Alien Covenant

I saw the very first Alien film at the old Capitol Theater during its premiere run.  Back then the theaters didn’t do matinée showings all the time, so Mom had to take me to downtown Charleston in the evening to see the film.  It was a haunted house on a spaceship with an alien in place of a ghost.

I really didn’t know what I was in for, but I was excited.  There were several points in the film where I remember being acutely aware of my heart beating a little faster than normal.  There were some genuine scares in the film.

When Aliens came along I was looking for more of the same.  What I got was a war film in space with a large dose of action movie heroics in the final act.  I found the early part of the film to be slow and it took me a couple of re-watches to warm to the film.  It wasn’t like Ridley Scott’s original.

Aliens 3 had a great trailer, but I missed it during its theatrical run.  When I finally did catch it, most likely on HBO, I really disliked it.  I really didn’t like the bald Ripley.  I also disliked the fact that they chose to kill her off at the end of the film.  I haven’t revisited the film, so my opinion could very well have changed.

Alien Resurrection was a little more to my taste.  I caught it at a theater in Beckley after work one Saturday.  For most people this was the nadir of the franchise, but I found it much more entertaining than Alien 3.  Once again this is a film that I have not revisited since my original viewing.

After this film the series shifted gears and did a couple of crossover films with the Predator franchise.  The xenomorphs most recently poked their heads out in Ridley Scott’s return to the world of the Weyland Corporation, Prometheus.  We watched and reviewed Prometheus on the Cinema Toast Crunch podcast (available on iTunes, Stitcher and at http://www.cinematoastcrunch.libsyn.com ).  The film was enjoyable enough, but it wasn’t Alien.

When word got out that Scott was working on a new film actually in the Alien world, I was intrigued.  The trailers looked great.  I was stoked to see this movie and to see it in 3D at the theater.  Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make it during the film’s theatrical run.  Thank God for home video!

The box art they used was eye-catching, and unlike many recent releases, they used the same art across all forms of home media.  The image, also seen in the trailer, is of a xenomorph clutching the outside of a ship and staring into the glass at the human within.  The human is omitted from the box art, but the look, the body language of the alien, tells you it has someone in its sights.  The amazing thing about this art is the use of white.  All of the previous Alien films as well as Prometheus have had very dark colors, usually the black of space spread across their box covers.

I bought the Target exclusive Blu-ray/DVD combo that came packed inside a limited edition book.  I love book packaging for discs and Target, Fox, and Titan really hit a home run with this one.  The design they came up with for holding the discs in place is the absolute best I have ever seen.  The book itself is also a thing of beauty, apparently borrowing content from Titan’s Alien Covenant art book.  I was especially drawn to the cover of the book with its simple line drawing.

Popping open my Sony Blu-ray player, I dropped in the disc and prepared myself for the Alien experience I missed in the theater.  About a week ago my podcast co-host watched Alien Covenant and had told me it was fantastic.  He said it had everything you want from an Alien movie.  I was stoked.  The film starts off slowly.  David the android from Prometheus is having a discussion with his creator.  From there we finally get introduced to the crew of the Covenant, a colonizing ship headed for a new world to settle down.  They also have an android (this one named Walter and also played by Michael Fassbender) who handles the day-to-day activities while the crew waits out the 7 year plus trip in cryo-sleep.

When a freak energy storm damages the ship, the crew is awakened early only to find their captain’s pod is malfunctioning and he bursts into flames.  While making the repairs, the ship picks up a transmission from an unknown planet.  Their scans show that the planet is perfect for colonization and is much closer than their planned destination.  They decide to check it out.

On the planet they find a perfect world with running water and free growing wheat.  There appears to be no animal life, but they know someone sent out the signal they received.  In the course of their search two of the crew inadvertently get infected by a biological agent that quickly gestates inside their bodies and soon produce a white skinned creature similar to the alien xenomorph.  The creature was referred to by fans and filmmakers as the neomorph.  These creatures don’t appear to have the extendable inner teeth of the original xenomorph, but they are still incredibly deadly with a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth.

For the most part this film does the cat and mouse game that the first film did so well.  Instead of trapping the “mice” inside a spaceship, this time they are stuck on a strange world with the creatures and David, the originator of the mysterious transmission.

I enjoyed Alien Covenant, but I had one huge problem with it before the first shot was hitting my TV screen.  We know that this is a prequel to Alien.  This means that the crew cannot survive.  If they survive, they would have warned Earth about the creatures.  Since this never happened, the crew cannot have survived.  At this point it just becomes a question of how they will die and in what order will their deaths occur.  Technically I guess you could argue that Daniels and Tennessee didn’t actually die on-screen.  They were shut inside their pods as the villainous David is revealed to have been masquerading as Walter.  He claims in his log that they died, but there is a chance they survived.  Survived to be killed at a later date by David, I would suggest.  This took away much of the suspense for me.  When someone was in danger I didn’t really feel any sense of hope that they would survive, because even if they did make it out of that peril, their fates were still sealed.  Nothing they could do was going to alter the fact that they were all going to die.

Despite this issue the film has much to recommend.  The effects look great.  The acting is top-notch with Danny McBride turning in a performance that truly surprised me.  Ridley Scott’s direction was good, but not nearly as sharp as his original turn.  All in all not a bad film, and one that I am sure I will like much better on future viewings where the fate of the crew will not be an issue for me.  Obviously on a second viewing I am expected to know who will survive.  I shouldn’t feel that way on a first viewing however.

I give Alien Covenant a 7.5 out of 10.  I feel certain that will rise to an 8 or higher upon a second viewing.  It safely falls in at #3 in my rankings of the Alien franchise, coming in behind Alien (#1) and Aliens (#2).  It is miles ahead of the other films in the series.

 

I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell

I have to admit, I didn’t even realize this movie was out.  I had seen the book at Books-A-Million a ton of times, but I was only tangentially aware that there was a movie based on it.  I happened to stumble across the DVD while shopping the pawn shops and decided to check it out.  Needless to say, I had no preconceived notions of what the movie would be like.

I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell is the semi-autobiographical tale of Tucker Max played by Matt Czuchry.  Tucker is an egotistic, self-serving jackass who takes his friend to a strip club for his bachelor party and ends up nearly causing his fiancée to call off the wedding.  His other friend had just dumped his girlfriend after he caught her performing oral sex on a rapper.  That friend meets a new woman, and he tell Tucker he doesn’t want him around right now either.  The movie covers these turbulent friendships as well as Tucker’s attempt to patch things up with both of the guys and their women.  The catch is unlike most films of this type where the character looks inside himself and finds out how big of a jerk he truly was and changes his ways, Tucker just cons everyone into believing he has changed his ways.  The film ends with zero character growth for Tucker, unless you count his being a better liar and being more tolerant of his friends’ girlfriends.

I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell spends a good part of the movie in strip bars and to say that it is a raunchy sex comedy would be a fairly apt description.  Just as Miss March found humor in messy bowel movements, I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell serves up a scene that is even messier and grosser than that film. 

I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell also features plenty of female nudity as well as Tucker’s bare ass in much of the above mentioned scene.  Tucker has a penchant or perhaps a fetish for women with disabilities.  He tells about the cops busting in on him while he has sex with a deaf girl.  He takes his buddy to a particular strip bar just so he can hook up with a midget stripper. 

I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell was a lot funnier than it had any right to be, and I could see it being very quotable in certain groups.  I did feel a little dirty after having watched it, but that soon faded.  I decided to check out the opinion on the web after I watched the film, and was surprised at how horribly the movie was slammed by some people.  A lot of the people seemed to be slamming the movie as a way to slam the real Tucker Max, author of the book on which the movie was based.  The fact of the matter is, Tucker seems like a major asshole, but the movie is still entertaining never the less.  Tucker might deserve a whopping half a star as a human being, but the film was funny enough to rate 2 1/4 stars in my book.