Director: Ridley Scott
Writers: Jack Paglen (story by), Michael Green (story by), John Logan (screenplay), Dante Harper (screenplay)
Stars: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Danny McBride, Billy Crudup

Synopsis: When her boyfriend dumps her before their exotic vacation, a young woman persuades her ultra-cautious mother to travel with her to paradise, with unexpected results.

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Alien (1979) is considered by many to be one of the best films ever made, and for a good reason. Alien was a huge success that spawned several other movies and the franchise has become a staple of mainstream culture. In the time of reboots and remakes, it’s no surprise that Alien would get the prequel treatment. Ridley Scott jumped back into the world of Xenomorph’s – sort of – with 2012’s Prometheus, rebirthing a beloved franchise that he kicked off some 30 years earlier. Not everyone loved Prometheus, although I enjoyed it for the most part, and if you did as well, you will more than likely enjoy Alien: Covenant.

Set in 2104, a decade after Prometheus, the Covenant is carrying 2,000 souls on a route toward the distant planet of Origae-6, where they hope to settle and propagate the race. If you are familiar with this franchise, then you already know that bad things are around the corner, and once that starts becoming true, our team finds itself heading to a closer planet with the intent to expedite the colonization process.

The new female heroine in this movie is Daniels, played by Katherine Waterson, and she does a great job selling the bad-ass heroine. The character of Ellen Ripley is still to this day one of the most iconic roles in all of the cinema, so it will be hard for any character to reach that same level, but Daniels has empowering qualities. Despite the pressures, Noomi Rapace (in Prometheus) and now Waterson continue the strong female characters that made this franchise a game-changer regarding gender roles. Synthetic characters also define the Alien franchise, and Michael Fassbender plays not one but two androids in Alien: Covenant. The more Fassbender we get, the better we all are. However, the performance I enjoyed the most was surprisingly from Danny McBride, who plays the chief pilot Tennessee. There are several other characters we see throughout the film, but most of them come off as dry and forgettable, another attribute we’ve seen before in this series. That said, the performances overall are good and add to the experience.

This being an Alien film, and it being Ridley Scott, there are elements of horror here. People need to die, so characters decide to venture off by themselves, as you do after getting attacked by unknown creatures. It’s a trope we’ve seen countless times before in this franchise – and the genre at large – and it’s pretty tiresome. There isn’t anything new in terms of commentary or aesthetic execution to make those actions feel earned.

On another note, baby aliens are the thing of 2017. Groot was first, and now we have the Neomorph. Although not as cute as Groot, it will steal your heart, but not in the same way. In fact, it will probably eat it. Those that were unhappy with the lack of aliens in Prometheus will be happy to know that the aliens show up here, and in a big way. Only Ridley Scott can blend the score and point the camera in the right position to get that necessary jolt, amplifying the aliens’ presence.

I am withholding most of the details of the story because watching the twist unfold is a great experience, and I would not want to ruin that for you. The first hour of this movie is fantastic in setting up this film narratively, and what its main goals are in regards to its prequel nature. That said, the second and third acts feel uneven tonally, which does become a little distracting in parts. Alien: Covenant at the very least is a popcorn movie that does its job well, and is one of the best-looking films in the past few years. The horror and gore is enough to get people in the theater and for them to have fun.

Overall Grade: B

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Hear our podcast review on Episode 222, coming soon.

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Director: James Gray
Writers: James Gray (screenplay)
Stars: Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller, Tom Holland

Synopsis: A true-life drama, centering on British explorer Col. Percival Fawcett, who disappeared while searching for a mysterious city in the Amazon in the 1920s.

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Some filmmakers are an acquired taste; I welcome James Gray into that category. Up until this point, Gray’s films have been so tedious and meandering in ways that felt fortuitous instead of deliberate, and ultimately emotionally distant. From the mess that was We Own the Night, the fine but uneven Two Lovers, or the empty melodrama The Immigrant, his films are beautifully shot to be sure, but emotionally stirring? That’s debatable. Surely that debate will continue with The Lost City of Z, Gray’s latest project and yet another attempt at a fashionable recreation of old Hollywood (much like The Immigrant). But this time, as the end credits rolled, my initial thought was a simple one; okay James Gray, now you finally have my full attention.

For the first time, a James Gray film finds a consistent and nicely focused through-line, where the journey from beginning to end continually adds emotional and thematic layers to that connective through-line. The Lost City of Z proves James Gray is actually a fine storyteller, something I’ve yet to notice in his previous films (and probably never will). Based on the novel by David Grann, the film tells the biographical story of Percival Fawcett, the British soldier and explorer who made it his goal to uncover an ancient civilization in the Amazon. The journey through the Amazonian jungle is violent, stirring, and unpredictable (many comparisons can be made the Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now), but Gray chooses to make the meditative journey the more interesting one, when Fawcett is not even in the jungle. It’s what grounds an already aesthetically thrilling expedition, but if it’s anything else that holds the film’s drama together it’s Charlie Hunnam’s performance.

As Percy Fawcett, Charlie Hunnam gives a rather cerebral performance, one that communicates without always speaking. With his ultimate goal in finding this lost civilization, one that the English government feels ultimately ignorant toward, Hunnam makes Fawcett into a human constantly at war with himself, battling his own selfish desires for nobility with establishing cultural open-mindedness. His intentions are honorable, but also narrow minded, and what’s heartbreaking is just how much Fawcett himself realizes that. His constant internal struggle (which just may feel like a struggle for some) is fragmented and sometimes messy, and that’s the point; he’s never content or finished in his motives, and Hunnam turns that war into something deeply psychological and heartbreaking.

This makes the film’s finally act so beautifully symbolic, a way for Fawcett to achieve that balance of his obsession without neglecting his family and friends, a realization made apparent while on the trenches of World War I. Both Hunnam and Gray rightfully use that to give The Lost City of Z a natural sense of progression. But credit must also go to Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson, and Tom Holland as well; sometimes a performance is so good that you are given character history without the use of trite exposition, something the supporting cast wonderfully excels in here. Tom Holland especially, as Percy’s son Jack, whose initial distance with his father is deeply felt and understood simply because of Holland; any other performance may have failed in emulating that.

Perhaps it’s the film’s jungle setting that matches James Gray’s meandering tone; the film deals with doubt and uncertainty, and the sense of feeling lost in time amidst the smoky jungle landscapes feels complimentary rather than contradictory. Whether it was dumb luck or not, James Gray found a rhythm here; The Lost City of Z is a Hollywood epic in the classic sense, one that reminds us why the David Lean’s or Cecil B. DeMille’s of the time are still talked about today. Get lost in it.

Overall Grade: A

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Here our podcast review on Episode 219:

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Director: Guy Ritchie
Writers: Joby Harold (screenplay), Guy Ritchie (screenplay)
Stars: Charlie Hunnam, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Jude Law, Eric Bana

Synopsis: Robbed of his birthright, Arthur comes up the hard way in the back alleys of the city. But once he pulls the sword from the stone, he is forced to acknowledge his true legacy – whether he likes it or not.

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I have a little bit of advice for Hollywood if you want to tell an updated story on classics we grew up with; do not include the word “Legend” in it at all. The Legend of Hercules and The Legend of Tarzan were not met with cinematic praise and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is another to add to that list. Perhaps having “Legend” in the title is irrelevant, but having Charlie Hunnam play King Arthur doesn’t help that matter either.

I did not think it was possible to open a film with a brutal battle where the most cringe-worthy thing about it is the handling of the opening credits. The stylistic flair of director Guy Ritchie and the way he edits this sequence is just the beginning of horrible decisions that plague the film.

After we see the murder of Arthur’s family by Vortigern (Jude Law), we are treated to the quickest human growth cycle that will have the fruit fly jealous. Arthur (Charlie Hunnam) isn’t aware of his royal lineage until he draws the sword Excalibur from the stone. The best thing about making this movie in 2017 among the superhero excess is that Excalibur can get into the fun. Excalibur grants Arthur superhero abilities and the action sequences that follow rival some of the best we’ve seen in modern filmmaking.

Guy Ritchie has a unique style where he likes to have scenes where characters are telling a story and we see that story happen as its being told; but here it just does not work – primarily because Hunnam cannot sell his character. In fact, the acting overall is partially weak. Ritchie is a director that is hit or miss, but due to the uneven dialogue and pacing in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, it is probably safe to assume there was some sort of studio interface since Warner Bros. loves to do that.

There is something that movies do that annoy me and that is when a certain character withholds a skill that doesn’t logically make sense. For example, in Transformers: Age of Extinction, we find out that Optimus can magically fly and if he would have just done that two hours earlier, none of us would have wasted nearly three hours of our lives. Perhaps that is nitpicky, but if not executed properly, it sticks out like a sore thumb and of course this happens in King Arthur. There is a certain character that does something in the final act, and when it happens, you will sit there shaking your head in shame.

Fun and entertaining are used often to describe certain films, and some audiences may give those movies a pass, but not me. Settling for its fun and entertainment value will hinder quality storytelling and creative scripts. King Arthur: Legend of The Sword is neither fun nor entertaining, and calling it such is offensive to films that are actually fun. And we deserve better.

Overall Grade: D

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Director: Lone Scherfig
Writers: Gaby Chiappe (screenplay), Lissa Evans (based on the novel “Their Finest Hour and a Half” by)
Stars: Gemma Arterton, Sam Claflin, Bill Nighy, Jack Huston

Synopsis: A former secretary, newly appointed as a scriptwriter for propaganda films, joins the cast and crew of a major production while the Blitz rages around them.

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Their Finest is a war-time drama about Welsh journalist Catrin Cole, winningly played by Gemma Arterton, who gets seconded to the Ministry of Information film department to write the ‘slop’, or women’s dialogue for the much-derided ‘informationals’ that made up part of a trip to the cinema in 1940. Once there she deals with standard establishment bigotry from likes of Richard E Grant and Jeremy Irons but shows her talent enough to be recommended by Sam Caflin’s Tom Buckley to help out on a possible feature film about two sisters who stole their father’s boat and rescued soldiers from Dunkirk.

Once this film within a film starts, we meet Bill Nighy as Ambrose Hilliard, a gradiose actor past his prime actor who thinks he’s tthirty years old and still awesome. The film makers then have to deal with propaganda demands from the ministry of war (add in a genuine American airman, who naturally cannot act), a constantly shifting script, complicated actors as well as the stresses and strains of life during the war years, and the challenges of finding and holding on to love during the particular challenges of the Blitz.

On the whole I found this film entertaining, but a little uneven. It was frequently quite funny, then sad, then hopeful, then bittersweet, then funny again, which makes it very hard to pigeonhole into a single genre. It is slightly romantic, it is gently comedic, but it is also hard edged and, in places, quite brutal. It is also unable to wholly avoid cliche, which is a bit of a shame.

However, the performances are, uniformly, fantastic. Gemma Arterton combines sweetness and steel in a measured, nuanced performance that is utterly winning. Catrin comes across at times a naive, even downtrodden, but also strong and bloody-minded. She’s a complex, fully rouded character and Arterton delivers her with skill. Likewise Sam Caflin is superb as the ascerbic, sexist even cruel co-screenwriter Tom Buckley. The man is a hard-to-pin down character who is frequently utterly horrible, but Caflin’s performance enables us to find a damaged, even likeable man within the outwardly hideous character without the script needing to telegraph his innate decency. It’s an extremely tricky role, and Caflin pulls it off admirably. Bill Nighy too could have simply cruised through his role, seeing as it effectively just requires him to be the Bill Nighy role he’s performed for years now, but the actor brings more to well crafted character, allowing him to be more than just the light relief. In a film of subtleties, Nighy’s ever so gentle romance with Helen McCrory, and his understated ‘bromance’ with Eddie Marsden’s agent (both supporting roles expertly performed) is amongst the most subtle.

The script, by Gaby Chiappe, delivers these fine actors with plenty of well-wrought lines and subtle characterization, though I do wonder if it would have been better served with a bit more time, despite this being quite a long film. We do sometimes lurch from horror to banality, though it never loses sight of the deprivations of wartime. Sometimes the incongruity of the daily routine is brutally disrupted by the destructive, deadly bombing of the German Blitz. Other times the day-to-day ho-hum routine of sheltering, working and even loving whilst at any moment a bomb could explode and end your life, is beautifully drawn. It just occasionally feels a bit rushed, or a bit ‘paint by numbers.’ One wonders with a bit more running time if these various elements could have been blended together a bit more evenly.

However this is nitpicking. Ione Scherfig, the director, has delivered a fine film, balancing the horrors of wartime, the struggles of women to be accepted in a man’s world where most of the men are elsewhere, and a fine examination of the craft of 1940’s film-making.

By the end of the film, when despite of all the problems that have beset the production and our heroes, we see cinema audiences reacting to the fruits of their labors, you have to posses a hard heart not to feel lifted. It’s a fine film about women shaking off the shackles of the pre-war bigotry, rising to the challenge of the world, and succeeding.

As Bill Nighy’s Ambrose Hilliard says at one point “we only get these opportunities because young men are fighting, and dying, elsewhere.” This is a film about opportunities and when to seize them. It is not a comedy, not a laugh riot, and it is being misrepresented by the advertising. It is, however, a well made, very well acted, wartime drama. And, if you are in the mood for this kind of film, you would do well to look it out.

Overall Grade: B+

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