Cast: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demián Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Jussie Smollett, Callie Hernandez, Amy Seimetz, Nathaniel Dean, Alexander England, Uli Latukefu, Tess Haubrich
Director: Ridley Scott
Duration: 122 mins
In his origination of this ongoing series with 1979’s Alien, Ridley Scott created a claustrophobic terror project within the confines of a labyrinthian space craft – and now, almost four decades later, although the films may have advanced technologically, alas, the narrative procedure remains extremely similar. Big bad monster enters the human body by imaginative means, it re-appears at ‘birth’, becomes angry with a minimum of delay and sets about dismantling the numbers within the crew as rapidly as it grows. In this latest outing, Alien Covenant, within an onscreen time of roughly two hours, we follow a group of intergalactic explorers on a mission to a new planet, where they plan to start a new human civilisation. But guess who or what is about to get in the way? No prizes here xenomorph fans. Afficionados will find the routine pleasantly familiar as Scott doesn’t veer too far from the tried and tested formula. The film unfolds as a weakened hybrid of the ponderous philosophy in Prometheus and more towards the ammo-fuelled survival tactics of the first two Alien films, as it plunges ahead, setting the story a decade later. A splendidly robotic dual role from Michael Fassbender elicits expanded theories on creationism concepts, but most paying homo sapiens will be more than satisfied with a large helping of blood spattered alienettes bursting forth from the chests and backs of the hapless gullible craft staff.
In Prometheus, an earlier outfit of astronauts arrived on a mysterious planet, only to locate a virus which implanted the eponymous beasts within unsuspecting human victims. This time however, our new team is attracted to the same planet via a signal, picked up during a cataclysmic electronic storm by the ‘music’ of bespectacled milkybarkid country tunesmith John Denver. Considering this is set some 100+ years after Denver’s heyday, it’s quite remarkable that the character played by Danny McBride reveres him so avidly. Regrettably, Covenant shares none of its predecessor’s spirit, as the cumbersomely violent participants show absolutely no interest in the origins of the almost-extinct population who were once this planet’s sole inhabitants. As such, I found myself rooting for the latter, and relieved when the boring former met their inevitable respective fates.
Cast: Anne Hathaway, Jason Sudeikis, Austin Stowell
Director: Nacho Vigalando
110 mins
Dorothy Parker once memorably expounded, “What fresh hell is this?” I will paraphrase on Colossal, a derisory, moronic mess that will have all film fans exiting the cinema with a head-scratching “WTF?”. Anne Hathaway plays an odd, scatterbrained drunk named Gloria who becomes obsessed with the news of a gigantic monster lizard that is terrorising the city of Seoul in South Korea (it was probably barred from entering the North). United Nations declares this to be a global crisis, but Gloria ignores warnings of world destruction, as she is responsible for the entire thing, due, simply to the stamping of her feet in a patch of parkland in her home town. This apparently has created the monster, and it in turn mimics her every move, which her cretinous chums follow on a laptop – even though parks have no wi-fi access. Wait though – it gets worse. Eventually Gloria, despite clearly being financially impoverished, jumps on a plane to go over to South Korea to tell the monster off for its bad behaviour. Bonus - you too can risk the loss of your very own sanity! Oh, and let’s not forget the preposterously insufferable screenplay by Spanish writer-director Nacho Vigalondo! Gloria has a boyfriend Tim (a role so vacant it could be played by a discarded plastic bag), but goes instead to Dan Stevens (he of Beauty and The Beast/The Guest/Downton Abbey fame), who kicks her out of their New York flat because he’s tired of never seeing her without a hangover. She goes back to her home town and hooks up with an old school chum named Oscar who owns a bar (the tiresome and bland Jason Sudeikis, in quite the worst role of his extremely duff career – and that is saying something). Oscar divides his time between necking endless bottles of beer, beating up his customers, setting off a giant firework in his bar and identifying with the Seoul monster’s new friend, an equally ginormous robot. He then burns up his bar. Gloria wrecks her house. He punches her in the face and leaves her with a black eye.
When last we see her, she’s trampling through the streets of Seoul, wiped out, with her bruised face and hair like an explosion in a Barlanark midden, and watching the lizard monster on her phone. As Gloria, Anne Hathaway resembles an asylum-for-the-terminally-deranged escapee sporting an old, discarded wig, this under the quirky direction of the aforementioned Vigalondo and the aforementioned script which appears to have been phoned in from a zoo by a hyena with dementia. It all results in a film that is as unwatchable as it is incomprehensible, and that, believe you me, is a colossal understatement.
