“Alien” – for all
its glorious cinematic blood and guts, big hidden ideas and woman as warrior
hero/savior of a kitty, was sort of like “Jaws in Space,” a monster film. A brilliant one, no less. With
exploding-from-the-inside chests and a real Paranoid Android, thank you, Thom
Yorke. I love that film, endlessly. This is far deeper, and comes from not just
the mind of original director Ridley Scott, but co-screenwriter Damon Lindelof,
the man behind the question-baiting, answer-withholding enigma-within-a-puzzle “Lost,” an
absolute favorite TV show, and I don’t watch much TV shows.
All this in a summer
flick, I love it. I digress.
To the film: Despite the million bitch-and-moan
reviews you see everywhere, those pointing out scenes don’t match up, we’re not
even on the same planet -- LV-426 -- that Ripley et al landed on in our 1979,
the movie’s 2122. Instead, here, much of the action takes place in the year
2093, on a moon dubbed LV-223, and believed to be the exact spot of the
creation of humankind, all the universe, or so a series of ancient cave
paintings tell two scientists, one a Christian named Shaw (Noomi Rapace of the European “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” trilogy) and
the other an agnostic hard-ass named Charlie (Logan Marshall-Green of “Devil”). The two
brains become the center of a $1 trillion, multi-year mission to find the
planet, and meet our makers, God, or –- so dubbed here –- The Engineers. (Go engineers!)
Yes,
things go bad soon after touchdown and a non-human, but definitely hand-built
massive structure, is explored, and bodies are ripped apart, stomachs opened,
and -– in one nasty scene -– a worm crawls out of a person’s eyeball. (I refuse
to give any spoilers, so I’m being as vague as possible here, but think this:
Worst science class field trip ever.) But this isn’t a B-horror movie, it’s
Scott’s bid to give us a pre-telling of not just “Alien,” but possibly “2001: A
Space Odyssey,” every great science fiction film ever made, including “Blade
Runner,” and our own lives. Connections to the 1979 flick are ... on your own to figure out, off screen, before or after this action.
“Alien” is just one child of this movie, this
story, this Father. So many more films are wide open to explore, even those closer to home than anything in the films we all know and love, save Parts 3 and 4, and anything with “Predator” in the title. To wit: Dig the opening scene in which a massive,
ivory-colored being drinks a strange, harsh potion atop a massive waterfall,
and immediately starts to literally crumble. From the inside out. A disc, flat then tall, hovers above. He falls,
splashes dead into the water, and his decaying cells are reborn in the water
into new live, and we can flash guess from the next jump to Scotland, we just
saw the birth of humans on Earth. All us.
In a summer flick. (Have I mentioned that before? Call me smitten.)
It’s not a perfect film, too
many of the scientists, engineers, doctors and brainiacs aboard the ship must
act foolish in order to meet their end, and a late-in-the-game self-surgery
procedure (the film’s biggest talk-about-it scene that will live on infamy and
YouTube clips for decades) would lay a person flat for a week, but the wildly
resilient character bounces back far too quickly. (Note: The person ingests and
injects enough drugs to kill every member of Guns N’ Roses, so the script leaves
wiggle room on that point. Almost.)
But damn the nitpicks, I loved it all, from the
sound design, the vast sets of the human space craft (the ironic title of the
film is its name) to the caverns of the alien temples and spacecraft, and
Michael Fassbender’s David, an android with no outward feelings or emotion, but
all too aware that as his creators -– mankind -- are all capable of being
flawed, hopeless, hopeful, beautiful, addictive, messy, psychotic, murderous, and
kind, why cannot man’s Creator also be
that. Scott even plays off of Fassbender’s godly good-looks and
stranger-among-strangers post as David obsessively watches and mimics Peter
O’Toole’s performance in “Lawrence of Arabia.” Even the 3D version rocks, including the surgery scene, and the eyeball, quite effective. Also, will someone please nominate Fassbender for an Oscar already, the man from “Shame" near owns this epic tale.
This “prequel’
is no “Thing 2011” rehash -– that’s the worst this film could be –- Scott is shooting
for the heavens, the stars, and beyond, and that’s something to celebrate
during a summer of caped hero movies and Adam Sandler comedies. Let the uncut,
full, master version of Scott’s vision come quick. God may be in the details. Imperfections and all, this is my kind of summer flick. Bravo to all. A
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