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 We Envy Cormac McCarthy's Therapist

Art By Omission

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Counselor
dir. Ridley Scott
117 minutes

The lawyer (Michael Fassbender) is a very happy-go-lucky guy. His business is with the cartels; his partner is Reiner (Javier Bardem). The two plot to sell $20 million in cocaine to the Mexican cartels. It turns out this is a very ugly business, although not quite as ugly as you may have imagined, since it is being carried off by people who look more like models than criminals.

Fassbender's love relationship is with a sweetly innocent Penelope Cruz. There is a fantastic scene between the two of them where we only hear the male side of the telephone conversation. Instead of excising the time it takes for the other person to respond, we have to suffer through Fassbender's patience to hear her completely, even if only for a moment, out of respect for the one he loves. "Being together is everything," he crows, "the rest is just waiting." Bullshit.

Fassbender is the most exciting actor working today. The only thing he cannot carry off seamlessly is any kind of sexuality — hence the phone intercourse. He more resembles an androgyne with a working set of genetalia; it is no wonder he seems perched on the edge of a career playing robots. He is the anti-Rock Hudson.

Mr. Scott seems to adore using Fassbender because he is wonderful for distracting you from the point of the scene. In The Counselor, such distractions are useful, since there is really nothing in the way of conflict between the characters, at least nothing that would feasibly be resolved with words.

Plastic surgery has altered the boundaries of Cameron Diaz's facial expressions. She is now prone to playing emotionless characters because the vast majority of her cheekbones' communicative abilities have been reduced to either a coy smile or utter disgust.

"My parents were thrown from a helicopter when I was three," she informs a priest for some reason. (He cannot even bear to share the same confessional as this woman.) The Counselor features Diaz's best role in some time, both because she is supposed to be cold in it, and because she does a nice job of showing how a person can be both corrupted and have that corruption be sort of infectious.

Brad Pitt portrays the middle man in the counselor's transaction with the cartel. He looks years younger than in his recent roles, probably because his part here demands more boyish charm than a grim father surviving the apocalypse.

Diaz having sex with a car windshield, as she does in a flashback Reiner recalls to the counselor, does not make very much sense. It is the only funny part of The Counselor, the rest is just extended long conversations between famous Hollywood actors pretending to be people they are so obviously not.

Yet there is a sort of benign, harmless charm to The Counselor, something like visiting a family ride at Disneyland. You try to enjoy it even though you know you are not the audience for which it was intended. The film never feels overly long or boring, since it is composed only of anticipation, not action.

In a way McCarthy is making a joke on how cinema represents anything at all, calling it to moral account. Do I have to tell you at whose expense this joke is being made?

The events of The Counselor all connect to each other, and there is very little in the way of plot to follow. These scenes might take place in any order. "I'm not going to tell you what mistakes you made that got you here," a member of the cartel tells Fassbender, who can only respond idly in a fakish Texas accent brought into existence purely for this role.

This explanation — that the counselor was doomed all along, simply because of his race and status, is meant to be an ironic commentary.

McCarthy's art here is entirely by omission. By drawing our attention away from how action usually takes place in cinema, he forces us to reexamine our role as spectator. It is something like looking into a microscope instead of the entire rhesus monkey: Fassbender, Pitt, Diaz, even McCarthy himself are merely cells in a larger organism. Instead of the way you are told evil unfolds, it has already unfolded more quickly than you realized. When you woke it was at your doorstep.

These people have known each other for longer than you have known them, possibly much longer. After they order two Heinekens, Pitt and Fassbender get to talking. Pitt's cliches are so wrapped up in themselves that they approach parody; it is all that his fellow actor can do just to keep a straight face he mugs so much. Pitt's career was founded on looking levelly at people with sunglasses and taking their measure; the counselor looks away until the penultimate moment, the only one at which he is ever alive.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Lotus Flower (Jacques Green remix)" - Radiohead (mp3)

In Which We Examine The Nature Of Creation

Robotic Faith

by LILY GOODSPEED

Prometheus
director Ridley Scott
124 minutes

In the case of Prometheus the title’s nod to the classical Greek Titan is almost insultingly intentional. The mythological figure is known for bestowing humankind with the power of fire along with his subsequent and sadistically creative punishment from the Gods. Prometheus attempts to place itself on a similarly grandiose scale. In a sweeping elimination of millions of years of evolutionary progress, Prometheus reveals that extraterrestrials were the so-called “Engineers” of human life on Earth. At the start of the film, a pasty almost-human-looking alien disintegrates his body into primordial waters, and his DNA seemingly reconstructs into a new line of native Earth-based life. Prometheus then jumps to the year 2089, where archaeologists Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) find awe-inspiring evidence of this original creation.

Fast-forward to the year 2093. On a streamlined spacecraft, humanoid robot David (Michael Fassbender) wanders about the empty ship, biding his time studying ancient linguistics until the human members of the crew wake from artificial slumber. Eventually, the team is assembled, which includes the aforementioned archaeologists, a few more feisty scientists, a smart-mouth pilot named Janek (Idris Elba) and an icy commanding officer Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron).

The ship has landed on a moon named LV-223, on which this motley team of scientists has traveled in hopes of answering questions about these Engineers and the bigger question of human purpose. Once there, the crew makes some unexpected discoveries. This is not the Engineers' home planet but a military base, and the Engineers' own weapons, which are organic, parasitic aliens, seemingly killed them while stationed here. Now those parasitic aliens, in various forms of maturation, are set on the destruction of the crew. Get ready for the deaths of numerous expendable characters.

The film’s impressively ambitious philosophical scope is not inherently misguided or unsuccessful. Yet Prometheus at times forces stilted dialogue and overwrought character development to definitively prove the existential importance of its thematic goals. Dr. Shaw’s Christian faith is constantly being questioned, as if the film is reminding the audience that this movie is about the meaning of life, and that’s really important. Rapace is a skilled actor, so it’s even more disheartening to see her attempt the cheesy line, “It’s what I choose to believe.”

The film also pursues extraneous storylines. Early on, David plays a holographic recording of the CEO of Weyland Corporation to the crew, as the company funded the expedition. Mr. Weyland (Guy Pearce), although apparently deceased, expresses his overwhelming commitment to the spiritual importance of the mission from beyond the grave. Eventually Weyland is revealed not only to be alive and on the ship (gasp!), but devoted to finding the Engineers simply to attain his own salvation from death. The plot twist is superfluous and unnecessary, though perhaps it solidifies a character motivation for David who hopes to impress his father figure.

The tragedy of these clumsy plotholes and dialogue is that Prometheus is an incredibly successful movie in other ways. The aesthetic execution is close to perfect. The grayish landscapes of LV-223 and primordial Earth are haunting and expansive. The streamlined symmetry of the inner ship is flawless. The spacesuits look Tron inspired and are desperately suitable for future cosplaying.

The last forty-five minutes of the movie can only be called “thriller movie porn,” with a face-paced sampling of ship explosions, flamethrower fights, and squirmy squid aliens erupting from surprising organs. On a purely visceral level, Prometheus easily achieves the same level of suspenseful anticipation that Alien is famous for.

Michael Fassbender’s performance is stunning, which is paradoxical since he succeeds in portraying a dispassionate robot. The character of David lacks human empathy, as evidenced when he infects Dr. Halloway with a parasitic spore without much concern. Despite this handicap, Fassbender’s David is also the emotional center of the film. We see brief glimpses of inner conflict, or at least some robotic version of conflict. He messes with his co-crewmembers, but does so in part to fulfill a strange father-son relationship with his creator Mr. Weyland. David watches Lawrence of Arabia in an attempt to parrot the cadence of human interaction; he exhibits signs of curiosity as he explores and discovers aspects of Engineer technology. David and Vickers, revealed as Weyland’s biological daughter, even have moments of sibling tension.

David is also engaged in Prometheus' deeper metaphysical issues. The film directly compares human’s creation of this robot with the Engineers’ creation of human kind. When David asks Halloway about the purpose of his own existence, Halloway bluntly answers, “We made you because we could.” David immediately retorts, “Do you imagine how disappointing it would be for you hearing the same thing from your creator?” This trillion-dollar space mission was funded to answer the meaning of human life, yet David is offered no answers of his own.

This issue of creation is the most intriguing thematic thread of the film. Prometheus makes a lot of lip service to Elizabeth Shaw’s “faith,” but the movie is much more successful in examining that relationship between the creator and created. In fact, the scariness of the parasitic aliens comes in great part from their disruption to this natural dynamic. Parenticide is mentioned numerous times, the most famous and publicized of which is Vickers' declaration: “A king has his reign and then he dies. It's inevitable. It's the natural order of things.”

For me, Prometheus is a lot like Lost which makes sense as Damon Lindelof is behind both projects. Both ask unsolvable questions, and fall flat in attempting to answer them. Yet, when Prometheus eases on the overly aggressive religious posturing and lets the mystery of creation remain a mystery, the film triumphs. When it examines the nature of creation, instead of attempting to explain it, Prometheus is a beautiful and surprisingly thoughtful movie. And if that’s not to your liking, there’s more than enough blood, guts and goo.

Lily Goodspeed is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. This is her first appearance in these pages. She twitters here and tumbls here.

"Timekeeper" - Grace Potter and the Nocturnals (mp3)

"Roulette" - Grace Potter and the Nocturnals (mp3)

The new album from Grace Potter and the Nocturnals is titled The Lion The Beast The Beat and it was released on June 12th.