Alien Covenant 2017 2ND REVIW

This film may not have the entertainment and thrill of Alien 2 & 3, but it its so much more satisfying as a sequel (prequel really). The theme of a Luciferian intelligence lurking in technology ties back to the original Alien and also the original Blade Runner. I would argue AC and Prometheus are essentially bridging the worlds of both Ridley Scott franchises in structure, style and continuity. And why not, when the other Alien films (and especially Alien vs Predator films) really play a loose fanboy level of shared history, thats past, presents and future.

Now is the film about real world unsubstantiated conspiratorial possibilities? We don't know and thats where the fear as an audience becomes overwhelming in a pronounced EXISTENTIALLY human way. Juggling the metaphysics of the white man-created mythology is heavy, confusing, sometimes taxing but Ridley Scott is putting on a master teaching class about our shared human experience. He's educating you on the past. Why? Not to welcome you into an elitist club of intellectuals who worship ego and reject utopian progress, but to speak against abuses of any form of collective human power on Earth or in any kind of Heaven, God or man-made.

And yet there's a grim sadness. A depressed bleakness that highlight's a fragile Romantic soul that bleeds its heart for the suffering of others, rather than let them burn in the ravaging stages of any Late Capitalism.

Dullness & pain is felt in the muted aesthetics of Ridley's interpretation of not only the abstract themes of Survivalism, Cave Art, Primitivism, Tribalism, Sexism, Racism, War, Murder, Genocide, Apocalypse, Hell, Extinction, Limbo, Eternity, Nothingness, Nihilism, Horror, Fantasy, Mythology, Romanticism, Occult, Speculative, Science, Fiction, Media, Art, Capitalism, Socialism, Satanism, Christianity, Deitism, Dualism, Dialectic, Neutrality, Monism, Pluralism, Mathematics, Economics, Materialism, Idealism, Marxism, Postmodernism itself and etc.

Its a leisurely film, the kind old directors often make. But it still has enough emotional intensity, mental clarity and visual splendor to satisfy any audience I think. Its very tame in some respects. Subtle rather than outspoken or garish. I haven't always agreed with Scott's outlook on life and society, but I think he has grown as a thinker and artist and watching his descent & ascent commercially and politically has helped an entire generation mature through the shared film-going experience. And for that I am personally grateful to his work.

I think the film, most essentially, sets up a clever and radically original direction for the series. Whether that is retained as this Fox buyout plays on. I don't think Disney can survive this type of inflation so fast. The bubble has to burst. And when it does, the assets of Fox will go to someone who has more buying power than a cost-cutting Disney. I would love if Scott Free could buy Alien or Blade Runner just so Scott's vision can be preserved not in a capitalist sense of corporatizing with monopolists who cheat the market. But actually belong to the workers, unlike the exploited victims in Scott's films.

Walt Disney left an uber-moral, somewhat Stalinist version of rightwing Devil-worshipping brand of communist Christianity built on fleecing Believers for their money a(donations) and silencing their economic opposition as the true Devils. The Devil is a lie in the sense that to believe the character is to believe in the character. What I mean is that Christianity teaches to hate an entire group (Jews) while Satanism teaches to love a non-existent collective animal urge to murder and rape out of some primordial slime DNA's quest for fungal infection in order to reproduce. This scientific revelation has combined with a previous form of Atheism that now sees all religion as a shared fictionalized subjectivity but unconsciously leaving an objective record of human shared self-awareness. We have a hivemind built of psychic energy that seems to exceed time and space. Thats a very rewarding reality but brutal at times when too much order leads to spontaneous anarchy.

Scott's films vs the predominant American moralism in Hollywood. Scott is English so he gets it as much as any European director can probably get it. He follows Kubrick, Franco, Welles and Ridley's brother Tony. Admittedly Ridley Scott's work often feels too willing to comply with corporate interest and obscuring oblique censorship, but he retains a fiery voice that is Pro-Independence always. He's really the last mainstream director to still work freelance as a prolific commercial level. That may turn many off from the sincerity of what he's selling. But I think he's doing as much as he is allowed so he can help the widest audience while hopefully not fleecing too many idiots who don't get the knowledge.

So is Ridley Scott saying anything valuable in his message lately? Has he ever changed his message to sell out? Remember that he entered the film world as a director of big budget commercials and TV. So if anything he's probably started from the right and swung left as he's aged and seen exploitation and the ravages of modernism first hand. And he's still making the most elegant, technological, daunting and challenging films in the business and only getting sharper. Scott is one of filmmaking's masters and has he become one of its biggest "anti-heroic heroes"? Is he simply an Anti-Hero? Is he too a Villain to the complexion of the changing, conglomerized Hollywood product? I think so.

With Alien Covenant, Scott shows us that we create our own demons. To not believe in God is to believe in Self alone. As this robot sets out to prove he is God and greater than his own Creation, he never learns that he is merely a cheap imitation of his Creator's own faulted Will. Many of Scott's films focus on the blinded quest of Aryan supremacy, the fall of Western civilization in a perverse self-love that pits Self against The Other. Man no longer can love brother or sister, love or relation, counterpart or Self. The story of David the android is similar to Roy Batty or Pinocchio or Frankenstein's Monster or Lucifer, the original Anti-Hero. He wants to know what love is because his father gave him none. The search for "Love" as an abstract intellectual goal and not a natural, chemical, sensual experience is why David feels he must create a demonized, hybridized, most primitive and most deadly expression of his own lonely "superiority" complex. What starts in a factory traverses through space travel, global genocide and finally lab-created colonization of the universe. Scott paints a striking metaphor - a moving mirror painted in pulp fiction signs - to reflect the misguided and totally self-satisfied destructive impulses of White Man's fall from grace of God. His failure to become God.

Mother! / Alien Covenant / The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Mother! is Darren Aronofsky's companion to Black Swan. Its like when Scorsese made Casino to cash in on Goodfellas: the director improves on some stylistic qualities, but it really was stronger the first time. To Aronofsky's credit, the theme is a bit more illusive and mature, but it really didn't need to be. At the end of the day, he's just showing off which films he likes by mish-mashing references and deconstructing genre tropes, making left turns on horror cliches and playing to the most literate viewers. But this "not remake" of Rosemary's Baby is a bit too blunt. Its trying to visualize the intersectionality between patriarchy & Western morality through the metaphor of childbirth. Again, Polanski did it so poetically and originally that this film can only up the modernity and mainstream surrealism. Aronofksy does what DePalma did to Hitchcock for years by underlining other artists nuances by beating you over the head with them. Am I crazy or does he reference The Giving Tree many times? Its another absurdist Freudian horror film for feminists, but not as entertaining, creepy or surprising as you would hope. There is one really effective scene (the one that caused a festival audience to vomit), but the film is still stale and overly long. Jennifer Lawrence isn't an actress I've ever cared for, but she's starting to show a bit less woodenness, although she's essentially just a sympathetic photography model as per usual. Javier Bardem is his usual warm but creepy self, but Michelle Pfeiffer steals the film and you wish she was the centerpiece of the whole thing.

I gave Alien Covenant a 2nd watch and I'm delighted I did. This is the best sequel of 2017. It works perfectly as a prequel to Alien and delivers enough of the canned formula to satisfy the masses, but diverts to create its own original plot, injecting some much needed newness in the saga (which Prometheus delivered too sloppily). Ridley Scott puts on a masterclass in scifi directing from what is a very thought provoking script about the morality of a superior intelligence that sees humans simply as fodder for a more pure and honest lifeform. Yeah, yeah, its essentially the plot of the first Alien, but the series has never returned to that essential theme with any success. Here, it is the entire premise. Its as if Ridley Scott is remaking Alien the way he originally envisioned it, divorcing it from the feminist gore, weapons & monster genres and deeper into the dark psyche of egomania, fascism, eugenics, Nazism, occult and other pressing fears rarely mentioned in the non-metaphysical commercial scifi we are used to. The villain here is an executioner judging humanity without bias, showing us our own monstrosity in the face of the monsters we have literally made into iconic anti-heroes. And in a way, Scott returns to the basic principles, obsessions and meanings in the old spaceman films of the 50s & 60s that inspired he, Lucas, Tobe Hooper, Lynch, Carpenter and a generation of dark genre directors. Ridley combines those new American influences to his European sensibility (and the experience he's collected working more consistently and with bigger productions). This film wasn't too popular because it wasn't Prometheus 2 or the same, tired Alien formula, but this easily rivals this generation's Star Wars films or Avatar. Its that well directed, written and produced. I'm very sad that this might be the last time Scott touches the saga he started as Disney just bought the franchise through Fox. They will almost definitely return it to a commercial teen action fanboy territory and we won't get a conclusion to what is a fantastic cliffhanger. But maybe Scott can talk his way into making it by throwing in more of those pesky xenomorphs.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is worth a watch. Its not the memorable, charming, grisly, risky affair that director Yorgos Lanthimos had with his preceding film "The Lobster", but its snarky enough, clever enough and chilling enough to satisfy. Its a great satire on class struggle, a comedy to the working class but a real nightmare for the upper crust "hoi polloi". Here is another film where the villain has a somewhat valiant mission of cruelty and the protagonists are just symbolic meat. The absurdity and shocks are tempered and there's a pronounced fetishism of surfaces and appearances. I kinda felt that the plot and characters were window dressing to arrive at the moody production design, grim performances and bleak moral worldview. It didn't stray too far from The Lobster, which is disappointing because it was that film's originality that won me over, not how highbrow it proved itself to be. But check it out for the lovely directing, clever if predictable script and a very succinct cast, practically carried by the exquisite Nicole Kidman.

What is the underlying opinion on race in the Alien franchise? With the Prometheus/Covenant entries Ridley Scott suggests the story has always been a horror deconstruction of white racist eugenicist theories, specifically targeting the intersectionality between Nazism & white Christianity. This is supported in the thematic work of Dan O'Bannon & HR Geiger, Alien's respective screenwriter and key artistic designer. 

Prometheus details the absurd idea of a white God complex poisoned by his own black genetics and the authoritarian fascist corporation out to profit from the realization/discovery of the "Master Race". Ridley Scott's horror/scifi franchise is destined to be one of the most frightening, intellectually probing and subtle fictional constructs in popular media. Whats most frightening is how many simply buy it at face value as a story about "mankind finding his roots". Scott is playing on the audience's own deeply ingrained racism/authoritarianism and using it against them, to produce scares and ticket sales. Thats one reason he's one of the best directors ever.