Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 15 - Dune: Part Two

 

Dune: Part 2, dir. Denis Villeneuve

Dune 2 was originally going to be No #12 on this list. I'm bumping it down in light of today's news, which gave this entry a lot more urgency.

Honestly, I do not even want to talk about Dune 2 right now. I'm cancelling this review, we're going in a whole different direction. I know most people do not think immediately of Dune when they think of David Lynch. I, however, let too many random movies I saw on Showtime Beyond in middle school decide the course of my life.

David Lynch passed away today. He was seventy-eight. The director was no longer a young man or even a man too young to suddenly pass. Last year Lynch reported that he was home bound due to health complications born from a lifetime of smoking. Worse, he had not filmed much since the conclusion of Twin Peaks Season 3 back in 2018. We'll never get to see that TV show he was shopping around with Netflix starring Naomi Watts, because Netflix felt their money was better spent on projects such as Zack Snyder's Rebel Moon. (Spoilers: that did not make my Top 15. I will have words about that project, however.) There will be a lot of piecing written in mourning because Lynch was a singular visionary director, one of the greatest of all time. In his filmography are several films that are more more unique and more fascinating most filmmaker's entire careers: Inland Empire, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead, and Wild at Heart. We spoiled by a splendor of greatness from this man, and yet one cannot help but wish he could have made more. You should really make a point to go see The Straight Story right now. It is not a surreal or experimental like many of Lynch's great works, but it is a beautiful story of an old man's final journey across the country to visit his elderly brother. They get to sit on a porch together, holding back tears, unsure of what to say. Maybe that is a perfect movie to mourn Lynch with.

I instead turned on 1984's Dune. That movie is a notorious disaster, one which Lynch himself never quite disowned but clearly failed in realizing his complete vision for. It was a flop. Alejandro Jodorowsky laughed at it in his documentary bragging out the Dune movie he never made at all. As history progresses, the '84 Dune may merely become a curious footnote beneath the 2020s retelling: the funky half-finished mess with terrible-looking shield special effects, an opening that is twenty straight minutes of info dumps, and a montage that "yadda yadda yadda"s over most of what Denis Villeneuve shows in Dune: Part 2.

It is also one of my favorite movies of all time. I cannot argue it is Lynch's masterwork. It is still my favorite thing he's ever done.

I needed some comfort, I worry enough about the death of elderly loved ones too much right now, so on a day like today I needed a floating fat man pulling the heart-plug out of a whimpering boy slave and then smearing himself in the spilled blood. I've only watched that scene a thousand times. I can quote the skin doctor's lines word for word, even down to cadence. "You are sooo beautiful my baron... You skiiin, loove to me..." I needed the Emperor of Space having a conversation with a floating ameba monster in a fish tank, words coming out of an awful twitching genitalia mouth, ultimately just to clunkily exposit to the audience what the plot is - which will be repeated a few more times. The money behind this operation, famed genre producer, Dino De Laurentis, clearly did not trust his audience to follow his director's strange vision. You can feel the arguments behind the scenes that David Lynch lost, forcing more and more explanation for a film that is on its greatest level, inexplicable. In some ways, this movie forced Lynch forward artistically, the more he became handcuffed to an explanation, the more his later works succeed due to the lack of one. This is the final time any studio would Lynch blockbuster money. It was also the last time we got a blockbuster this unique, this broken. I love all the more for the flaws.

You can "solve" a David Lynch movie, some feel that's exactly what they've done with Mulholland Drive or Twin Peaks. There's Youtube lore theory videos that will tell you all about who or what Judy is if you really want to know. Blue Velvet is not all that inexplicable, that first scene tells you all you need to know: the bugs crawling under the bright green lawn are a metaphor for the darkness hiding within the peaceful veneer of white suburban America. Dune is about space barons fighting for control of a sand planet and magic drugs. It is high concept space opera schlock, as explicable as it gets.

My guess is that Lynch was given this job because he had famously turned down the off to direct Return of the Jedi, and De Laurentis wanted his own Star Wars. Thus he funds Dune, the Frank Herbert book that heavily inspired Tatooine, Jabba the Hutt, and that boy's fantasy Hero's Journey that is so core to Star Wars. David Lynch could have turned in a very typical big budget space opera of the era. Instead he made a movie whose every detail, every particularity, is unique.  Dune tells you why Paul (Lynch regular Kyle MacLachlan) goes to the world that the script calls "Dune... Arrakis... Desert Planet..." and why he rides a giant Sandworm. What fascinates is every point on the line besides that big picture explanation. These are choices Villeneuve did not make. They are choices no other filmmaker would have made.

There's a reason that Lynch chose to jump into the world of Frank Herbert and not George Lucas. For one, Lucas has already built a universe and Lynch would have no opportunity to populate his sets with pet dogs, men with giant bushy eyebrows, or bald witches. Dune is a triumphantly singular vision full of character actors delivering their lines in wonderful ways, such as whatever form of kooky sign language that Brad Dourif is playing with. Or Patrick Stewart running into battle with a pug cradled in his arms.

The other reason though is that Lynch actually saw something in this material. His art has always been dream-like. This is a tale of a hero driven by fate into a realm of dreams made real. Lynch believes heavily in the power of transcendental meditation. So his Paul is not like the Paul of the novels, or the 2024 version, a tragic conqueror who is forced against his will to become the Great Man of History, covering himself and the universe in blood. The Lynchian Paul is the sleeper who must awaken. Leto (Jürgen Prochnow), his doomed father, has no access to the greater magics or destinies of the Spice. Yet he is the one who recognizes the value of 'becoming'. This is a full Messianic fantasy, following the power of inward transformation to achieving wisdom and peace. The Reagan-era Paul is a righteous champion of the unjust who brings rain to the desert world, yet wins his final battle by "bending like a reed in the wind".

One interesting thing that Dune '84 does is heavily use voice over. Star Wars will let a few Jedis talk to each other from across space. However, Dune makes it a part of the entire cinematic language. Almost every scene we get interior monologues in this spaced-out whispered delivery. I usually hate voice over exposition like this. Cinema as an artform does not need it, the footage and edit can better tell the story of a a character's thoughts and feelings than blunt "I feel like X". In Dune, however, it works. Because there's this entire higher universe of psychic energies and destinies that our protagonist taps into. There is a network of wills and powers at play, in every scene, whether Paul is there or not to read the character's mind. Sometimes it is just the gross Baron (Kenneth McMillan) luxuriating in his own sadism, a whole galaxy aware from our hero.

Speaking of that Baron, he is the most fun character in the movie. McMillan makes every evil act so delicious in its nastiness. But he's also the first of many terrifying sexual predators that will populate Lynch's work. Behind him is Frank Booth, Killer Bob, Bobby Peru, and whatever is happening with the Phantom in Inland Empire. (My guess is as good as your's.) Lynch never shied away from the most awful and terrible aspects of humanity, the parts society needs to ignore in order for it to continue functioning. The real horror of Twin Peaks is not demons from another dimension, it the regular American home, where so much abuse can hide behind closed doors and ignored under the rotating sound of a ceiling fan. The final shot of Lynch's career effectively is the ending of Twin Peaks: The Return with Laura Palmer screaming at her own childhood home. In some ways, it is a perfect ending to wrap up his life's works. This is what hiding the truth, sealing yourself off brings you: cruelty hidden away.

Back to Dune, there is no real plot reason why we spend so much time watching the formally-human creature called a Guild Navigator fold space. It is a wonderful sequence of miniatures and Eraserhead-like imagery of the cosmos. But all we're seeing is some faster than light speed. Villeneuve cut the Navigators out entirely of his Dune because they did not serve his ends, and maybe one more faction simply confused the plot too much. I see the Navigator folding space in 1984 as one of the most important parts of this movie. Dune is not merely a battle for a patch of sand, with an army of extras in Stillsuits fighting while a very cheesy but awesome guitar riff plays over the soundtrack. There is a mystical level of reality that we are seeing that the Harkonnans cannot imagine, that the scheming Bene Gesserit sisterhood hope to monopolize for themselves, that the Emperor is afraid of, which Paul can unlock and unleash to his followers. Sometimes this power is a miracle, the rain in the desert. Sometimes it is Paul's terrifying half-demon of a sister, Alia (Alicia Witt) spiritually overwhelming the wicked Baron and pushing him into the maw of a Sandworm.

Technically too, Dune is a great looking movie. You got Sandworms on screen, and they still awesome. There's full lavish sets, wild costuming, many many extras with blue eyes rotoscoped onto them in post-production. Though practically any movie shot on film with real objects in frame will look impressive in 2025, when the latest space opera blockbuster is Rebel Moon, tons of CG with an art design that goes out of its way to look generic. No character is unlocking deeper wisdom in that thing.

And yet, Dune (1984) as a movie, is arguably the least of what David Lynch achieved as a director. I would need many more words, more hours of study, and probably some advanced meditation techniques of my own to decipher Inland Empire. That's a masterpiece of dissociation that depicts through an impossible-to-follow narrative the horror of Hollywood's consumption of its actresses. Dune, in comparison, is just is a lot of fun. A guy has to milk a cat to get the vaccine to the poison that's killing him every day. Villeneuve would never dare shoot that. I'm not sure any filmmaker would dare shoot that in a major blockbuster in 2025.

That and more is what we lost today.

...

Anyway, I really liked Dune: Part Two. I'm looking forward to Dune 3 when Villeneuve completes his vision and adapts Herbert's second novel, Dune Messiah. I had a whole review here originally, turns out it was not all that important in comparison. I actually did not have that much to say about Dune 2 that I had not said about Dune 1 a few years ago, so... this emergency piece kinda worked out.

 I really liked Austin Butler in Dune 2, btw.

Top 15 Movies of 2024: MASTER POST!

I saw about seventy movies with initial public releases in the United States in 2024 - which as always, is my requirement for what qualifies for this. Seventy is a lot of movies, there's a lot to talk about. 

Warning: this may get delayed because personal stuff already means I'm further behind than I want to be.

What will follow will be short reviews/essays about all Fifteen of the Best Movies of 2024, decided objectively and scientifically by my own taste at this one random second. One review released a day until we hit Number One. 

But first, the preamble thing!

Argument:

Why do I do this? This is the fulcrum of my writing output every year, this recap of my year watching movies, then later my other recap about video games. (Which I can already tell you is going to be very late this year.) I am far from the most influential critic. I have never made a movie, I know as little about the craft now as when I started writing twenty years ago. I do not think I have a clear a capital-T 'Theory' of what makes art good versus bad, important versus unimportant. One tries to come up with a better rubric than 'that was really cool' or 'really gross', however, in real terms, that governs a lot more of my thinking than I'd like to admit. You never stop being a six-year-old jumping up and down in the living room as the Death Star explodes on standard definition 4:3 on VHS. You just gather a lot of fancy language to cover up the simple animal pleasures that really dominate your thinking.

For the last few years I've been using these Master Posts as a 'here's what I think about the year in movies that just passed'. For 2024, I do not know what to think about the year in movies. It was strange, but not strange in a definable way. The artform is certainly not lacking in product and there were a ton of great movies. But I don't see much of a trend or a plotline that one can gather out of these random data points. I could not tell you why audiences really wanted to see Deadpool & Wolverine any more than I could tell you why they did not want to see Furiosa. 2024 was like a holding pattern of a year, where the superhero blockbuster thing is far from over, but its absence did not make me miss it all that much. Few wept because there were no Fast cars being driven Furiously by Dominic Toretto. In general there were not many huge sequels to the big franchises. Movies that spoke to our mass-anxiety over the future of our country came out like Civil War, but sparked seemingly no real discussion or gave much insight to the future.

Movies just existed. And that's good enough for me. Civil War is a great movie. It did not do anything to stop the election from being a nightmare. Bad things are still coming.

I'm doing something different this time with the preamble. I'm actually going to rewind back to the 2023 list. I want to rethink that previous list before I start working on this one. This process is as much a fashion statement as anything. Some of these movies age poorly in my estimation. Some grow.

It is Less Easy to Pretend Otherwise

I largely avoid writing as much about politics as I did as a kid, when this website first started, when the 'blogosphere' was actually a potent force that anybody cared about. There's two excellent reasons for this. One is that this topic is no longer merely a sporting hobby where I had aesthetic associations with one side and could smugly cheer for it. Now politics is dark, deeply depressing, and upsetting. I cannot talk about the state of the world in real life anymore. If the topic comes up, even when I am well-versed and knowledgeable on it, my mouth locks up. It is a psychological wound now that inhibits function. The other reason is that I do have any illusions of greater knowledge. The more you learn the more you learn how little you know, just how ignorant you are on so many topics. Twenty-year-old me would look at the political landscape and say "clearly nobody knows anything" and decide in his arrogance, that he was "the special boy, the savior who could untangle all of this with my keyboard". Thirty-three-year-old me looks at this and thinks... well fuck.

I'm only writing this because ultimately I have no other option. This is a lunatic urge, a compulsion, an instinctual act. I could not sleep last night because the words kept repeating in my brain what I needed to say. Dr. Melfi might compare this form of painful, utterly useless writing to childbirth - Tony Soprano and I know it is more accurately taking a shit. I don't know if I'll have the stomach to read and revise this. I might not even publish this, I don't know.

One thing I do not need to do is wag my finger. The polling results will come in, a million narratives will form, somebody will eventually decide what the mistake was. According to the crooked unfair system of the Electoral Collage, this election is a brutal landslide. Worse still, it looks like our future cretin leader-of-the-now-free-to-be-cruel-world will win the popular vote. It was not laughing too hard. It was not bringing in Dick Cheney. It was not being too wishy-washy on stopping the reckless rampage of Israeli violence (but hey, it would be nice to think so). Somebody else will watch the tape, somebody else will tell us where Harris' fundamentals were wrong, where she did not plant her feet and how she lobbed an INT over the head of Texas when there was a wide open Michigan. Unless there is a miracle and we discover some spectacular act of voter fraud at a level not seen since 19th century political machine elections, the truth is pretty damn clear: Kamala Harris could never win this election. Worse, the entire Democratic Party as currently constructed, could never win this election.

Eggs are too expensive, McDonalds sets its prices like its deep fried slop is luxury food, gas prices are too high (even though I just filled up for what is a reasonable in my adulthood $2.67 a gallon the other night), affording a house has gone from "maybe when I get that better job" to "ludicrous daydream". That's all it is. That's all America ever was, I'm sorry to say. It is less easy to pretend otherwise this morning. This whole late-20th century slide towards Reaganonomics, neoliberalism, whatever you want to call this creature, was born because in the late Seventies one day Americans realized the good times of ruling the world's markets unchallenged forever after the World Wars was ending, and we needed to get crueler and more brutish to stay ahead. Therefore we had layoffs, severe inequality, billionaire oligarchs, and now the dream that AI can wipe out jobs so the empire can continue. The narrative of the 2024 election is pretty fucked in its simplicity: We survived a pandemic, the economy overheat itself inflation like it often does after a major war which Covid effectively was, and people are timid with their dollars and believe we're in a recession even if statistically that's not the case. It does not matter, nobody cares economics besides vibes anyway. They just know the system as constructed does not benefit them. 

I'm not excusing any of this. When the mammalian creature called the American was asked to choose between saving a dollar on a carton of eggs or not having open cruelty towards the most vulnerable and desperate populations within us, the creature chose the loathsome bestial option. And also, there's no proof you're going to get that dollar saved for eggs. You never got anything tangible under Trump's first term, you're not getting anything this time, I'm sorry.

Kamala Harris' big slogan was "we are not going back". But her project, a continuation of the Joe Biden project before her, was exactly that: going back. Joe Biden was the promise that all this Trump stuff could be safely put away forever, that just one boring norm-y presidential-looking fellow from Central Casting could reset politics back to 2013, or 2007, or 1978, whatever year you're nostalgic for and believe politics worked correctly then. I think Biden did better than I expected in some places, but I knew he was going to be insufficient even in 2019. The problem is that no matter what year you reset back to, you're still fundamentally resetting to an American system that operates with deep inequality, where inevitably even the "imperial core" of white (or white-enough) middle class Americans cannot get their car, house, BBQ pit, big screen TV, and yearly vacations. That's what they want, that's all this ever was. The American Empire has had lots of great moments in its history, and a built up a lovely mythology of freedom and generosity and positive reform. Over a century ago, the American people were on the forefront of liberal drives to save Jews trapped in poverty and pogroms of the backwards Tsarist Russian Empire. In the twenties we saved the floundering Soviet Union from famine after its civil war. There's dozens of examples you can name that your high school textbook won't remember. It would be nice to think that's the real America. But all those liberal drives were only possible because the middle class 1900s Americans were wildly rich thanks to the happy accident of being granted a whole continent to rule practically unopposed, they were wildly comfortable and would soon become more comfortable. The increasingly doddering tanned criminal says we can all get back to being fat and happy again, where we can rule our little car dealerships off a stroad next to a Chick-fil-a and a crooked mattress store as mini-dictators, going home to a wife we're cheating on when we molest our female employees whose wages we steal but luckily the wife never has to know. Then on the weekend we watch football, we watch superhero movies that now-properly only star men/boys like us, and we get angry about the right kind of sexually-sinful minority on our phones.

That's the greatest level of ambition America seemingly can aspire to. Thousands of people need to suffer to make that dream happen, but that was true on Monday, it is still true today. On Monday the police brutalized people for landlords, our subsidized proxy bombings murdered people in the Middle East, authorizations for necessary medical procedures were auto-denied by insurance companies cooking their books, and people were fired from jobs they were good at to make their company's stock price look sexier. The only thing that changes today is the tempo of cruelty. And that it is less easy to pretend otherwise.

I would love to say I see an arc of history trending towards justice. The Democratic Party gave its most truly Democratic Party punch this election. It was insufficient on practically any level. I can't say that the Biden-y Big Tent brand of politics is dead forever, but the bench for their kind of politics is pretty vacant. Who the fuck do you run in 2028? (Not a woman, I'm sure, they'll be blamed somehow for this.) The old bastions of liberal thought are gutted and dying, hollowed out by billionaires: Bezos owns the Post and Musk owns Twitter. The Norm-y wall of "Resistance" types exhausted themselves, and turns out, were not enough. I would love to say that the death of the center finally opens up the possibility of leftist, socialist politics, but I know where this is going. This is not going to be a fast controlled burn to open the momentum to a new America built on justice and wisdom and economic equality. No, we're going to march downwards into the dust and cinders with the fire. In the Nineties, after getting thrashed for a generation by Reagan and his cronies, Clinton figured out the winning move for the Democrats was to "just be Republicans", and they're still basically there, and even that Overton Window has slammed shut. So in 2028, we'll have the first 'moderate' anti-woke Democrat. Does John Fetterman want the job?

At least there will be an election, since the most reactionary conservative movement in American history since Reconstruction came to power bloodlessly on the ballot. Saved them the need for violence. That Southern reaction of the 1870s took a century to overcome, history does not move linearly, I'm sorry to say. This will take a long time to fix, it is ever fixed. I do not think these guys are very good at much of anything except capturing anger and grievance. When it comes to actually ruling, I do not have many silver linings for you. There's not a lot I agree with these people on, and not a lot of legitimate forms of opposition left with much strength to stop them, except perversely, states rights if you're lucky to live in New York, New Jersey, or California. This fight will continue, there will be losses and victories, but you do not fix a fundamentally broken America by doing more America.

I should end with some kind of silver lining. A nice statement that ultimately national politics only goes so deep and so far. That in the end, our lives and their meaning are not defined by what skin color the samurai is in the new Assassin's Creed that you probably aren't going to play anyway. But I do not know how much I believe that, the poison seeps deep, and there's few methods of communication left that are not blackened by the creeping shadow. You open your computer to work and the home screen is just another vector of infection towards hatefulness and conspiracies and a general desire to tear down everything collective and community-based in modern civilization from schooling to milk. I'm writing this on a website owned by Google, who are pushing a slush of AI trash that is the new "exciting" future, whose venting of pollution is aiding to the overall malformations in our climate that have caused an unseasonably warm and dry November. It has not rained in six weeks, this could be my apocalyptic log. Harris did not even try to fight on the environmental front, we had already ceded that ground, and not going to fix it, again, it is less easy to pretend otherwise.

All I have are what little spaces I have left in my real life and in my online presence. I have trans and queer friends, I have friends with unclear immigration status, I have friends who simply want to create and write truth in a time overwhelmed by bullshit. I do not know what else I can do for them except maintain what communities I'm in or have built. I'm going to be fine: so far they're still saying I'm a white dude, so I can pass. I don't know writing this will help them or help me. Just, last night I finally fell asleep after dozing on and off for four hours. Today I'm still safe, you're still safe, we'll still be able to grieve with the people we love. We can go to sleep maybe a bit easier tonight because it does get easier day by day.

And I'll delete whatever gloating fucking comments somebody posts underneath this. Because this place, this blog, you're not welcome here.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 31: Prey

Day Halloween: Prey (2022), dir. Dan Trachtenberg

Streaming Availability: Hulu

"You think that I am not a hunter like you. That I am not a threat. That is what makes me dangerous. You can't see that I'm killing you. And it won't either."

Is this Prey the best Predator movie? 

Well, it is the only good one following Predator 2. For this series I skipped over Predators and The Predator, the two non-Alien related sequels, and you did not miss much. Both of these movies were trying to be the next Predator 1, with these big casts of badass action heroes. The Predator even brought back Shane Black to direct... and what a shame thaat was. He's trying his best with quips! Sterling K. Brown sure is chewing a lot of bubblegum and smirking in that movie. Predators 3 and 4, I guess you can call them, are both really messy script-wise. Both movies feel like they're missing scenes. The Predator, for example, posits a theory that neurodiversity is the next stage in human evolution, that old savant trope which was offensive already before we learned the Predators want to steal an autistic boy because he's the greatest threat in the world. I think Hollywood has finally stopped doing this gross shit, and thank god.

These movies that miss the Predator for the jungle, if you will. They do not realize what makes the Predator work as a creature, where this monster needs to live. This alien is not just an action movie villain, the Predator had a very specific niche in his first two movies. This monster lives in places of conflict, invisibly between enemy lines. Predator 1 is all about US interventions overseas, Predator 2 could be argued to be about that violence coming home (negatively in the form of scary immigrants, but that movie's politics are bad). This isn't merely a scary hunter with Batman gadgets, it is a parasite on conflicts. And none of the Alien vs Predator movies get this, Predators thought it was all about The Most Game Dangerous aspect, and finally The Predator thought it needed to be a complete piece of shit.

Prey actually gets it. There is the Prequel aspect where they feel the need to explain the antique 1715 pistol at the end of Predator 2. I never felt any need to meet Raphael Adolini, and honestly Prey isn't interested in him either. He's such an incidental part of this movie, like the studios demanded this intertext fanservice and director Dan Trachtenberg had to oblige. The movie is really about the ongoing conflict between Native Americans and Europeans. Of course a Predator would be drawn here, right at the moment that Europeans began conquering the entire Earth. If they're nibbling at the borders of the American Empire, they also should have been here in our origins too.

I've said this before, but aliens typically represent the future. Speculative fiction is rarely a period piece. However, the alien concept fits extremely well right here. What's happening to our characters, members of the Comanche Nation in the early 18th century, is an invasion by two different kinds of alien peoples. Our protagonist, Naru (Amber Midthunder), comes across a herd of slain and skinned buffalo. Cow mutilations are another element in the seemingly endless varieties of modern UFO mythology. You assume what's doing this is the invisible Predator (Dane DiLiegro), who Prey cuts back to multiple times to show murdering animals for sport. Naru's tribe is strangely nervous about going beyond the ridge line, not telling her what has them so spooked. But the Predator does not kill herbivores. There are things from another world that are much worse: French fur trappers.

The early eighteenth century is the first time trapper parties begin showing interest in North America's interior. Europeans had been in the New World for centuries, conquering the empires further south and taking small bites at the Eastern Seaboard. This was going to radically change the lives and societies of every Native culture. The Comanche in 1719, for example, are not yet the mounted steppe nomads they would become by the mid-century, with the entire nation traveling by horseback. Horses were only just being introduced to the Americas by Europeans, and wild herds of horses would eventually make their way to the Plains. Naru's main companion is a dog, Sarii (Coco).

Oh, we've had a very rough history with dogs this month. There are a lot of dead pets in alien movies: The Thing from Anther World, The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Alien³, Signs, etc. etc. Well, I have good news: Sarii lives! Good dog.

I cannot say with 100% certainty how accurate the depiction of Comanche life is in Prey. I'm extremely not an expert on this stuff. Prey was shot in English but Hulu offers an alternate dub in the Comanche language. I can only assume the dub is authentic. One thing that's interesting is that the European characters speak in French in both dubs. Movies make conscious choices when they choose which people get to speak English for their audience, The Hunt for Red October famously turns Russian into English so audiences feel more connected to the Soviet crew. (Whether or not this is a good thing is another question, I'd rather hear Russian or Comanche, but mass English-speaking audiences prefer English.) In Prey, French is purposefully left untranslated in the subtitles. The trappers are not your people. They're filthy, nasty, dangerous fools, and Prey has no hesitation to murder dozens of them.

One thing that's became clear to me watching all these Predator movies is how much more violent things are in the 2020s than in the 1980s. John Wick's effect on action cinema over the last decade has been enormous, fight choreography is much more impressive now than it was then. Arnold would just spray and pray, Naru in this movie is fast, nimble, and fatally creative in her stabbing. There is just an overwhelming amount of talent to make - there's no other word it - awesome fight scenes in modern filmmaking. Naru starts this movie hesitating and unable to kill a mountain lion. Later it comes to the French, she'll kill six or seven of them in the span of two minutes, stabbing away like a very bloody superhero, to rescue Sarii. The Predator too gets to massacre these guys with gleeful abandon, they are cannon fodder. It really makes the finale of Predator 1 seem slow and cruddy in comparison.

Prey ends up being a less comedic movie, there's few gags in the script. Naru struggles all movie to prove to her tribe that she can transcend gender boundaries. The Comanche were a patriarchal culture, nobody is pretending otherwise. It is actively a question whether or not she should be out there, especially when she's making simple mistakes and unable to kill a normal Earth bear. She has a good relationship with her brother, Taabe (Dakota Beavers), the golden child of the family, already war chief at a young age. Taabe at least will give her a chance. The other teenagers in his group are cruel bullies. There's a scene where Taabe is absent and his gang capture Naru to bring her home, and this scene is really disturbing, you're afraid where it might lead. Same with the French later. It is a far cry from "goddamn sexual tyrannosaurus".

I'm less in love with the design of this Predator. I like that he's lean and Dane DiLiegro gives him height and speed, versus the plodding lunks from AVP. But there's something weird about how the script calls this one a "Feral Predator", which is bringing in some ugly politics. He's less civilized than the previous ones? I would not think in such terms if your movie is championing peoples who were themselves widely considered "feral" and "savages". One major change is that the Predator's face is fully CG, so the jaws open much wider. The costuming looks different. The new mask evokes a cow skull, he's shirtless, actually he's dressed like a Native American in some ways. The Predator monster has been racially-coded in ways I'm less and less comfortable with, so it is weird to see him look more like our heroes. Script-wise, this one is less "honorable" than the Predators that have come before (which is horses shit, Predators have been sore losers since 1987). Taabe actually is giving this alien a good challenge before the monster cheats with his invisibility cloak.

It therefore comes to Naru to finally complete her hunt training. The final fight is great. It also is one of those times that a very neat script actually works to a film's advantage. Everything Naru has learned about these woods and how the Predator works is used in this fight: the quicksand swamp, her magic herbs that lower body temperature, Sarii as a distraction, the Predator's laser guidance system. Sometimes it's really clever, who could not cheer when Naru tricks the Predator into cutting off his own arm? Or when he auto-locks onto his own head? I wish this movie had come to theaters so I could have heard a crowd roar at that one.

Yeah, movies are good sometimes, man. I stand by it: best Predator movie. Prey even avoids 90% of the cliche call-back quotes of the other movies. Taabe does say if "it it bleeds, we can kill it", and to the script's credit, it makes sense at the moment and is not groan-worthy.

Dan Trachtenberg is making a whole new Predator movie for 2025 called "Badlands", which sadly will not bring back Naru. I would love to see more of Amber Midthunder and Dakota Beavers, just recast them in new roles please. Then like this very week, I found out there's a different currently unnamed Predator movie coming out before that, also being directed by Trachtenberg. So there's a lot of Predator coming down the pike. (Plus an Alien TV show set on Earth created by Noah Hawley!) Disney is gonna exploit the heck out of their Fox alien properties, I guess. But if you come out with good actors, creators with ideas about what to do with the material, you can keep franchises rolling. Being the seventh movie in your series need not be a sin. Even Alien: Romulus was promising in its first half with a young cast and a good idea, until it turned into schlock replays of the other movies.

Uch, I still hate that movie.

...

And that wraps up that. Spooky Season ends with Halloween. A lot of good movies this year. Turns out thirty-one reviews was woefully insufficient to cover the whole history of aliens in horror films. Just off to the top of my head, I should have covered Planet of the Vampires, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the other two Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Pitch Black, Virus, The Vast of Night, Nope, Under the Skin, the Quiet Place series, Critters, could I write a whole review of Annihilation again? Why not? Annihilation is one of the best movies ever made! Obviously we'll have to do this again. I really should try to cover more alien films that are not Anglo-American and don't star white people next time. It felt overdue to watch Prey in Comache.

So aliens will be back one Spooky Season or another. Not next year though.

Happy Halloween! Be very generous to the like two trick-or-treaters you might get.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 30: Prometheus & Alien: Covenant

Day 30: Prometheus (2012), dir. Ridley Scott

Streaming Availability: Hulu

-"Why do you think your people made me?"

-"We made you because we could."

-"Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?"

I actually wrote a review for Prometheus back in college when it first premiered. I'm not terribly proud of that. I was a bad writer back then - might still be a bad one now. I was very loud back then.

Ridley Scott is emphatic that he's never seen Alien vs. Predator. "I couldn't do it", he told Empire Magazine in an interview. It is therefore very curious that Prometheus' script has so much in common with AVP: Ancient aliens that inspired dozens of unrelated civilizations, a precursor race breeding the xenomorph-ish creatures, a dying Weyland corporation patriarch looking for a final answer sending out an expedition to a harsh dead land. There's full identical scenes. Prometheus has two credited writers, Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof. However, the story concept belongs to Ridley Scott, with the rough idea predating AVP. He was talking about making a prequel origin story all the way back in 2002. I wonder if Paul W.S. Anderson had more access to Scott's notes and borrowed some of them for his dumb creature feature. It's hard to believe this was entirely incidental convergent evolution. Either Scott stole from Anderson or Anderson stole from Scott, somebody is not being honest.

This is hilarious because Prometheus was meant to be a return to form for the Alien franchise, a more serious reboot after decades of slowly descending into schlock. I remember the pre-production speculation around this thing being wild, with 20th Century Fox acting weirdly evasive about whether this was a xenomorph movie at all. This was the era of "viral marketing", so there's a few scenes shot specifically for internet videos. Guy Pearce as Peter Weyland did a fake TED Talk set in the then-distant year of 2023. Which explains why in our final movie, set in 2093, Pearce is given a horrendously-bad old age make-up effect. (I beg of you, Hollywood: please just cast the elderly in movies, they're good actors, don't do this.) And of course, this was the triumphant return of Ridley Scott to the franchise that made him. He didn't need to come back to this, he was a bankable director with a run of hit and had been nominated three times for Best Director and made a Best Picture in Gladiator. If Scott is coming back, we're told it is because he has big important capital-F Filmmaking to do. The hype could not be higher.

The AVP similarities are only part of the issue. Prometheus in retrospect is a messy movie, probably a movie that's too short at two hours. There's too much cast with not enough space to work. It seems like Prometheus will map onto the plot of the original Alien, then breaks away in unsatisfying ways. We have two alternate Nu-Ripleys in Noomi Rapace and Charlize Theron, one of which is murdered violently by the script, her sin being the one person who never believed in any of this shit. Also, this movie is a weird combination of high-minded concepts of a search for human creators and the ultimate meaning of life, that's also living in a gross exploitation monster movie. It is gorgeously shot by Dariusz Wolski using wonderful landscapes in Iceland and Scotland. This might be, production-wise the single best looking Alien movie. There's great character actors like Idris Elba and Kate Dickie and Rafe Spall and even Benedict Wong in the background. Then there's weird tendencies towards slasher movie rules: the first two deaths are these bozos who get lost in the alien ruins and decide to smoke dope through their astronaut suit respirators. There's two separate alien infestation threats that generate independently of each other, and a then a third villain entirely in the Engineers, our precursor race. There's a lot that's great here and also a lot that you want more of

Personally, I've never been curious about the origins of the xenomorph monster. I never cared about the 'Space Jockey', the big elephant-nosed creature they find already dead in the first Alien movie. Now they're called Engineers and turns out the elephant face was just a mask, instead they're pale bald human-ish giants. Aliens in general are not really monsters that need much history. They're a dark futurism, they don't need to exist in the past. They're twisted reflections of some aspect of humanity, be it our drive towards emotionless modernity or sexual terrors or a wish for the fantastic and spiritual. Prometheus, to its credit, combines all these themes into one story. However, no matter what the alien means, their backstory is irrelevant because they are not real things and they're not supposed to be. Who cares where any random horror movie monster came from? Have you ever cared where IT came from? (Oh, by the way, WB is making a Pennywise prequel, enjoy!)

The origin of the xenomorph becomes bizarrely complicated and confusing. Our heroes travel across the universe to where we think the Engineers have been calling us, led by archaeologist Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Rapace) and her dipshit husband, Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green). Holloway believes he's about to find God and all the answers, instead he finds a dead world full of X-Files-esque Black Oil that mutates in random ways. David (Michael Fassbender in a tremendous performance) is the local Android, with his own agenda, and poisons Holloway - who was so obnoxious he was asking for it. Dr. Shaw ends up pregnant with a tentacle baby and there's a terrifying abortion sequence, a masterpiece of body horror right here. Then through seemingly random circumstances, her baby, a now-giant Facehugger creature grabs an Engineer and makes a creature that kinda looks like a xenomorph ...but isn't quite? Why is its head pointy?

Disappointment and lack of answers is a core thing of Prometheus. Nobody sums up the entitlement of gratification like Holloway, who instantly descends into drunken asshole territory the moment he does not get to meet his Space Dad and be told how special he is. We never find out why the Engineers made humanity. We never find out why later they want to kill us by dumping Black Oil all across our world. Our selfish, desperate quest for answers is contrasted with our own relationship with David, the next generation of life. Who is treated as sometimes a butler, an irritance, or just a tool. There is much more happening with David than the previous Androids. He's got the same creepy agenda as Ash from Alien, but is also much more, there's a vast interior life for him. Maybe the best sequence of Prometheus is David alone on the ship, modeling himself off Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. He alone figures out anything on this dead world, and he's not sharing that information with the fleshbags.

There is something really brilliant in the self-absorption of these humans, be them Holloway or Weyland or Dr. Shaw, and their desperate need for some greater spiritual answer, while never considering how little meaning they put into creating David and his kind. The fact we never get an answer is probably because there isn't one: we were made to be useful in some way and failed. The universe really does not care. The final child born is a xenomorph(-ish) monster that was never part of anybody's plan. Dr. Shaw keeps her faith in a God we know isn't real. I can even forgive the Ancient Aliens stuff (plus several characters in Prometheus laugh it off as complete nonsense). Since it creates the stage for such profound existential bleakness. Aliens have usually been proof of the mystical in our series (Signs, Communion), in Prometheus they're exactly the opposite. You go to heaven to find God, and God isn't home.

Honestly? This rules. My only complaint is that there is not enough Charlize Theron. Her character wakes up doing push-ups after years of hypersleep, and is the only one trying to stop an alien infection from taking over the ship.

David and Dr. Shaw end up being the only survivors, and they fly out to space to find the Engineer planet. Well, we'll see if they get any answwers in the next review... starting immediately!

Day 30-2: Alien: Covenant (2017), dir. Ridley Scott

Streaming Availability: Hulu

"No one understands the lonely perfection of my dreams. I found perfection here. I've created it. A perfect organism."

Five years after Prometheus, Ridley Scott went back to the drawing board with another Alien movie, this one seemingly to clear things up from his first swing. This was supposed to be a more satisfying versus Prometheus' philosophizing. Prometheus met a lot of mixed reviews and the audience seemed to turn on it just a few months after release. You can see why Fox would want something that was more traditionally "Alien". Instead, Scott made practically a replay of Prometheus, just in case you did not get it the first time. We have a different ship, now a colonization craft, that lands on a different spooky abandoned Engineer world, full of slightly different xenomorph(ish) monsters that eat the cast, and starring Daniels (Katherine Waterson), pretty much the new Dr. Shaw. There's even a new David in Walter, a less advanced but more stable model, with Fassbender using an American accent to differentiate the two.

Oh, and there's tons of Selfcest homoeroticism between the two Fassbenders. "I'll do the fingering." That is really weird and really hot, I applaud this decision.

Alien: Covenant leans even more traditionally into out-right horror than Prometheus did. Ignoring the space concepts, the movie is basically The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where our colonists are Brad and  Jet and have some car trouble in the form of a violent solar flare that kills Daniels' husband (a corpse played by James Franco, who thankfully is not in this movie). They land in David's nightmare castle for the night, and come up to the lab to see what's on the slab. David has fully become a Dr. Frankenstein in a Gothic ruin, he's a mad scientist and our heroes are the very dumb, very clumsy fools who get to suffer for his science. There's multiple allusions to Milton's Lucifer. Ridley Scott even considered calling the movie "Alien: Paradise Lost" at one point. Plus, the weird slasher rules come back: two characters banging in the shower get eaten. It is almost comical how fast the colonizers completely fuck up everything, step on every possible rake, and David gets to run the show.

Back on the theme of religion, David is not just Lucifer in that he's now rebelling against his fleshy creators, he's also this vampire feeding on faith. He sees in Daniels another Shaw, which is terrifying. It turns out he's killed our first heroine between movies in his various experiments, and he has similarly twisted plans for his new lady. Shaw carried her faith forward to doom. Similarly, the acting captain, Oram (Billy Crudup), is a single-track mind about divine plans. He walks right into a xenomorph egg, even after David has given him every indication to not be trusting. God did not protect anybody.

The creature that is born is like, 90% of the way to being a traditional Alien-ass alien. I saw this whole movie and did not realize it was supposed to be different. The Alien Wiki calls this thing a "Praetomorph". There's also little white monsters called "Neomorphs". The monster born at the end of Prometheus is unrelated entirely, apparently it was called "The Deacon". Honestly all these flavors of alien just feel like we're making shit up to sell toys now, like they did in the Nineties. I had a xenomorph-bull toy as a kid, by the way.

There's a great father-son scene where David meets the newborn Chestburster and stands proud over this tiny monster covered in Oram guts. After all these generations of accidental or purely utilitarian creations, a new God has finally imbued his creation with love and purpose. And the creation is the most terrible being in the galaxy, a monster that just eats and consumes.

Alien: Covenant is very far from a perfect movie. It is disappointing compared to Prometheus' ambition that it leans so heavily into schlock. It is nowhere near as beautiful a production, it has a worse cast. Maybe the correct move was to dump the xenomorph entirely. Or don't use the xenomorph in these stories, it is only a distraction. Covenant, to be positive, is maybe the single bleakest movie of the franchise. There is not even a hope against oblivion like in Alien³. No, David just wins, and everybody on board the ship is going to be his canvas for his art. We never got answers to the lingering questions left by Prometheus because there were no answers. The fact the movie is silent on this is the highest level of darkness. God never wanted us. Instead we built a mad God who wants to make.... purity. The kind of organism that an Ash from Alien would admire.

More or less, Alien: Romulus becomes a sequel to Covenant. The Black Oil shows up again in increasingly goofy ways. There's a wacky giant Engineer baby for some reason. Romulus has no ideas of its own so inevitably ends up borrowing images from Prometheus and Covenant. It does nothing with the concepts of faith, existence, or creation. It just thinks this stuff looks cool. And that movie sucks. I got so mad at Romulus I rewatched the entire franchise just to confirm my initial reaction, and thus this entire series. Yeah, it's disappointing trash.

Next time! Let us wrap up with an actually good sequel. Prey!