Movie/film thread: resurrected

You were expecting more than fast cars and the occasional scantily clad female?

I've actually enjoyed all the Fast and Furious movies, but watching these does require putting parts of one's brain into neutral.

No, I liked the Fart of the Furious 8. "Dominic Torretto" looks old. He has no chemistry with the love of his life. His crew are all bimbos. And Jason Statham does parkour. The Rock actually is about the only real person in the whole movie. But the absurd, James Bond style action is what I was looking in to see. The movie could have made a whole lot more, ahem, mileage out of the zombie cars (and could therefore have let the cyber criminal be a fraction more cyber), but it's a fun movie anyway. Boring by the end, but fun along the way.

I wonder how many more movies until they have to rename them "The Old, Slow, and Annoyed"

Speaking of the Fast and the Furious...

Death Race 2000 (1975)

hahaha oh lord, is every decade inherently goofy or did the 70s reinvent clownishness in a special way? A lot of the music I willingly listen to these days is from the 70s so maybe it was just the movies. Anyway, in a dystopian future 2000 USA there's a four car intercontinental death race, and lol, four cars?! They get points for knocking down pedestrians. And underneath it all, revolution is brewing...

 

Operation Mekong - 湄公河行動 - (2016)

Related, sort of, to the Mekong River Massacre where 13 Chinese nationals were murdered by pirates (maybe in collusion with, or at least in the presence of, corrupt Thai anti-drug police). That massacre happens in the movie. The rest of the movie is an uneasy mix of partial truth and wildly exuberant action movie untruth: real settings, real names, made up shootouts with rocket launchers, and other criminal weirdness (the big bad guy in the movie was real, but he apparently did not in fact, for instance, have a child army....)

As an action movie, a lot of stuff happens fast. Then there are the classic enmity tropes (one of the cops has personal history with one of the many baddies). And so on. Not a bad movie all in all. It's interesting seeing the clash of genres: HK action with fists of fury, kungfu, long running jumping throwing stuff fights in the same scenes with modern special forces action where in assaulting a bad guy hideout no squad ever would step slowly into a dark room and inch forward looking for a baddie who might be lurking in any shadow.

Starts polemical, finishes absurd, quite good in the middle.

 

Speaking of the Fast and the Furious...

Death Race 2000 (1975)

hahaha oh lord, is every decade inherently goofy or did the 70s reinvent clownishness in a special way? A lot of the music I willingly listen to these days is from the 70s so maybe it was just the movies. Anyway, in a dystopian future 2000 USA there's a four car intercontinental death race, and lol, four cars?! They get points for knocking down pedestrians. And underneath it all, revolution is brewing...

 

Definitely worth dusting off the old VCR and watching.

I'll be they've already got a 50th anniversary release for blue ray (or whatever replaces blue ray) planned for 2025.

Death Race 2050 (2017)

A Roger Corman 2017 remake of the 1975 original! Same setup, nearly the same four cars, not quite the same four drivers. And in an accidentally prescient move, the "Chairman" of the United Corporations of America rules by division and has hair-in-the-wind issues....

This movie is not bad. Well, relatively speaking, it's not bad. It can be watched. But the goofy original probably has more bite. This movie has some very interesting characters in Tammy the Terrorist and Jed Perfectus, but they're not used much. Also, this movie still has a Frankenstein, but we don't know why. Some of the state names are funny.

 

Death Race 2050 was a great flick.  Watching the original and the remake back to back would be a great way to waste an evening.

ALIEN COVENANT - 

Perfect?  No.  Equivalent to Aliens?  No.  Up their with the original Alien?  Close enough!

So I watched it. (There's a Korean hdrip available at the moment - acceptable video quality and crappy audio that can be made listenable with judicious equalizer tinkering.) And.....

Yeah, nope. Nope, nope, nope. No. I see what they were going for. But nope. I'll watch it again with properly adjusted expectations when the bluray comes out, but.... nope. Especially given that this is a prequel.

Granted, as a standalone horror movie, indeed as scifi gothic horror, it works. And maybe I'll thank it later for letting me know I had expectations, but yeah, first reaction was WUT?! THAT'S NOT THE STORY YOU WERE SETTING OUT TO TELL! As crappy as Prometheus was, Covenant seems like quite a, um, detour in the journey.

Yeah, I'll have to watch it again to know for sure, but:

[spoilers]
blitzkreiging the Engineers offscreen and then doing a Frankenstein with David? The robots are the "us" now? We are the engineers instead of the Engineers being the Engineers? Did Noomi Rapace ask for too much money or something? Making Weyland/"us" be the evil creators in this Evil Creators story when we already had the Engineers in place as the Evil Creators is......... well, I had expectations, I guess.
[/spoilers]

It was okay. I'm still processing.

Alien Covenant

And it's open in China.  Guess I didn't have to see it in the US.

I still think it's far better than Prometheus.  Not as good as Alien, but much more in line with the whole mood of Alien.

SPOILER ALERT

The whole Engineers being genetically more or less human was established in Prometheus.  My best way to interpret is is that Engineers have been around for a very very long time, and humans (along with most/all of life on Earth) were the result of Engineers either establishing life on the planet and guiding evolution or else finding that Earth organisms were sufficiently genetically compatible to allow selected alterations over time to result in humans.  Either way, they were planning to end the experiment until a lab accident ended their bioweapons program.


BIG SPOILER ALERT

Yeah, making David the creator of the egg and facehugger Aliens did seem a bit farfetched.  It also is in conflict with a frozen alien queen being in the pyramid in AVP.  However, there is a possible way out of both of these objections.

David has access to an Engineer ship which was part of their bioweapons program.  He also had access to one of their cities (homeworld?).  It's possible the Engineers had already developed (or discovered) the egg and facehugger Aliens we all know and love, but discarded them for the infectious version - since that makes bombing a city or planet a much faster way to clear out the local population if one is in a hurry to redevelop the area.  If this is the case, David would have access to the information and technology to recreate the older version.  Why he'd prefer this version remains unknown.  Maybe he likes this slower, more terrifying version of Alien reproduction for esthetic reasons.

The implication is that the passengers on the Covenant become hosts/snackfood for Aliens.  He yakked up a pair, which were probably a queen and a drone of some sort, so was all set to get production of new eggs going.  But this leaves some big unaswered questions before we get to the original Alien movie.

The Engineer ship David previously flew appears to be wrecked halfway up a mountain.  He and his victims to be are in space aboard the Covenant moving on towards their original destination.  But the crew of the Nostromo discover a huge pile of eggs on an Engineer ship, not a colony ship or at a colony.  Does David manage to take Covenant to a world with Engineer ships and transfer all the eggs his new queen lays to an Engineer ship for some reason?  Why park the ship on a world which is uninhabitable without major terraforming?  In Aliens, it appears that this level of terraforming was developed while Ripley and her cat were still waiting for their lifeboat to be rescued.  Why is there a beacon on the shipload of eggs which takes just a little too long to translate as being a warning?  David would have put out a sign saying "Free Kittens!" and found a way to preserve himself so he could watch the fun when someone showed up, or he'd just have taken the eggs to another colony world.  How does the Company know there's some life form so interesting along the Nostromo's flight path that they put Ash on the crew to try to insure retrieval of a specimen (crew expendable )?

My guess is we need one more movie to fill in the gaps. 

Alien: Covenant

*SPOILERS*

I still think it's far better than Prometheus.  Not as good as Alien, but much more in line with the whole mood of Alien.

Agreed.

BIG SPOILER ALERT

Yeah, making David the creator of the egg and facehugger Aliens did seem a bit farfetched.

That's what was going on? Good lord. I breezed right over that, taking it to be both odd as something for David to say in this movie and sufficiently self-aggrandising that it fit in with whatever was going wrong with his personality. Didn't take it to be true, even though the sudden appearance a little later of an Original Alien sort of did back up the claim.... All the creatures on the planet were thin-skinned, pale and afraid of light whereas the OAs are dark, more primitive lizard-like and considerably more armoured.

So I went back and got some David quotes:

The pathogen was designed to infect all non-botanical lifeforms. All the animals. The meat if you will. Either kill them outright or use them as incubators to spawn a hybrid form. Highly aggressive.

The pathogen took so many forms, and was extremely mutable. Fiendishly inventive in fact. The original liquid atomised to particles when exposed to the air. ten years on, all that remains, outside of the original virus, are these gorgeous beasts.

Patience is everything. From the eggs (!?!?!) came these parasites. Shock troops of the genetic assault. Waiting for a host. Entering the host. Rewriting the DNA. And ultimately, producing... well, these enviable unions. My beautiful bestiary. Soon enough I began a bit of genetic experimentation of my own. Cross breeding, hybridising, what have you.

But then

I've found perfection here. I've created it. Perfect organism.


So, gothic horror, a la Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, etc. I suppose I can live with that. It lets the original Geiger ideas come out and play. I think the 1979 Alien was, for lack of a genre term, industrial horror rather gothic, but what the hey

And David winning is a sour end for industrial horror but suitable for gothic, I guess.

SPOILER ALERT

David did some cross-breeding and other genetically tinkering, but it's quite possible he's exaggerating his role and really just rolled back the clock on an Engineer creation to be very close to its original form.  The infections version is great for quickly taking out large populations.  The facehugger version works better in close quarters (and can blow right through a space suit helmet).

Alien: Covenant & Alien: Prometheus

*spoilers* & speculation

The original "pathogen" appears to have various roles. Assuming it's the same stuff as used at the beginning of Prometheus, then in very small doses it can jump-start evolution. And by very small doses I mean one cupful for an entire planet. So I shall just go ahead and assume the black stuff is a powerful mutagen that promotes aggressive adaptation, aggression and violent struggle being good things in terms of evolution. In very large amounts then, this pathogen either completely fries anything living or really focuses every aggressive, predatory characteristic into one mobile, living package. That sort of makes science-y sense. And then along comes David...

So yeah, I guess it makes sense. From the stuff he's given - the pathogen, the population of the planet, and Shaw - he crafts a particular version of the pathogen's results. He uses some dose of the pathogen that's more than is needed for evolutionary development and less than is needed for genocide, and the stable version he gets has eggs and facehuggers. How he got the eggs is another question. Did they come from a queen or did he craft them himself? If the narrative is going to fall apart, it'll be there, I guess.

Wonder Woman (2017)

Origin story, backdated to World War I. Steve Rogers blunders upon Themyscira, the lush city state island nation of the Amazons, bringing with him news (and violence) of WWI. Diana, the daughter of the queen, insists she must go into the world to seek out and kill the cause of all this violence, Ares, the god of war.

The movie is likeable. FWIW, I think the ending a bit weak. The lessons Diana learns could have used quite a bit more development. The story might well have been a decent ten episode tv show, like Daredevil or Jessica Jones. (Except that DD and JJ are Marvel whereas WW is DC, like that matters anything worth a damn.) I suppose it means something good of the movie that the character appears a whole lot more substantial than the story quite allowed  That might be from Gal Gadot's characterisation - she seems to make the character be larger than the story she's in.

 

Ghost in the Shell (2017)

Recreates iconic imagery and sequences from the anime on top of a significantly altered story. Odd! The effect is a jumble, and whoever Scarlett Johansson is, she's not Motoko Kusanagi. For one thing, she has a human brain and a former identity to seek out, whereas Kusanagi's thing in the anime is whether or not she was ever human at all.

The movie's okay, I guess. Every scene looks like a chunky back alley or a sound stage (or both) and Scarjo is too short, but pffft. I have no real opinion in the end.