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!

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 29: The Fourth Kind

Day 29: The Fourth Kind (2009), dir. Olatunde Osunsanmi

Streaming Availability: YouTube

"The fourth kind, there's nothing more frightening than the fourth. You see, that one is when they abduct you."

The Fourth Kind is one of the most experimental movies we've covered this month. This is part of the late-2000s found footage horror boom following Paranormal Activity; found footage itself a new wild production method. Things like The Blair Witch Project could explain the camera in the diegesis of the film, giving this bold pose that what you were seeing was "real". 'Did those kids really die in those woods?' It all fits well into UFOs, considering how our experience of these things are usually cruddy footage shot by a shaking POV. The found footage subgenre is daring you to believe the same way spooky documentaries or X-Files episodes dare you to. The Fourth Kind goes all the weirder with it by pulling in traditional film scenes with professional actors mixed with a mockumentary of supposedly "real" footage. It is trying to make the found footage aspect seem more convincing by leaning on the artificiality of filmmaking. In one version there is a supermodel actresses performing melodrama. Meanwhile the "reality" has a sickly woman with blemishes and less favorable lighting.

Few movies open with their star introducing themselves and explaining the role they're playing. The Fourth Kind intrigued me right here, this is why I chose to cover this.. Milla Jovovich comes on to tell us she is playing Dr. Abbey Tyler in a "dramatic reenactment". .Meanwhile, there is archive footage and audio we'll see, often side by side with the "fake" stuff. The "real" Dr. Tyler is played by Charlotte Milchard. Either Abbey is a psychiatrist working in Nome, Alaska, helping patients tormented by alien abductions. 

The duel level of reality is strange even within the metanarrative of The Fourth Kind. History Channel documentaries would sometimes add color between the various academic talking heads with little reenactment scenes where extras might play some Confederates in costume, maybe at best you'd get a few lines by a guy playing Napoleon. You never have a full Hollywood movie living side by side with what is supposedly a real document of the material. Why would you do this if you're the in-universe documentarian (played by the director, Olatunde Osunsanmi)? It is interesting as a commentary on the blend of fact and fiction that is core to the found footage genre, but it has no further strategy I can understand.

I kept waiting for The Fourth Kind to really get funky and start messing with this bizarre mechanism it has built. It is establishing layers upon layers of artificiality, I wanted that structure to collapse. Get Jovovich and Milchard to interact in the same scene to mess with our heads. Have the fake movie also get tormented by aliens, suddenly our actress is experiencing what her inspiration has been through, like Wes Craven's New Nightmare with Martians. But that never happens. I cannot explain the motivations of the in-universe Osunsanmi when he decides what parts Jovovich will recreate and what parts he'll leave 'real'. We don't have our big star performing the final climax scene. Sometimes the two kinds of footage are shown literally side by side, split screen, sometimes not. I really wanted that border to break down, the 'safety' of what we're told is real and what we're told is pretend to become blurry and messy. It never does. It never is more than a gimmick, which was sadly the key problem of this whole brief found footage craze. This style persists, but the P.T. Barnum showmanship trickery aspect died out.

Worse, I'm not terribly impressed with even our universe's Osunsanmi as a director. The Jovovich portions use a lot of handheld photography. Why would you do that when the footage is consciously un-real? Handheld photography is supposed to create intimacy, as if you're living and breathing in the scene with the actors. But this is all fake and The Fourth Kind wants us to know it! I would gone much harder with the formalism. Put Milla Jovovich on very obvious sets, with blatant CG aliens. Maybe even put her on a stage doing overly-dramatic reads. We could have four or five levels of adaptation happening here at once blurring everything.

What I'm saying is that Wes Anderson needed to make The Fourth Kind. And in fact, did he not? Last year, he made Asteroid City, I picked it as my favorite movie of 2023.

As an abduction movie, The Fourth Kind is decently scary. I don't think the gimmickery contributes much to the horror, and the movie seems to know it. That's why Jovovich disappears in the big scary climax. The Fourth Kind understands the assignment of an alien movie better than say, Fire in the Sky. It has to play with the audience's reality enough that they just start believing in the story. I don't think the budget was very high so we never get footage of the aliens in either plane of reality. Instead there nice frightening scenes of characters seemingly under possession. Milchard's Abbey Tyler has great screams. I do not begrudge you if you lose sleep to The Fourth Kind.

I even think its concepts of aliens are interesting. There's this recurring archetype in every patients' dreams, this white owl that appears at night when they cannot sleep. This is lifted directly from Whitley Strieber who theorized that 'the owls are not what they seem', to quote Twin Peaks; that these nocturnal visions are fake memories replacing a Gray alien. And owls do look spooky sometimes, there's a viral video of two baby owls in a crawlspace that look terrifyingly like space aliens. It is an effective bit of economical imagery, the zoomed-in shots of owl eyes fill in for big effects shots well.

More interesting is the mythology. I have to wonder: Is The Fourth Kind even about aliens? At a certain point we discover the creatures tormenting Nome speak Ancient Sumerian, a la Pazuzu from The Exorcist. Everybody keeps waking up at 3:00 AM, the witching hour like in The Exorcism of Emily Rose. We get vague references to Ancient Astronaut theories (which are still all horseshit but I won't relitigate all that). There's multiple hypnotic regression scenes where uncovering the memories takes on a demonic quality. Characters float in their beds and speak in tongues. Abbey Tyler will break her neck trying to speak with the voice of the creature. During that portion, with the standard dropped camera and spooky effects of static on the digital camera, the alien announces that "I am God". Abbey explains it merely believes itself to be God, reminding this writer of Yaldabaoth, the gnostic demiurge. 

We get a flying saucer on camera though. Demons do not use flying saucers. So who knows?

Less great is the use of Nome as a setting. The Fourth Kind exploits this region's history of missing persons and high fatalities. It is one thing to make a fully fictional movie saying aliens are attacking Alaska, but when The Fourth Kind has these pretenses of reality, it feels more than a bit tasteless. There's real pain here, do not pretend that your shitty horror movie offers answers or closure.

The real flaw of these found footage movies is that ultimately they need to end with you dazzled by the magic trick. Once they've conned you, that's it. There is no definitive statement on what is going on with the demonology or aliens. Tyler's daughter disappears and is never found. We discover very late into the movie that her husband, who we were tricked into believing was murdered (possibly by aliens) actually committed suicide. Documentarian-level Osunsanmi, why would you fake-out your audience that way? Nobody making a documentary would do that. The Fourth Kind is ultimately all a tease. There's no juicy conclusion, nothing is really done with the metafiction. There just is no there there.

Next time! The remake of AVP without Predators, Prometheus! (Oh and Alien: Covenant too.)

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 28: War of the Worlds (2005)

Day 28: War of the Worlds (2005), dir. Stephen Spielberg

Streaming Availability: Paramount+

"They defeated the greatest power in the world in a couple days. Walked right over us. And these were only the first. They'll keep coming. This is not a war any more than there's a war between men and maggots. This is an extermination."

The opening scenes of Spielberg's War of the Worlds were shot in my hometown, Bayonne, NJ. I know exactly where Ray (Tom Cruise)'s house is, I used to commute over that bridge in his backyard to school in Staten Island. This movie was a big deal back then in my city, I remember they were doing camera tests a block away from my house. We Bayonners (Bayonnites? Do we have a demonym?) were all annoyed when between cuts, the movie implies that you can turn a corner and teleport to the Ironbound neighborhood of Newark, several miles and an entire harbor away. Plus, somehow the family ends on the Staten Island Expressway, a bad idea even in peacetime, now impossible thanks to the alien attack. These are the kinds of Cinema Sins complaints that really matter.

All around, I am disturbed how well War of the Worlds maps onto my life. I was a teenager in 2005, I had a divorced dad living downtown. I remember terrible, awkward nights of staying over his depressing bachelor apartment with my younger sister. We had lots of pointless arguments over nothing. I walked home once just to piss him off.

Also, remember that time aliens nearly conquered the world in Bush's second term? That was weird.

War of the Worlds does have a real, traumatizing event on its mind, and much like Signs, it is the September 11th attacks. Bayonne is not far from Manhattan. You can see the skyline from taller buildings, say the third floor of my elementary school, where I saw one of the towers burning that morning. Everybody in the Tristate Area has their story about that day and how they got home. My mom walked and hitchhiked home because of the traffic jams. A huge smoke cloud hung over New York Harbor for days afterwards. Signs is about the distant fear of watching these attacks on CNN all night. War of the Worlds is about being at Ground Zero, being covered in soot, watching debris float from the sky. Aliens have been representations of our wars since the beginning of this series. How America begins fearing the skies because we were afraid we were due for the horrors of the Second World War we had escaped. Well, the September 11th attacks are when that happened for real. You had good reason, finally, to fear what was above you.

It is fitting that Spielberg chose the novel War of the Worlds as his inspiration. He was not the first to adapt this novel, he was not the last, but his version stands alone as a unique nightmare. In 1897, H.G. Wells was terribly prescient about the Total War future to come, he imagined mechanized war from the air destroying every ability of an innocent nation to resist in mere hours. He imagined a Martian race doing to Britain at the height of her empire what Britain was doing all across the planet. In his writings, he directly referenced the 19th century Tasmanian genocide. 9/11 was America's airborne acts of violence coming home. We had ruled the skies for sixty years raining death without meaningful response. And we followed 9/11 by doing yet more war across the Middle East. Only twenty years later when our client governments are bombing hospitals in Gaza and Lebanon, it is clear that terrorism only begets more terrorism. It is disturbing how quickly we forget our own experiences.

Spielberg has another fascination, and that's of course: dads. His works are full of guys who either fail as fathers (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) or are forced by circumstances to become fathers (Jurassic Park). War of the Worlds features Ray, a patented cocky Tom Cruise character, a guy so divorced he's turned his kitchen into a garbage to work on an engine. He has to watch his two kids, Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and Rachel (Dakota Fanning) for the weekend while their mom and step-dad are out on a trip. Ray is irresponsible and blue-collar clearly disconnected with his children and their more affluent lifestyle. One visual metaphor of the divide between father and son is that Ray is a Yankees fan and Robbie has a Red Sox hat, which in 2005, would've gotten that kid punched in face in Bayonne. (We're still not over the '04 playoffs.) Ray is at least capable and knows exactly which magic thing in a car's starter motor you need to replace to get around the alien ETM blast. He can get his kids out of danger, he is properly cynical and prepared for the dog eat dog violence to come. All told, he does a great job under the circumstances, at least until Robbie goes full quixotic teenage jackass and runs up a hill to join the army and gets himself exploded.

In terms of technical execution, War of the Worlds is as good as anything Spielberg has done. These CG effects by ILM still look great. There's great sets later in the movie. There's a lot of long-takes which are clearly enhanced with a digital camera, a lot of impossible camera moves through a windscreens and such. Spielberg gets a lot done with night scenes and big lens flares - JJ Abrams' entire aesthetic is lifted from this era in Spielberg. There's an amazing set piece where Ray walks through the ruins of a crashed Boeing 747 in the suburbs (probably a reference to crash of Flight 93 on 9/11), and that's a real destroyed plane he's walking through on the Universal backlot. The plane is still there if take the tour.

War of the Worlds is an unrelenting movie for most of its runtime. From the moment Ray is escaping the alien lasers to Robbie's foolish death scene, it is practically non-stop action. There's a car chase scene, a terrifying ferry boat attack, and a bitter misanthropic set piece where a gang of survivors kill each other over the one working SUV. The horn sound effect of the alien Tripods is great sound design. War of the Worlds slow down in its second half with Ray and Rachel forced to hide in the basement of a crazed survivor named Ogilvy (Tim Robbins). And just part of the bleakness here.. Ray has to strangle his host to keep him quiet and his daughter safe. Rachel knows her father is in the other room doing murder and trying to not see or hear it. This is not a 9/11 of people coming together and trying to help. It's a total breakdown, grab what you can and run now.

On the aliens. They "Martian-form" our planet, creating a red weed environment that is lifted from the Stephen King's novel, Dreamcatcher. We actually see the aliens, which was probably a mistake. Their design is clearly taken from Independence Day. They're a lot scarier when they're up in the skies operating these invincible death machines, a lot less scary when they're little goblins playing with bicycle wheels and passing around photos. It feels like they're all about to start cackling like the goofballs in Mars Attacks!.

We do need to talk about the ending. The aliens dying from Earth's microbes comes straight from H.G. Wells. Signs did basically the same miracle thing. Independence Day at least got clever by making it a computer virus, so playing with the concept, and forcing the heroes to be proactive to save the planet. Wells is a Victorian so can thank God's wisdom more than we can. That is a little less satisfying in the 21st century where the inevitability of God's plan comes off more forced and corny. Even more miraculous is that Ray's ex-wife is exactly where he told Rachel she would be: Boston. And Robbie is here too!

Somehow. He clearly exploded and died.

Whatever. Don't worry about it. The movie is over.

Morgan Freeman is doing the narration, get your leftover popcorn and go home. I don't think anybody in 2005 wanted an ending as bleak as "Tom Cruise could not mend his relationship with his son and let him die". But let my official position be this: Steve - can I call you Steve? - you should have killed that kid.

Next time! I probably should have covered Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Oh well. Well, I'll do one better: The Fourth Kind!