Tag: Life (2017)

Is "Alien: Covenant" part of a misanthropic and pessimistic trend?

On By Erica L. WrightIn Horrific moviesLeave a comment

While watching Alien: Covenant with Todd and his family, I had to ask myself, “Is 2017 the year of the misanthropic Hollywood movie?”

Earlier this year, another big budget sci-fi/horror film Life was released in theaters. In a move more appropriate in a John Carpenter film than a Hollywood blockbuster starring Jake Gyllenhal, the creators of Life decided to end the human race through series of colossal  fuck-ups, revealed in a deceptive twist ending.

Alien: Covenant is the latest entry in what I now view as the Space Fuck-Up subgenre, in which terrible things happen that were completely avoidable. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy the movie. I’m saying that virtually all the characters display terrible judgment based on impulse and emotions rather than logic. Explorers on an unknown, un-researched planet decide to flounce around the unexplored terrain with no protective gear and to eat the local vegetation without testing it first. It’s not what kills them, but surely that space wheat was full of gluten. They fail to enact quarantine measures when crew members are infected. Later, when things are completely FUBAR, a pilot risks the lives of thousand of colonists and human embryos because he wants to rescue his wife.

The endless fuck-ups and poor leadership displayed by the human characters may be among the issues die-hard Alien fans have with the movie. But I’m going to assume it was a deliberate thematic choice that explains and enables the villain’s motivation to get rid of the dipshit human species entirely. Yes, the android David is back from Prometheus, and because there can never be enough Michael Fassbender, he also plays the role of another android, Walter. As an added bonus, Fassbender gets to share an erotic scene with…himself.

David was a complex character in Prometheus. He does some terrible things to his human crewmates, but he’s also sympathetic, and exudes an almost childlike curiosity and wonder. Prometheus ended on an optimistic note, with heroin Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) extending kindness to David. One gets the impression that there will be a redemptive storyline for David, with him developing empathy for humans.

All of this optimism is blown to hell in Alien: Covenant, with David emerging as a full-blown villain. He has human qualities, but seemingly our species’ worst traits, combined with superior intelligence. A guy so narcissistic that he would literally fuck himself if he could. Someone whose definition of “love” in no way precludes vivisecting his beloved. Hence we learn of Elizabeth’s horrible fate following her decision to rebuild his body. Like any narcissist, he “loves” others to the extent that they benefit him. As a side note, because  there was the implication that David has developed sexual urges, I do wish the film had more explicitly a homosexual relationship between David and Walter, or human-android relations between David and the new heroine, Daniels.

“Let me do the fingering:” that point when the audience erupted in guffaws of “that’s what she said!”

Because he himself is not human, it’s somewhat easy to understand his contempt or indifference toward humanity as a whole. In this respect, he’s not as strange as the antagonists of Carnosaur or In the Mouth of Madness, who are humans desiring the end of humanity. And while Alien: Covenant has a twist similar to that in Life, I think everyone in the theater saw it coming. But, since this is a mainstream Hollywood film, it’s unusual that the filmmakers  not only decided to let the villain win, but to effectively make him the protagonist and to lay the groundwork for humanity’s destruction.

 

LIFE (2017): That ending tho…(spoilers ahead)

On By Erica L. WrightIn Horrific moviesLeave a comment

I’m taking another brief break from our Women’s History Month theme to report on my viewing of Life, the new big-budget sci-fi/horror movie starring Jake Gyllenhal and Ryan Reynolds. As with Kong: Skull Island, I’m somewhat wary of big-budget horror films, because they tend to play things safe.

For the most part, Life does play things safe, referencing classic films such as Alien and The Thing, without really adding anything new to the genre. Yeah, we get it. There’s an invasive life-form on the ship and it cant be allowed to reach earth. After it kills a few crew members, the best option is to shoot the alien into deep space and send the human survivor back to Earth in an escape pod.

But then…the filmmakers go where few other mainstream filmmakers have gone before. The ending comes out of left field and seems more like something John Carpenter would have filmed while in a bad mood, though even Carpenter isn’t generally this cruel, with the exception of In the Mouth of Madness. The best way I can describe the ending is that it is defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, thanks to some deceptive switcheroo editing reminiscent of The Silence of the Lambs. I wasn’t completely caught off-guard, because things seemed “off” once the escape pod reached Earth, but the big reveal was still something of a gut punch. I was actually pretty repulsed, but walked out of the theater snickering over the misanthropy of it.

Another clue to the final deception is the fact that the trailer itself is deceptive. Entire scenes and pieces of dialogue in the trailer don’t appear in the movie, or appear in altered form. The trailer shows a clean intercept of the rover containing samples of martian soil, whereas the intercept in the film is offscreen and a bit messy. One of the trailers also has dialogue stating that the invasive life-form destroyed civilization on Mars, but there is no mention of a martian civilization in the movie itself.  While most of the film doesn’t break new ground, I will recommend it because of the ending alone.