Category Archives: Sci-Fi

(Don’t look so surprised. You knew this was coming.)

There really is nothing like a new “Transformers” movie. It’s the high fructose corn syrup of cinema, an overwhelming deluge of tasty, tasty artificial garbage. In a diseased way, I find this series enjoyable because I know exactly what I’m in for. (I went to see “Dark of the Moon” in IMAX 3D roughly six years ago, and I’d like to say my taste has gotten better over time. Clearly it has not.)

For “The Last Knight,” I trekked out to one of the largest IMAX 3D screens in the country, and I wasn’t disappointed. If you’re going to watch one of these movies, you might as well go all the way.

This time around, Bay really doubles down on the saga’s incoherent internal mythology. As the dapper English gentleman Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins) helpfully informs us, Transformers have figured in human history for centuries (in the film’s opening minutes, King Arthur and a three-headed robot dragon incinerate an army of Saxons). Secret human societies—counting everyone from Beethoven to Harriet Tubman as members—have defended the secret of the Transformers ever since their first emergence.

Skip forward a few generations. After the last film’s battle of Hong Kong, Transformers are falling to earth from space more and more frequently, causing enough devastation to justify a “TRF,” or Transformer Response Force. Any interaction or collaboration with the robots is outlawed. But that doesn’t stop Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) from defending a small team of Autobots against prying government agents. He’s joined by new character Izabella (Isabela Moner), a tough-talking 14-year-old whose character arc goes precisely nowhere (she’s entirely inessential to the plot, and more of a reflection of Bay’s penchant for casting ever-younger actresses than anything else).

Meanwhile, our beloved hero robot Optimus Prime returns to his ruined home planet of Cybertron, where he meets the metallic sorceress Quintessa (who looks kinda like the T-1000 from “Terminator 2”). Quintessa’s interested in rebuilding the decimated Cybertron, which means she requires the Transformer artifact that served as “Merlin’s staff.” But it soon becomes clear that the only one who can wield Merlin’s staff is Oxford don Vivian Wembley (Laura Haddock), the last descendant of Merlin’s bloodline. (She’s about as convincing as a distinguished professor as Denise Richards was as a nuclear physicist in “The World Is Not Enough.”)

Many explosions ensue all around.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: this is not a good movie. It’s abundantly clear that no one involved with this film’s production had any idea that the series would reach this point, because the plot holes are legion. More questionably, as the film’s three acts unfold, the movie veers from a dystopian sci-fi thriller (a la “District 9”) to a historical fantasy (a la “National Treasure”) to a cosmic-scale epic (a la “Independence Day”). None of it ever really coheres into an integrated whole.

Yet for all its outrageousness, “The Last Knight” is a significant step up from its immediate predecessor. Yes, it relies on a berserk amalgam of narrative devices. Yes, there’s still tons of product placement, vague sexism, deafening global destruction, and so on. But for the first time in the series, there’s a winking self-awareness underlying the whole thing. Hopkins’ presence isn’t degrading to the venerable actor: it’s a joke that everyone’s in on. And if we’re all honest, the whole idea of Transformers interfering with history is so deranged that it circles back around to being kind of amazing (I fully expect the inevitable Transformers 6 to feature Transformers cameoing in various Bible stories.) And as cacophonous as his work can be, no one does explosive mayhem quite like director Michael Bay. The best way to view these movies is as very expensive Saturday morning cartoons, and they’re pretty fun if you just kind of…allow the experience to wash over you.

At the end of the day, there’s no other film saga in existence that is so willing to embrace its own apocalyptic absurdity. No one here is pretending, a la Zack Snyder, that this is the stuff of Greek tragedy or biblical narrative. Everyone involved realizes that this is a CGI-drenched apotheosis of techno-carnage, the stupid, primal, lowest-common-denominator of modernity. Yet, to paraphrase the immortal Galileo, “eppur si intrattiene.” And still it entertains.

VERDICT: 7/10
A noisy, ludicrous spectacle. Good summer fun.

The gleaming black Xenomorph of the “Alien” franchise—eyeless, serpentine, a creature of claws and dripping fangs—is certainly one of sci-fi cinema’s most recognizable creations. And the creature’s had a long lifespan since its first appearance onscreen. Its best outings—Ridley Scott’s initial space-slasher flick and James Cameron’s shoot-‘em-up sequel—are indisputably genre classics, even if its later movies were pretty lackluster (we don’t talk about “Alien vs. Predator”).

With “Covenant,” Scott aims to bridge the time gap between 2012’s woefully underappreciated prequel “Prometheus” and his original 1979 movie. And, true to form, the first third of “Covenant” feels like a straight-up remake of the first “Alien.” We first meet android Walter (Michael Fassbender), who’s in charge of managing a spaceship of outbound planetary colonists. The ever-appealing Katherine Waterston turns up as Daniels, this installment’s protagonist and requisite Wide-Eyed Brunette. James Franco, Guy Pearce, Danny McBride, and Billy Crudup also make appearances, but they’re largely background scenery. (This is an “Alien” movie. You know most of these people are gonna die.)

A mysterious radio transmission unexpectedly draws the crew to the surface of an alien world, where they discover a crashed spaceship filled with traces of a mysterious civilization. People get infected with extraterrestrial spores, monstrous creatures erupt in gory explosions from human bodies, and general carnage ensues.

And then “Covenant” shifts gears, abruptly veering away from its horror-film sensibilities and revisiting topics last seen in “Prometheus.” As it so happens, the planet is actually the burned-out homeworld of the Engineers, the nine-foot-tall aliens responsible for seeding the galaxy with life (and, in the process, creating humankind). Some old friends from the last installment also show up,

(Spoilers ahead. Without them, it’s impossible to do this movie’s themes justice.)

It quickly becomes clear that David (also Michael Fassbender), the castaway android of “Prometheus,” has set himself up as king of the necropolis around him. Obsessed with the concept of creation, he’s labored for years to manipulate the “bioweapon” of the Engineers—the spores that birth proto-Xenomorphs. His goal: spawning a “true” Xenomorph—the sinuous dark monster of the original film quadrilogy, which he views as the “perfect organism.”

This is relatively cerebral stuff, and “Covenant” often feels like an uneasy attempt to blend the narrative styles of two very different movies. The grand themes of “Prometheus”—creation, power, human destiny—are a lot more highbrow than the earthy nastiness of the original “Alien,” and it’s quite clear that Scott’s much more interested in the former than the latter. Thus, “Covenant” ends up tacking on a third act that quickly turns into a retread of the original flick—a xenomorph is stalking crew members through the spaceship!—rather than striving for some suitably operatic height of horror. (Call me overly baroque, but I’d say the climax should’ve been a blood-soaked, hand-to-hand battle against David, fought in a charnel house of creation, decomposition, and rebirth and set to a classical music score.)

That said, “Covenant” really does have some genuinely visionary moments. The destruction of the Engineers’ homeworld, depicted in flashback, is a Boschian nightmare come to life: a sea of twisting limbs, insectile carapaces, and dark mist. David’s laboratory is a bone-chilling, Da Vinci-meets-Leatherface vision of deconstructed human forms. And whether or not his ideas are completely lucid, Scott’s clearly trying to say some very interesting things about God, the body, and sexuality.

If “Prometheus” had Gnostic overtures—disengaged, somewhat malignant creator-beings, or demiurges—“Covenant” doubles down hard on those themes. An important part of Gnostic philosophy was the idea of “emanation,” or a chain of subordinate beings interposed between God and the world. That idea of emanation is the narrative backbone of “Covenant”: from the Engineers come humans; from humans come androids; from androids come xenomorphs. And despite David’s talk of increasing evolution toward perfection, it’s plainly apparent that what plays out is a steady deconstruction of the idealized superhumanity of the Engineers. Humans are more biologically fragile than the Engineers; androids lack the ingenuity and freedom of humans; xenomorphs are nothing but soulless killing machines. Any attempt at subcreation has its limits.

And I’m certainly not the first to note the eerily sexual imagery that characterizes the franchise’s art design. Here, Scott’s seemingly suggesting that the disintegration of human identity goes hand-in-hand with the amplification and exaggeration of human sexuality (in the form of the xenomorph, a being of pure appetitive id). That’s a pretty heady idea, even if it remains only an undercurrent.

(Spoilers end here)

Technically, “Covenant” is satisfying but not groundbreaking, and leans very hard on its computer-generated effects. Occasionally this is great (we get a bang-up, three-dimensional alien battle on a wildly careening shuttle), but most of the time it’s a serious letdown. I’m firmly in the camp of folks who think special effects have actually gotten noticeably worse in the last decade or so: CGI creations move with unnatural speed and fluidity, breaking the illusion of reality. It’s hard to believe, but the prosthetics and rubber monster suits of the 1979 “Alien” really were much, much scarier than anything seen here. (The same could be said of other films in the genre: the gooey effects of John Carpenter’s 1982 monster movie “The Thing” were vastly superior to anything in the CGI-drenched 2011 remake).

When all’s said and done, “Covenant” is a middling sixth installment in a longstanding franchise that’ll almost certainly keep trucking for years to come. As a fan of the series (yes, even the crummy installments), I have to confess my disappointment: Scott simply doesn’t let his ambition carry “Covenant” to the heights it demands. Love it or hate it, “Prometheus” really went all-in on its Big Ideas. I only wish this chapter had been willing to aim as high.

VERDICT: 6.5/10
Not the finest “Alien” series outing, but certainly not the worst.

Normalized Score: 2.4