QUICK REVIEWS: Alien: Covenant, Free Fire, Colossal

Alien: Covenant

Attempting to figure out a way to explain how Alien: Covenant fits within the mythology and narrative that is the Alien series is giving me a stomachache.

So, you had four films spaced over roughly twenty of our years, Alien in 1979, Aliens in 1986, Alien3 in 1992, and Alien: Resurrection in 1997, all of which were the saga of Ripley, former dock worker cum badass flamethrower-wielding warrior. Then in 2012 we got Prometheus from Alien's director, Ridley Scott, a prequel to the entire affair, a complete mess of a film that attempted to establish an entirely new series explaining the origin of the “xenomorph” but didn't make a whole lot of sense.

So, along comes Alien: Covenant, in my attempt a largely failed attempt to ground this new series in the years of cultural familiarity we have with the original films. It follows a brand new crew of nobodies on a ship going from nowhere to nowhere, much like Alien, and references the original film by way of all manner of obvious callbacks: musical cues, lines of dialogue (“a... perfect organism”), and scenarios (another “let me out of here”... “no, quarantine says I can't” situation, for one).

It's all really quite distracting. I'd be OK with all the self-reference if the film were funnier, or more campy, but Scott plays the thing almost entirely straight and what we end up with is a film that simultaneously wants to make money and be “fun” while expanding its philosophical and metaphorical arena beyond what makes the original series so interesting.

At some point I might go into this a little deeper, but what I've always found frightening about the Alien series isn't the physical aliens themselves. They're almost too scary in terms of their essence, all teeth and claws, no eyes to give them humanity, no red blood to give them a connection to “life” as we know it, pure killing machines. What makes them disturbing on a deeper level is the existential notion that our universe is so utterly uncaring and mechanical that it could easily generate such monsters purely by accident, and in fact, maybe the aliens are evolutionarily more “fit” than we are to exist. The universe actually prefers the aliens.

Prometheus and Alien: Covenant turn this entirely on its head by making the xenomorphs not the creation of evolution/reality/accident but a result of intelligence-driven genetic engineering. This is not nearly as scary as the idea of a universe that DGAF about me or humanity in general.

That all said, Alien: Covenant bears the nu-Ridley mark of being pretty as hell and superbly staged. The initial alien attack, a clusterfuck of confusion and gore in multiple locations, is one of the scariest things I've seen in a while in terms of pure chaotic horror. And it's well acted, especially by Michael Fassbender in a dual-role that really showcases his ability to go from dashing near-Bond level stud to raving madman in only a few seconds.

I think that people new to the series would be better off starting with the originals, which hold up really well given their age. But if you've seen the originals and are at least okay with the direction taken by Prometheus in terms of its handling of the mythology, Alien: Covenant is worth a watch.

Free Fire

This review will be shorter because, well, there's really not much to say about Free Fire that you can't glean by watching the trailer.

The plot is as bare bones as plots get. It's 1978, and two groups have met in some beat-up warehouse in a Boston industrial dregland to exchange assault rifles for cash. We get a good twenty minutes of character setup (he's an IRA hitman! This guy's a junkie! And, uh, this one's got a mustache) and then, thank God, there's a misunderstanding and shots are fired. The rest of the film is a dozen or so people lying behind chunks of concrete, trading bullets and barbs for the better part of an hour.

I sound unimpressed, but it would be entirely unfair to say that Free Fire isn't without its pleasures. In terms of pure, realistic “gunplay”, it's a pretty fun watch. Gunfire sounds authentic, explosions are loud and punchy, and there's a sense of randomness to the affair that feels real.

But at the same time, like all of director Ben Wheatley's films, there's a weirdness to the whole affair which feels mannered, artificial, as if he wants to make a genre film and deconstruct it at the same time and doesn't quite get it “right”.

Maybe it's because he occasionally stops the narrative for a moment of calm, or twists what might be a moment of chaos into something more poetic, and it gives the audience the feeling that maybe there's more to what's going on than just bullets and blood.

Maybe it's a case where the presence of an “artsy” director means we look for something where it isn't, or what we've found isn't anything close to what Wheatley intended. If there's a subtext to Free Fire, something about our love for violence, or darkness in human nature, or some kind of comment about film aesthetics, I sure couldn't find it amoungst the whizzing of shells and insults thrown around in various accents.

Colossal

Ah, what a little gem of a film! Colossal could have been a massive failure, but turns out to be a low-budget high-concept effort that somehow overcomes the weirdness of that concept and delivers something thoughtful and surprisingly meaningful.

I feel I can give away the central “idea” of Colossal without a spoiler warning for this very reason, but if you really want to go in blind, and you dig smaller, stranger films, just give it a shot. Otherwise, read on!

Anne Hathaway stars as Gloria, a hard-partying Manhattanite who gets kicked out of her apartment by her boyfriend (Dan Stevens) after one-too-many late nights. She moves back to an old house she inherited from now-dead parents, and reconnects with Oscar (Jason Sudekis), and old school friend, who owns a local bar. She meets his friends and starts working at the bar.

Meanwhile, a Godzilla-esque creature has attacked Seoul (no, I didn't just forget which review I'm writing). Gloria doesn't really notice it at first but after a couple of days realizes (via watching the creature's movements on YouTube) that the monster is essentially her avatar, mimicking her movements whenever she walks onto the local playground at which she makes nighttime calls to her ex-boyfriend.

At first her new friends don't believe her, but when the creature starts mimicking her dance moves live on air, they're convinced. And this is when things get really messy, as it turns out that there's more than one monster on this playground.

Colossal is exceptionally clever, setting up what seems like the reversal of a typical “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” scenario where some existentially-lost urban male moves home and meets a cutie pie who shows him how to live, and then pulling the rug out from under our expectations. At first we're like “hey, this girl needs to settle down, look at the damage she's doing to her friends with her refusal to settle down and become an adult” and then we're like “heh, look at that sweet metaphor! Her self-destruction and effects on other is so bad it has manifested as Godzilla!”.

And then the film turns on us, establishing an entirely different metaphor that plays off those expectations surprisingly well, creating yet another level of metaphor that deals with gender stereotypes and masculine rage in a powerful, yet, mindful way.

It helps that the leads are just fantastic, Hathaway a hot mess that at first feels like a stock character you're supposed to hate (perfect casting choice there) but can't help but sympathize with, and Sudekis wonderfully underplaying his obvious charm to develop a quiet, hidden menace that's all too real. Dan Stevens feels overcast, but isn't that always the case?

Colossal isn't a film for everyone. Many of you will find it too weird, and it's more than a little rough around the edges. Personally, I found it to be one of the most welcome surprises in my recent filmwatching history, and wish more things coming out of Hollywood were this ambitious.