In Which We Stand Against The Music Of Time

Another Country

by ETHAN PETERSON

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
dir. James Gunn
136 minutes

Kurt Russell's first scene in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is this creepy flashback of him and his young girlfriend where the camera barely glimpses his face. Since he is supposed to be twenty years old during these scenes, and is in all actuality a ripe 66, director James Gunn papers over his face with some hot CGI. The fact that he did not all have the courtesy to do this for Sylvester Stallone as well seems deliberately mean and perhaps even anti-Italian.

Stallone portrays a ship captain named Stakar. He is absolutely tiny, like morsel-sized, and he only really has one scene. Unfortunately, I was unable to recognize a single word he slurred in any of his dialogue, so this review will remain incomplete until the movie comes out on Blu-Ray or Gunn updates the special effects for a theatrical rerelease forty years from now when they seem vague and corny. Right now they seem vibrant and fun, but as we know, time turns everything into molten shit.

The plot of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 concerns Russell finding his son Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), and taking him to the planet he has created, called Ego. As a result, Star spends the entire movie completely gullible in his Papa's thrall and never really goes anywhere. Pratt is deemphasized in favor of the real protagonist, Rocket (Bradley Cooper) a CGI animal, who is briefly imprisoned before attempting a rescue mission. Rocket's internal dilemma is that he has the sense he may be nothing but a little asshole.

It is sort of sad to see Gunn hamstrung with the general shittiness of this cast and material. He is a bravura director, whose swirling, colorful style for these films is extremely sophisticated, and should fit the diaphonous galaxies on display. The art direction in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2. ranges from awe-inspiring to dogshit, and the general atmosphere of the planet Ego comes across as a bit too familiar. Gunn papers over this lack of visual depth with stunning movement and accomplished cinematography.

Pratt looks absolutely huge physically, and he should have a lot to bite into on an emotional level with his father as the antagonist. This is the most disappointing of his recent roles from that perspective. Harrison Ford was never great at communicating sorrow or indecision either, but his directors and writers knew how to give him purposeful, active characters that played to his abilities. When Pratt is in motion, he is like a high-speed train, but stalled his considerable bulk is too close to the impact of his larger colleague, Drax (Dave Bautista).

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is ostensibly a comedy, and the film is at its most amusing when the various members of the starfaring team are playing off one another. Unfortunately Gunn decides to split them up for most of the film, and the resulting pairings do not work so well. The flirting between Quill and Gamora (Zoe Saldana) is given a higher priority than the latter's more interesting plotline with her sister Nebula (the preternaturally talented Karen Gillian). Gamora never asks Quill for advice or details the vagaries of her situation, which is a lot more complex than anything her boyfriend is going through.

Instead of analyzing these deeper issues, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 spends way too much time having the characters laugh at each other's jokes. It starts to become seriously forced around the time a space pirate named Taserface has his name mocked for ten straight minutes. It is a very strange bit that reeks of body-shaming, and it would have made a nice DVD extra if it weren't for the fact that Rocket is not given anyone else to crack on.

This is a minor quibble, however, when the film's completely awful soundtrack manages to ruin most of the extended action sequences. Through careful analysis, I can inform you that outside of a single song by Fleetwood Mac, every single piece of music used in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is an unending horror on the ears. I understand that this gimmick was meant to offer something to spice up the lack of cohesion in the original film, but transplanting it to another feature-length audio mess was easily the worst decision Gunn made on this project.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which Katherine Waterston Wears A T-Shirt With No Sleeves

Mother May I?

by ETHAN PETERSON

Alien: Covenant
dir. Ridley Scott
122 minutes

Alien: Covenant has one truly great scene and a bevy of variously amusing ones. This great scene happens when Oram (Billy Crudup) walks in on David (Michael Fassbender) communicating with a gigantic white alien/humanoid hybrid. He is appalled at what he is seeing, and the fresh corpse that shimmers in a nearby fountain. Still he waits an additional second beyond what might be appropriate before blasting the creature to bits. He tells David, who is an android stranded on the planet Oram has navigated his colony ship to, that he must explain everything to him.

The concept of a megalomaniacal android has never been explored too fully, since once such qualities are embodied in an individual, we generally regard them as human. Daniels (Katherine Waterston) is second-in-command on Oram's ship, and she does not need things explained to her. She walks into a room where David displays a series of drawings which explicitly detail the intersections between alien and human life with which he has occupied the past ten years. She has found the lair of a monster, and she looks for a weapon to destroy it.

Waterston is as subtle and expressive an actress as there is. Unfortunately, Fassbender looks pretty bored/confused in his scenes with her, and there is a serious paucity of human-on-human scenes in Alien: Covenant in general. It probably would have been a far better movie as a silent film, since there is really no relationship at all between any of the human characters. As far as the android ones, David is bestowed an extended scene where he teaches the Covenant's resident android Walter (still Michael Fassbender) how to play the flute. It is cute, but not really something you want to think about for more than a minute.

In Alien: Covenant's opening sequence, Daniels loses her husband Branson (James Franco) when the crew of the Covenant is prematurely woken from cryosleep. The ship's internal A.I., called Mother, cannot prevent damage from a solar flare. Branson burns up in his little coffin, and they pump Franco's corporeal body into deep space. It is kind of funny, but not really since Waterson was planning on building a log cabin with her life partner and now she has to do it alone.

The crew sends an expedition team down to a nearby planet which seems to be hailing them. (The cast of Alien: Covenant looks like one of those movies that is going to be picked off by casting directors for years to come: every member of the crew is gorgeous and limber except for Danny McBride.) Although the seed planet has land mass and clean water, they quickly discover there is no animal life at all. This is probably a good tip off that long-term existence would not be possible in this biome, but they decide to explore anyway and find a small ship and their antagonist.

In 2012, Damon Lindelof and Ridley Scott came up with some ideas for the evocative masterpiece that was Prometheus. Determined to focus on the themes of that story rather than the characters, Alien: Covenant is rather boring for a film in this milieu. Yes, the expedition is in danger, but by the time they even realize how dire their straits are, they have no actual narrative time in which to be terrified or make plans to destroy these beasts.

Without much in the way of a tangible script, Scott focuses on what he does so well, better than almost any director in history. That is make visuals which shatter our preconceptions and approaches to familiar material. There is nothing really new about the art design or circumstances of the Covenant's space travel, but Scott and his team manage them more slickly and believably than almost anyone working in this genre. Scott has a fairly good grasp of how much science to bring into this story, and he decides the answer for Alien: Covenant is, not much.

Alien: Covenant is more a fantasy film about how a bunch of hapless humans become prey and stay prey. They were never fit to explore the stars, Scott argues, any more than a monkey could surmise whether or not a God was responsible for his existence. It is a not a good feeling to see humanity as so useless, and so I suspect Alien: Covenant will never be very well liked for its sad ending and the downer way it sees humanity: as a bunch of fragile containers for wildly disparate emotions.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which She Was There For More Than A Few Years

Oh, Say. Can You See?

by ETHAN PETERSON

The Americans
creator Joe Weisberg
FX

Keri Russell, 41, and Matthew Rhys, 42, changed everything through their love. At the beginning of The Americans, they fought a lot and never seemed to penetrate each othe's emotional defenses at key times. Their real-life marriage altered the deal. Now in the middle of this fifth, penultimate season, one addresses questions posed for the other. Their daughter Paige asks if they feel like their names actually are Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings. "Yes," Rhys answers for both of them. "But I miss my old name." He does not say it, or tell it to his daughter. But we know it well.

Finally these married spies are thinking about going home to Russia. A part of us knows that they will never make it there, or survive in that unforgiving place. For the first time in the show's history, this season has attempted to give us a taste of what life was like before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Before, during, and after the Cold War most Americans did not know what life was actually like in the Soviet Union. The Americans depicts Moscow as a sinister, unforgiving limbo. The mere idea of leaving Washington D.C. and its environs for this place fills us all with a deep and abject horror.

Life in D.C. has become sufficiently ridiculous for the only son of these two spies, a growing boy named Henry (Keidrich Sellati). Henry is at the age when he has no real use for his parents, and he has devised a plan to separate himself from them permanently. He has met a lovely young woman named Chris with whom he plans to abscond to a New Hampshire boarding school. "Senators went there!" he shakily announces to his parents, who are gobsmacked. I don't actually believe any parents would stifle their boy's dreams in this fashion.

Paralyzed by the fear of what their retirement might mean, every murder or act of sabotage takes on additional heft. So they hold Russia up, as their last impossible dream, and the American writers who shape their lives tear it down. In order to show us what would await them, The Americans has given us Oleg (the marvelous, pleasantly scrutable Australian actor Costa Ronin) was moved from his duties in the U.S. home to be near his family. He occupies a small room in his family's apartment. All the women he loved are dead or gone. His mother and father are even more devoted to him than ever, since his brother has perished in Afghanistan.

Oleg learns that his mother served more than a few years in a camp as penance for some non-crime. It was beyond his father's capabilities to help her then, and she explains that in return for fucking the camp doctor, she was given perks such as a blanket and extra food. His knowledge of what happened to his mother in the society he props up through his work in the KGB makes him deeply jaded. In one powerful scene he stares out at Moscow; the wish in his eyes is to burn it all down.

Some societies – now that I think of it, every society – comes to this burning point, where they feed on their own inefficiencies and collapse if they do not have certain basic operating principles that allow healing on a macro scale. True democracies always have the opportunity to take this positive step. The Americans does not really explore the various foibles of their own country, except when it comes to the fetid, cliquish FBI, the only mirror of the enemy which does not come across as a resounding win for the United States. It is not moral scruples which prevents Agent Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) from eclipsing the fervor of his enemy. He just has better things to do.

The best scene in the entire season featured a double date, KGB and FBI. It was the first time Keri Russell's "character" had met Renee (Laurie Holden), a woman Stan had begun dating after the collapse of his marriage. Team KGB openly wonders whether she is a plant to spy on Stan and keep him in check, and regretfully decide they will probably never know the answer.

The concept of having another person's happiness in your hands comes up again and again in The Americans. It is akin to a weird sort of godhood in a country whose main figure of worship is Ronald Reagan.

It took far too many episodes to resolve the subplot of Paige Jennings (Holly Taylor), who finds her priest's diary entries about her. All in all, Paige took this information in good stride, and she seems to finally understand how much her parents must trust her to make her complicit in their work lives. Taylor is a phenomenal actress who ably communicates a sterling range of emotions lurking beneath the surface. The writers of The Americans, knowing how little is actually required to make her scenes interesting, probably have lingered on her too long as a crutch.

Every possible dilemma the spies have faced in their personal life has now been explored. A subtlety of purpose and horror has replaced conventional twists and turns. The Americans has always been fairly short on action, but in the eleven episodes remaining in the show's run, we get to build to the ultimate moment: when Stan Beeman is informed of what a total oblivious, hot dog-eating chump he really is. If Phillip's son Mischa never gets to meet his father, I will take it very personally.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.