault Ridley Scott for casting an outcast from TRAINSPOTTING rather than our preconceived “type” for a geologist (in fact, the burgundy-mohawked Bobak Ferdowsi was the Flight Director who guided the rover Curiosity to the surface of Mars, and looks more like Ryan Reynolds than a crotchety professor, so maybe Ridley was ahead of his time in casting a guy who looks like a drug thug on a space mission), but of the 7 billion people on Earth, this expedition couldn’t find one geologist with more thrill for his avocation? His attitude was simply screenwriter arc material; i.e. he is so badass to begin with so that when he breaks down like a pansy, we can assume the danger must be Real Serious. But his ‘tude screamed inauthentic louder than he screamed like a pansy when that thing attacked him. I’d say that with a paycheck somewhere in the range of 2 kajillion space-dollars, there’d definitely be a Shut The Fuck Up And Do Your Job clause in his contract.

And why are characters never naked when they should be naked? We’re all adults, and this movie is R-rated. So why does everyone in interplanetary hypersleep wear irritating Movie Cloth Strips to cover their naughty bits? When Noomi is in a hospital gown, she rips it off and underneath – she’s wearing more Movie Cloth Strips! She enters the auto-surgery booth with her innards exploding – one would think she would rip off anything that might constrict the machine doing its work, but the sacred Movie Cloth Strips remain! Hell, even the surgery booth that is authorized to tear open her abdomen and stomach-staple her and administer morphine without prescription isn’t authorized to unglue those goddamed seemingly adamantium cloth strips for fear that someone might see a nipple or an actual vagina and become a terrorist or something. Idiot censors. And idiot society that would let censors run rampant over art with their hypocrisy and stupidity.

There are many “exposition” lines – dialogue inserted specifically for the audience lowbrows, that insults the intelligence of anyone remotely smarter than a seahorse. One of the worst offending lines: one astronaut says to another after the atmosphere is examined, “Two minutes without your helmet, you’d be dead!” Thanks for the heads up! Maybe I should have paid attention in Astronaut Training on that chapter titled Never Remove Your Helmet On A Strange Planet, You Frickin’ Imbecile.

That being said, even though these particular Movie Helmets are designed for maximum viewing of the stars’ smirky faces within, even though that jejune warning was issued, nonetheless, two minutes into the extravehicular activity – off come the helmets! Like Val Kilmer in RED PLANET, like Gary Sinise in MISSION TO MARS, like Dr. Zachary Smith in LOST IN SPACE, like any ’50s movie arrogant or stupid enough to believe that every planet harbors a humanly-breathable atmosphere, the astronauts in PROMETHEUS expose their bankable Hollywood mugs at the first sign of a lame rationalization: “Lucky for us those terraforming aliens were here before us and terraformed it, so that there’s oxygen in this terraformed cave. Did we mention the terraforming?…” Ironically, this helmet-off stupidity was rectified by ALIEN itself. (Remember Tom Skerritt and his crew EVA in the horseshoe spacecraft? We could hardly see anyone’s faces, yet every helmet stayed on. It took an alien facehugger to get John Hurt’s helmet off.) Now Ridley has bowed to the convention of his inferiors. And uh, terraforming.

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PROMETHEUS does not pursue the question of what is going to kill humankind, but the bigger canvas of what birthed it. It’s an eerie, thoughtful fiction, masterfully rendered, but what can become annoying is when culties such as the Ancient Astronaut nuts and others try to skyhook this entertaining fiction to their mind-witheringly ignorant origin tales that are supposed truths.

Do not consider PROMETHEUS anything but Ridley Scott’s original vision of a fantastic science fiction tale (even though many elements of the movie have been inspired by culty theories, and two of the elements have been inadvertently stolen directly from my own screenplay, Human Dawn – the name of the ship and the elephantine masks). Let’s face it, even the original story, Prometheus Bound (attributed to Aeschylus), that tabulated the myth as we know it, is itself a fantastic science fiction tale that has grown to mythic proportions because its elements have been assimilated by Christianity for its own fantastic science fiction tale which, we are told blinkeredly and repeatedly, is Original Fact. Percy Bysshe Shelley would publish Prometheus Unbound in 1820 (inspired by Aeschylus’s book of the same name).

And this PROMETHEUS continues the legendary aspect of its predecessors in being totally Off The Chain…

END

Requiem for a Dweeb.

Hundreds of Aliens. One Predator. No actors.

The splash-slogans on the DVD packaging of ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM scream at us louder than the Predator’s roar: “More Blood… More Guts… More Gore!” Pretty much guarantees a maximum rating of five cucumbers out of ten – if everything else is top-notch. Everything else is not.

Sucking never hurt so good.

Story picks up exactly where we thought it had thankfully ended in the last movie, AVP: ALIEN VERSUS PREDATOR (2004), with a cute Alien busting through the chest of a Predator onboard a Predator rescue ship. Sporting Predator-like quad-jowls (therefore affectionately called Pred-Alien by the film-makers), the little tyke quickly dispatches all the supposedly-tough Predator warriors onboard and crash-lands the ship back on Earth in a small town called Sequel Land. Whereupon Pred-Alien starts laying eggs, whereupon face-huggers face-fuck every human in sight, whereupon chest-bursters emerge, and Aliens over-run Sequel Land.

A decidedly hyper-masculine Predator from Predator Planet receives the auto distress signal from the downed Preda-ship and takes the express Sequel Rescue Ship to Earth to take on this Pred-Alien who unceremoniously capped his Predapeeps (even though there was a Predator mother ship that was just leaving Earth orbit, all those Predators apparently too insubordinate to be stop-lossed and turned around to return the few hundred miles to Earth).

But think about it: if the Pred-Alien can kill Predators so efficiently while still a tiny chest-burster, imagine her lethality when she grows into one of H.R. Giger’s rubber suits. And only ONE Predator goes back for the clambake?

Shake out that stupid thing called Logic. Cue pointless human interest stories…

Like the last film, it’s another B-Actor hoedown, everyone conveying just enough emotion to get past the audition for a detergent commercial: the ex-prisoner (who looks like a model), the small-town sheriff, the dork pizza delivery guy, the college jocks, the salubrious chick who digs the dork, but jacks the jocks… But that’s why there’s “more blood, more guts, more gore!” – more distraction.

Credit where it’s due: the Alien character was created by Dan O’Bannon and Ron Shusett (ALIEN, 1979) and the Predator character was created by Jim Thomas and John Thomas (PREDATOR, 1987). Though this movie launches another salvo that only aids marketing synergy and recognition, I can’t help feeling a little sorry for the crafters of these once-ominous alien beings, their legacies being smeared more heinously than the Republicans smear men of honor and vision.

Directed by The Brothers Strause (Colin and Greg, two effects supervisors whose best work as directors could definitely be said to be in front of them), REQUIEM boasts many staff who worked on both PREDATOR and ALIEN franchises; movie also retains the ominous elements of the PREDATOR soundtrack – those tribal drums, coupled with that eerie music.

Then Ripley turns up.

Well, not exactly. One of the human stories shows a female Marine returning home to find her daughter has bonded closely with her husband. Struggling to regain her daughter’s trust, an Alien comes to her rescue – as her husband is mangled by an Alien, she doesn’t hesitate: grabs the kid and hi-tails it like Jackie Onassis off the back of that limo in Dealey Plaza – so much for “leaving no one behind.” She and the prison model rally the puny humans into fighting back. And fail. Need more testosterone than that to be Ripley, honey…

Then there’s a government guy who obviously works for even less than Lance Henriksen. But kinda looks like him if you squint real hard. He’s the baddie (cos he’s from The Government, see?).

As the Aliens rip into the townsfolk, who all use magical guns (Happiness is never having to reload), the Predator, who is all alone against hundreds of Aliens, shows he’s a pretty resourceful son-of-a-predatoress by using his gadgets and superior intellect (so who died and made the Predators the good guys?) in attrition against the Aliens until there remains only him and the Pred-Alien.

And what happens to all the B-actors? Who cares?

Hundreds of clichés. One script. No kidding.

END

The Warrior/Goddess Dichotomy and the Eternal Feminine.

ALIENS!

Leaping, screeching, hissing, grabbing – hellish armies of H.R. Giger’s inscrutable extra-terrestrial life forms, swarming killing machines going elongated-head to jar-head with the United States Marines (Roger Ramjet Space Division, Glib Company).

Writer-Director James Cameron helms this sequel to one of the landmark space/horror films of our time, ALIEN (1979). And it shows. Not one for subtlety, Cameron creates a script (with David Giler and Walter Hill) that bluntly screams “More is Better” – more aliens, more victims, more explosions and incredible amounts of more mucus. Surprisingly – he gets away with it.

A colony of humans on a remote planet has lost contact with Earth. [Director’s Cut scenes show the crashed “horseshoe” spaceship from ALIEN and a local family that goes to investigate. Bad idea. We see the father overcome by a “face-hugger” at the base of the horseshoe. We would realize later that the little daughter is Newt – the lone survivor that the Marines discover.] The military sends a reconnoiter mission, along with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver, recently rescued from suspended animation in a drifting escape pod some sixty years after blowing up the Nostromo in ALIEN). She is more than miffed that the planet she is forced to return to is the one she just escaped from.

Sho’ nuff, send the Marines in anywhere and everything gets pear-shaped. After aliens en masse peel from the mucused walls of the space colony corridors and decimate the grunts, the remaining Marines (under Ripley’s ad hoc supervision) must find a way to leave the planet and nuke it.

There are so many factors that make the ALIEN series so much more than just Running-and-Screaming debacles. A major factor was Swiss surrealist, H.R. Giger’s alien design, overseen in this movie by legendary creature-creator Stan Winston. The life-cycle of the aliens was also well thought out, which gave them an organic depth that simple zombies or big-eyed beige beings lacked. Like some interesting insect species here on Earth, the alien warriors do not simply eat or kill all their captives, but cocoon them to serve as host bodies for their hatchling stage (the face-huggers), which impregnate the captive with the seed that grows into the chest-burster (which John Hurt will never forget).

Cameron, who is renowned for his Wham-Bam, actually cleverly inserts major Thank-You-Ma’am into this movie. At first blush, ALIENS looks like any summer Boy’s Movie, but look closer and you’ll notice that it is actually a homage to the Eternal Feminine! All the males are either emasculated or ineffectual: Apone the Marine captain (Al Mathews) is dispatched in the first battle, Gorman the coordinator (William Hope) is bitchslapped by Ripley when he crumbles during a skirmish, Hudson the grunt (Bill Paxton, in an immortal sissy role which will haunt him for life) takes girlie whining to a truly vaginal level (“Game over, man! Game over!”) and Paul Reiser is perfectly cast as a corporate weasel. The most masculine Marine is Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein), a dirt-talkin’ hussy who has bigger guns on her arms and around her neck than any actual male Marine.

The only male worth his cahonnes is Hicks (Michael Biehn) – and even he ended up taking orders from Ripley. The other male of any note is Bishop the cyborg (Lance Henriksen, as a “synthetic person” who is ironically the most empathetic of the group) – and he gets torn in half. All the other male Marines were like those nameless Star Trek crewmen who beamed down to a planet with a different-colored titty-shirt than the principals…

Cameron boldly brings us Sexy Dangerous with Ripley: whereas in ALIEN she was an innocent youth who grew into her formidable anti-alien role (with a wink-wink end-scene that stripped her down to panties to remind us of her femininity), here she is the vetted warrior, tougher than Marines, yet maternal enough to dote on a surrogate child; she may slam the corporate weasel against the wall, but when Hicks gives her a location bracelet (“Doesn’t mean we’re engaged or nothing”) her alluring smile is radiant. Cameron has brilliantly created what every man craves – a woman powerful enough to stand on her own feet, yet beautiful enough to attract you into sweeping her off them. The Warrior/Goddess dichotomy. (If it weren’t for that soccer mom ‘do, she’d be perfect!) And he does it in such an artful way that we don’t feel threatened or repulsed by it.

Even the final battle is between Ripley and the alien queen, as the queen chases Newt (young Carrie Henn, who never made another movie; although I really wish she would stop that insufferable, high-pitched screaming). Ripley interjects with the now-famous, “Get away from her, you BITCH!” – a female going after a female, being stopped by a female.

ALIENS is a thunderous movie, fulfilling our every craving to see bigger, badder, madder aliens and see them in full action, in full view. Boldly directed and edited, with incredible detail paid to the species that spawned so many inferior copycats. The egg-laying scene, in the cavern with the queen alien, is still a disturbing piece of icky cinema.

And in the film’s final minutes – even WITH all the female empowerment flying at our testicles – Our Man James Cameron somehow manages to get Ripley down to her panties again!…

END

AVP: Audience Versus Padding.

The question is not whether an “Alien” can overcome a “Predator” (ignorant semantics, as the two non-human species in this film are both “aliens” and “predators”); the real battle is pitting the movie’s Audience against its interminable Padding scenes. Can – we – survive? With my leg bloodied from the onslaught and a gaping wound in my side, I struggled out the theater exit, leaving two friends gurgling in the seventh row – hey, I’m no jarhead – I make no empty promises to “leave no one behind”… If the subterranean walking scenes didn’t finish them off, the inane talking scenes did.

Padding: 2. Audience: 1.

AVP: ALIEN VS PREDATOR is a nippled Batsuit – a franchise gone too far. It fulfills its purpose of keeping 14-year-old boys off the street and thereby less likely to shoot up a school or get your daughter pregnant, which is small respite; all we can hope for – until the next over-breasted Lara Croft video game release or somnolent Harry Potter movie. But as adult entertainment – and let’s face it: present-day adults, not kids, are the demographic weaned on the ALIEN and PREDATOR movies – it is diversionary, but not involving; good but not great, glittering but no prize.

An ancient pyramid is discovered beneath the snows of some snowy country, where Aliens are kept imprisoned in labyrinths, for Predators to send their teen warriors in and achieve predatorhood via slaughter. Sounds great on paper.

Both ALIEN (1979) and PREDATOR (1987) were sui generis movies, the former, through canny screenwriting and an uncompromising lead heroine, spawned three above-average sequels while the latter spawned an adequate-bordering-on-lame sequel (Danny in lieu of Arnold?!). Now, like the HIGHLANDER franchise, the mythos of both creations is sullied to the level of soap opera and with the Marketeers wielding their pimp-witted power, no longer will any successive ALIEN or PREDATOR movies exude the mystery or excitement of their progenitors, but rather, bombastic, overblown CGI and gratuitously-tweaked explosions for the action-figure teenboy market.

As a stand-alone movie – forget it! AVP’s existence is predicated on our cognizance of the last 25 years of these iconic monsters. Without that foreknowledge the very existence of these creatures and their interaction will appear contrived. The plot seems cobbled together from drafts made by 14-year-olds playing with their action figures (much like George Lucas writes his plots). The concept of the battling races at first seems mildly plausible, but then we realize the whole backstory is shoving square storyline into round plot holes and demystifying not one, but two rapacious extra-terrestrial cultures. Casting one’s senses back to those heady days of the original movies, our enjoyment was piqued precisely because their antagonists were inexplicable; they were truly… “alien.” Now they’re just Philo Beddoe in a barroom.

Except for Lance Henriksen (renowned B-movie “That Guy”), all human characters are instantly forgettable, except for a guy whose cultured locution could easily get him mistaken for a black James Bond (Colin Salmon, who actually had a small recurring role in the three Brosnan Bond films) and the young female expedition leader (Sanaa Lathan), i.e. Black Ripley; in essence, humans are this movie’s McGuffin, for any agent could have unearthed the battle-pyramid and a text crawl could have explained the backstory of the Alien-Predator symbiosis. Only reason we meet humans at all in this film is to mayhap invest a modicum of interest in this tale which, literally, has nothing to do with our species.

Henriksen’s role is anomalous: his character is familiar with Aliens (from ALIEN 3), yet when confronted by one, instead of becoming Mr. Corporation (as would be his character’s wont), he burbles incoherently with the rest of the B-Actors. Then when confronted by a Predator, instead of dollar signs cha-chinging in his eyes at the discovery of yet another alien species, he goes Rambo on it and gets, subsequently, dead. But I will leave that trite conundrum to the fanboys to clarify.

Terming one species Alien and one Predator is a point of irritating contention for me; these terms only exist in our viewer-reality, for in the movie, the creatures are only superficially identified as “serpents” (Aliens) and “hunters” (Predators). The substitute terms are a dead giveaway: hunters are “noble”; serpents, well… do we need to extemporize on a well-trodden metaphor? From the outset, we are led a merry road by the film-makers to perceive the Predators as “good guys.” No surprise, for in being prejudicially human, we are prone to siding with the more anthropoid of the two aliens and ironically, the Predators assume the Arnold role in this movie – the musclebound “heroes,” as it were. The movie rationalizes, sensibly, that the Predators only try to kill our human B-actors to re-acquire what the B-actors stole – their weapons. Which puts paid to the movie’s tag-line, “Whoever wins – we lose.” Well, not exactly, for the Predators are portrayed as sentinels keeping the roistering Aliens at bay… So only if the Predators lose, we lose.

Battle scenes ensue – with the predictably close-cut action and blurred whiz-banging – but the fights are only adequately directed and rather short, and it is just too incongruous viewing these two iconic monsters on screen together. Something just don’t click. Either this would be a good Alien movie (for the Aliens are animated excellently, combining live puppetry with CGI) or a good Predator movie (the rugged masculinity of those 7-foot behemoths was enough super-cruel to power a small township), but – as Offspring advised – “you gotta keep ’em separated.”

And for the record, the “AVP” acronym is so IGNINTLY “skoolyard-bitchin” that it reeks of Marketeers grappling with the long-dead spirits of their nerd youth in pathetically trying to ramp up the street-cool of this geek-square movie.

Now gimme that spear – after witnessing those man-tastic pecs on the Predators, I’m going in – I’ve got two friends to save in the seventh row…

END