Alien: Covenant

"The house of Israel and the house of Judah have broken my covenant that I made with their forefathers. Therefore, this is what Jehovah says, 'Here I am bringing on them a calamity that they will not be able to escape. When they call for help, I will not listen to them."

Alien: Covenant, the sixth (or eighth if you include the Alien vs. Predator movies) in this multi-decade science fiction/horror franchise, is a step in the right direction but one that sparks a debate as to whether or not director Ridley Scott and his team should continue making these movies. Scott, whose second film was Alien, a legendary science fiction film, returns here again as director. He left the series after directing the first one in 1979, allowing James Cameron to take over with Aliens in 1986. Others followed, far less successfully than Scott and Cameron. The series was rebooted, sort of, in 2012 with Prometheus with Scott returning as director. Scott and his writers put a cast of characters in the same universe as the malicious xenomorph aliens, but those creatures basically did not appear. Instead, we got a series of enigmas and interesting theories on the genesis of humans. Alien: Covenant is part Alien, part Prometheus, and while we get the familiar structure of scientists being picked off one by one, we also get, for better or worse, a further exploration of those large themes.

If you didn't watch the short prologue, you should. It will be a basic reminder of what happened in the previous film. In case you missed it, a quick reminder: The survivors of the Prometheus in 2093 (Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, played by Noomi Rapace, and the android David, played by Michael Fassbender) decide to go find the "engineers", the mysterious alien species that may have created humans (and incidentally tried to kill them).

More than ten years later, a crew of colonists aboard a ship called the Covenant is on a journey towards a new home planet far away from Earth. The ship is anchored by a newer android type named Walter (also played by Fassbender). Walter has a number of improvements from David, the most obvious being that he thinks less for himself. This is beneficial for a variety of reasons explained in the film. But the crew are awakened by a deadly neutrino burst. Picking up the pieces, they discover a distress signal not far off their path. Their captain (Billy Crudup) decides to lead the crew there (for some reason). The planet they find is so Earth-like that they apparently don't need helmets (more astronaut stupidity), and they explore an eerily quiet land. Ghoulish Pompeii-like casts of some kind of being are everywhere, as is danger, and it's all downhill from there.

Many seem annoyed that Scott has chosen the Alien franchise to explore these large concepts. I don't mind. Half-way through, not long after they land and things start going badly, the film switches fairly suddenly from an Alien movie to a Prometheus sequel, and while this probably will irritate most viewers (particularly those who didn't like Prometheus), from there the two are neatly tied together. The themes are there, for sure, and some of them quite obvious. "Covenant" is a religious term regarding the Biblical ark; here, just as the animals before them, the ship carries couples two by two to a new world. Some themes are a little less obvious. For instance, Walter points out that David has made a mistake in his quoting Ozymandias, and that the real author was Percy Shelly, who many believe co-authored Frankenstein with Mary Shelly. And the subtitle of Frankenstein is (wait for it)...The Modern Prometheus. Watch the film, see what kind of power David has and uses and wants to use, consider both Frankenstein and Ozymandias and the themes involved, and have more fun with the allegories.

But if you do want chest (and back) bursting, scenes of gore galore, and fright, Alien: Covenant delivers. It does not possess that prudence and tension employed in the first one, which was a much more contained and limited movie that ended up paying off beautifully. But still, this is a better looking movie than Prometheus, and one that is far less frustrating. The characters, though, are some of the least interesting in the series. The lead, Katherine Waterston, is not given much to do, and the other female actors (namely Carmen Ejogo, Amy Seimetz, and Callie Hernandez) scream a lot and heighten the film's tension, but that's about it. Crudup does provide a somewhat intriguing character as the ship's new captain, who is not truly suited for his unexpected assignment. His leadership skills are questionable, and he's learning on the job. Damian Bichir does a mostly good job as another crew member, but the one who is really remarkable is Danny McBride, who has made a successful career as a funnyman. Here he's all serious and is perhaps the most impressive addition.

And yet the most enjoyable to watch, yet again, is Michael Fassbender, a true treasure of cinema. Whereas Sigourney Weaver was the star of the first four films, here Fassbender is the driver of this part of the franchise. He gets the dual task of playing Walter and David, and of course they come face to face, brother to brother. The flute scene, which starts with David teaching Walter how to play a wooden flute, is remarkably tense and entertaining, dripping with homoerotic hints at incest. (David has one line in particular that is truly eyebrow-raising.) David sees himself as the king of kings, and while I think this franchise (along with many that are overstaying their welcome) is growing a bit dull, I also look forward to seeing if humans deteriorate because of his nefariousness.

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Nobody Did It Better

Roger Moore, who passed away last week, did it better than just about everyone else. In terms of James Bond, his most famous role, he was the only one of the six who understood the farcical, fictitious, facetious nature of the character. Spies, frankly, don't look like James Bond, they don't dress like James Bond, and they don't drive extravagant cars like Bond does. I certainly doubt they introduce themselves like he does, regardless of which order they put their name in.

Thus, Moore's Bond was more humorous than Sean Connery's, certainly more than Timothy Dalton's or Daniel Craig's. It would be hard to image practically any of the others floating around in space like he did in Moonraker in the era of late 1970s sci-fi, or dressed like a clown in Octopussy. But this is what helped set him apart, and this is why to many he was the best. After six seasons of the successful series The Saint, Moore would go on to eventually tie Connery with the most appearances as Bond (a total of seven). They ranged from pretty darn good (The Spy Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only) to mediocre or slightly substandard (Moonraker, Octopussy, A View to a Kill), to the bad (Live and Let Die) and awful (The Man With the Golden Gun). They all, for the most part, have a humorous bent, particularly when Moore finally appeared to stop doing a version of Connery's Bond and just come up with a new persona. His was far gentler; his Bond may have been as horny as the others were, but at least he didn't rape a woman (like Connery's Bond did in Goldfinger). Yet for whatever reason, 53 percent of women rated Connery the best.

Was he my favorite? I try to avoid "ranking" the Bonds. They all brought their own unique talents to the role, a role and franchise that unfortunately are growing tiresome. Roger Moore's, though, was probably the first or second that I remember seeing and recognizing as James Bond, and that is one reason why I liked him so much. Despite my inclination to avoid ranking them, as the iconic song from The Spy Who Loved Me goes, perhaps nobody did it better.

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Death on the Nile

"The Nile, forever new and old,
Among the living and the dead,
Its mighty, mystic stream has rolled."
-Henry Wadsworth Longfe

Death on the Nile features an opening in the English countryside as if this were Downton Abbey (the film even features Maggie Smith), but soon we are introduced to a treasure trove of spoiled opulent British people all aboard a cruise in Egypt, where the rest of this murder-mystery tale will take place.

Film reviews are supposed to limit the use of personal anecdotes, yet I must write that this is one of the earliest films I have a memory of watching, and this reminiscence is what drew me to seek out the movie and watch it as an adult. I first viewed it when I was a young child with my grandmother. (She probably liked it more than I did then or do now.) I can only remember two scenes, and they both feature Angela Lansburgy, who appears here as a novelist with a ripe fondness for full-bodied vocabulary. She gets most of the notes right initially but soon goes over the top, hyperbolically flailing about and complaining that her drink has "lost its croc." It might be oddly ironic that the worst performance of the woman who would go on to be Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote is in this murder-mystery film.

Aside from her, though, Bette Davis and Smith are especially enjoyable to watch. Davis joyfully orders around Smith, who despises what she has to put up with. Mia Farrow's portrayal of a sinister and nefarious woman out for revenge is almost as good as her performance in Rosemary's Baby. Jack Warden sort of has a German accent as a quack who brags about using Armadillo urine as a remedy. Many actors have played Agatha Christie's famous detective, and this time it's Peter Ustinov. "Luck," he says, "I leave to the others." His portrayal is a good one, more subtle than the performance of the same character by Albert Finney in Murder on the Orient Express.

Everybody, as expected, has a motive for the murder that takes place on the cruise down the Nile, and yet they all, expectedly, deny it. "Everyone around here was her enemy," we are told. Poirot deals out a plethora of hypotheticals in the whodunit scenes, which only happen an hour into the film. From there, there's a variety of scenes featuring Poirot and his new partner, Colonel Race (David Niven), as they put together the pieces of the puzzle, and it's mostly good fun. But when he finally reveals what had happened ("We have pwoved it! Pwoved it!" he shouts), it feels like a disappointment.

As a matter of fact, unfortunately the whole movie feels dull compared to Murder on the Orient Express, another Agotha Critie novel adaptation released only several years before, and especially so compared to Clue, an Christie-esque whodunit that is more elementary but certainly more fun. Other than a rather tense scene involving a cobra, this movie has no croc.

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