Here’s my advice to you: if you’re going to go see Alien: Covenant in the theater and you have not watched Prometheus since it came out, you will be vastly better informed if you give yourself a refresher course. Now, if you hated Prometheus, that’s going to be a problem, because Alien: Covenant picks up 14 years after those events and the end of Prometheus spawns by far the most interesting parts of Covenant. The quick and dirty of my opinion on Covenant, because I am going to have to get into spoiler territory a bit, is that I think two episodes into Ridley Scott’s demystification of the origins of the xenomorphs have convinced me the entire endeavor is a mistake. Sometimes things become a lot less interesting the more you know about them (Wolverine’s origin should still be a mystery, for example). Prometheus was gorgeous, dreamed big, was massively flawed, but was admirable in its ambition. Covenant provides answers….eventually, but is criminally boring in getting to them with 75% of Prometheus‘ budget (no one will be calling this film “gorgeous”). It’s not Aliens 3 or Resurrection….but, honestly, it’s not even Prometheus. Continue reading Movie Review: Alien Covenant (2017) “Some Things Should Remain a Mystery”→
Guardians of the Galaxy was the biggest surprise of the first two phases of the MCU, so it’s shouldn’t be a huge surprise that James Gunn took your expectations for where the stacefaring group may go next and stood them on their head. For all the amazing special F/X, Guardians 2 is a much smaller, character-driven movie than the first one was. It is undoubtedly Star Lord’s (Chrs Pratt) film, closing questions on his origin in the first film that will give birth to conflicts sure to pop up for the survivors of Infinity War. In the end, though, this film is about family. Not the families we’re born into, but the families we cobble together out of the people who share our mutual life damage and how they can be as strong and weird and wonderful as any biological bond. It’s a funny (probably funnier overall than the first film), screwball sci-fi family dramedy that makes issue #15 of the MCU as fresh as the first.
I have no idea how in its eighth installment The Fast and the Furious franchise has reached the box office clout of Star Wars. While it’s nowhere near as possible as THE SAGA in the US; globally, it seems there is a worldwide love of fast cars, pretty people, explosions, and increasingly humongous set pieces. The Fate of the Furious opened with the largest international opening in history, passing even Star Wars Episode VII to set the new record. The opening is bigger than Furious 7, but is F8 an improvement on the first movie in the series to be a legitimately great action movie? No. In no way is it a descent of epic proportions, but it feels a lot like the fifth and sixth installments: islands of cool moments, enjoyable enough, but bloated beyond justification and beginning to get mired down in its own mythology. Continue reading Movie Review: The Fate of the Furious (2017) “CARMAGEDDON!!!”→
Seventeen years ago, comic book movies were a dead genre. In 2000, the first X-Men movie was released and jump-started a renaissance of adaptations. The franchise succeeded in no small part because the most popular X-Man: Wolverine, was cast to perfection. Hugh Jackman was an unknown. He’d done more musicals on-stage than movies on-screen, but from the moment we saw saw him cage fighting in a bar, he owned the Wolverine in a way that no actor perhaps has ever fully become linked with a fictional character (Bond and Connery and Downey Jr. and Iron Man being the only comparisons I can come up with). Logan is Jackman’s 9th film as Wolverine and his last. The film that bears his name is a nearly perfect Wolverine story. Unlike the PG-13 Logan that had to be leashed for the team films, this is the Wolverine from the comics, and yet, this a Wolverine unlike we’ve ever seen. It’s unremittingly grim, wonderfully acted, violent and gritty, redemptive and tragic. After all, Logan’s was a story that was never going to end well. Continue reading Movie Review: Logan (2017) *Farewell, Hugh, and Thanks”→