The week of August 14th is hosting a lot of stellar titles, so let's pass Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment's awful Alien: Covenant like a kidney stone and get to the good stuff. I don't know if Alien: Covenant is the worst film of the year - it does manage one frightening setpiece and sport one hilarious/fascinating performance - but it's certainly the year's most disappointing franchise entry. Perhaps director Ridley Scott was doomed from the start. His 2012 Prometheus sharply divided audiences. Some appreciated his willingness to mine a larger thematic gambit (namely the complex interplay between flawed humans and indifferent gods) out of what was supposed to be a rote Alien prequel, while other found the theological underpinnings shallow and lamented the relative lack of bloody alien carnage. Alien: Covenant, then, tries to split the difference, inserting a showdown between another crew of space travellers (like Katherine Waterston, Danny McBride, Billy Crudup, Carmen Ejogo, Amy Seimetz, Demián Bichir, and a distracting cameo from a McBride confederate who shows up just long enough for you to wonder a) if he was who you thought he was, and b) if so, why the hell did Scott cast him in what's almost a literal throwaway part) and alien Xenomorphs (who barely factored into Prometheus) into the journey of Prometheus' sentient android David (Michael Fassbender) as he yearns to exceed the capabilities of his human creators. There's just one teensy little problem. If Prometheus didn't make it clear enough, Alien: Covenant confirms that Ridley Scott couldn't give less of a s**t about the iconic monsters that he and H.R. Giger helped popularize in 1979. Considering that roughly half of the film contents itself with alien attacks, this disinterest results in a crippling lack of tension. Every time we meet a monster (and the film actually offers up a few new varietals, from a proto-Xenomorph to the translucent, goblin-shark-esque "Neomorphs"), Scott hustles it off-screen as quickly as possible, like he's begrudgingly fulfilling his contract obligations and nothing more. An ambush in a wheat field looks visually arresting but lacks spatial coherence (editor Pietro Scalia struggles to distinguish between the human and alien characters), while the big climax, which finds Waterston's bland Ripley-surrogate and McBride's boring sidekick (the Eastbound & Down star is on his best behavior here, sadly) hunting an alien on their spaceship, plays like the last half of Alien sped up to about 15X.
Outside of the horrifying sequence where we see the Neomorphs' births (and to Scott's credit, this section is almost as scary as the John Hurt-chestburster death; you get why Fox kept trotting it out to preview audiences before Covenant's release while revealing suspiciously little of the film's other hundred minutes), Scott doesn't care about the monsters (and the terrible, omnipresent CGI doesn't help - Xenomorphs suuuck when exposed in daylight as a tangle of digital pixels), and he and Scalia have hacked down so much of the character detail that we don't care when a crewmember bites it. Of the twelve or so major characters, only Crudup's sensitive man of faith registers as something resembling a human being, and that's all Crudup. As good as he is, he has to suffer the indignity of John Logan, Jack Paglen, and Michael Green's jerry-rigged script, which has his character act like a moron at a critical juncture. The rest of the actors get one note apiece to play and/or sport a Star Trek-level red-shirt designation in terms of their disposability (The one that gets their jaw ripped off! The one that gets decapitated! The ones that get killed in the shower, Friday the 13th-style! All compelling and rich). So what fascinates Scott? That'd be Fassbender, who almost makes Alien: Covenant watchable through sheer force of will. In the ten years that have elapsed between Covenant and Prometheus, David has grown ever more sneeringly contemptuous of humankind, and Fassbender plays the character like he's auditioning to replace Mads Mikkelsen on a nonexistent Hannibal reboot. When he's not quoting Shelley, singing like Peter O'Toole, and flirting with the crew's updated android assistant (Fassbender again, and yep, you read that right - Alien: Covenant jumps right into full-on homoeroticism between the two Fassbenders), this new David is greeting the human characters with an unctuous malice that Vincent Price would find a little overdone, but Fassbender is having so much fun that watching him devour the scenery emerges as Covenant's greatest pleasure. That said, even this material feels compromised, both in the editing (it's clear Scott and Scalia excised large narrative chunks - the previews and promotional materials are loaded with David-centric material that didn't make the final cut) and in Scott's tired acquiescence to the Alien mayhem, including a pair of twists that couldn't be more obvious AND cheapen some of the Alien franchise's core strengths. I will say this: if Scott's objective was to make us resent the formula as much as he does, then mission accomplished. But I doubt he'll get another opportunity to play with this material. What a waste.
Kino Lorber is using this week to give special-edition upgrades to two memorable Westerns - King Vidor and David O. Selznick's 1946 oater Duel in the Sun and Sergio Leone's great 1966 Spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Of the pair, Duel in the Sun is the least traditionally successful, but in no way do its shortcomings make it any less entertaining. The film exists, in large part, as a testament to Selznick's hubris. While Vidor gets the "Directed By" credit, Selznick willed Duel in the Sun into existence, even directing much of the picture during production in the hopes that he could make a movie more iconic than his Academy Award-winning Gone with the Wind. However, Selznick grew so obsessed with doctoring a masterpiece that his behind-the-scenes machinations outstripped the central narrative about a spirited desert woman (Jennifer Jones) torn between a gentlemanly cattle driver (Joseph Cotten) and his hot-headed younger brother (Gregory Peck, reveling in the opportunity to play someone who isn't an exemplar of moral decency). Selznick made exacting demands about the production design, and his Svengali-esque desire to turn Jones into a star only exacerbated the fact that the two were having a not-so-secret affair whenever shooting stopped. Like the director's cut of Zach Snyder's Sucker Punch or Francis Ford Coppola's One From the Heart, you feel like you're watching a cinematic therapy session than an actual movie. But what a session it is! Whatever its narrative shortcomings, Duel in the Sun remains consistently, breathtakingly hypnotic. No less an expert on cinema as Martin Scorsese has praised the film for its aesthetic marvels: the richness of the Technicolor photography and the totemic beauty of the film's Western landscapes makes visceral the central love triangle in ways that Oliver H.P. Garrett, David O. Selznick, and Ben Hecht's script never could. After its release, critics derisively referred to Duel in the Sun as Lust in the Dust, so pulpy is its approach to melodrama, yet that nickname feels strangely apropos. Cinema should be a sensory experience, and you can't blame Duel in the Sun for hoping we overdose on it. In contrast, what makes The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly so impressive is that it proves even more overwhelming and doesn't succumb to any of the same faults. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly might be the Platonic Ideal of Spaghetti Westerns. Sergio Leone uses a simple, familiar setup - an amoral gunslinger (Clint Eastwood) forms an uneasy alliance with an sleazy small-time bandit (Eli Wallach, giving the film's most delightful performance) as they hunt for buried treasure and dodge the depredations of both a ruthless killer (Lee Van Cleef, terrifying) AND the Civil Freakin' War - as a springboard for an immersive screen experience that merits comparison with other large-scale screen fantasias like Gone with the Wind or Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Leone's "heroes" are venal, petty, and cruel, and if Eastwood's character comes off as more likable than the rest, it's only because the people he kills are so much worse (shades of Richard Stark's "Parker" character). Everything, from morals to geography (while the three films are set in Mexico and the American Southwest, Leone shot them primarily in Spain and Italy), is off-kilter in Leone's world, and that dislocation makes his Westerns fascinating to consider. Kino's edition exists to correct two faulty Blu-ray masters. When The Good, the Bad and the Ugly first made its Blu-ray debut, the MGM/Fox disc slathered the film in print defects and excessive DNR, all of which corrupted the texture of Leone's aesthetics. Fox/MGM fixed those issues on a remastered 2014 disc, except it applied a controversial yellow-green filter to the film. Kino's disc ostensibly offers the definitive visual experience of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - here's hoping third time's the charm.
According to Brian Orndorf's Blu-ray review, though, Kino hasn't yet cracked this nut: he writes that "the AVC encoded image…presentation from Kino Lorber has decided to reverse the yellow fever, dialing down colors to help even out the viewing experience, giving it more of a natural appearance. Protests have greeted this alteration as well. So, here we are with yet another disc that isn't exactly what was originally intended, or even imagined, leaving the faithful with another piece of the puzzle that seems more impossible to solve with every passing year. The basics are simple: without the blazing yellow, the Kino disc looks colder, more restrained, returning everything to a less extreme palette. It's not unappealing, but it lacks urgency and the extremity Leone often favors, muting cinematographic achievements to a slight degree. It's hardly a black and white event, but it's missing a certain snap. Detail is satisfactory, securing rich facial particulars from Leone's beloved close-ups, and more panoramic shots maintain depth. More problematic are black levels, which come off a tad brightened, draining depth and restraining delineation. Compression issues are present as well, with posturization peeking through periodically…This is a major, inescapable 'your mileage may vary' title."
Finally, Warner Archive is bringing Arthur Penn's perennially underrated Night Moves to Blu-ray. The 1970s represented some kind of renaissance in neo-noir cinema - in one eighteen-month-period, we got both Roman Polanski's Chinatown and Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye - so it's saying something that Night Moves deserves acknowledgment with the very best of them. For the film's first half, we could be watching the great Travis McGee mystery never made. While this isn't a direct adaptation of one of John C. MacDonald's McGee thrillers, Alan Sharp's script has the same kind of lazy charm and casual menace, thanks in large part to Sharp's wonderfully etched noir hero: Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman), a running back-turned-P.I. who's searching for an aging former starlet's promiscuous daughter (Melanie Griffith). Hackman's presence is the first indicator that Night Moves won't play by traditional noir rules. He is painfully aware that he's an also-ran, that any initial promise he had as a football star is long gone, and he accepts his fate with a ruefulness that masks a deep depression. In one of the film's brilliant little vignettes, he comes face-to-face with his wife's lover (Harris Yulin), and an encounter that we think will turn violent de-escalates once Yulin's character starts sympathetically taking the measure of the beyond-beleaguered Moseby. Hackman was never better than when he was playing insecure men painfully aware of their own inadequacies (even his Unforgiven and Royal Tenenbaums blowhards puff themselves up to distract others from noticing their crippling character flaws), and Moseby ranks as one of his finest performances. If we just got to watch Hackman amble around the film's Florida Keys locations and half-ass his missing persons case, Night Moves would satisfy (you gotta figure the Coen Brothers are big fans of this one), but Penn and Sharp use the film's lazy early-goings to gut the viewer. The more Moseby dawdles, the more he starts getting drawn into the real danger at the center of his case, and we're reminded of the similar magic Penn employed in his groundbreaking Bonnie and Clyde. That 1967 classic started out as a slapstick-y hayseed comedy before exploding in a rush of still-graphic violence, and Night Moves, too, develops stakes that Harry seems ill-equipped to confront, culminating in an ending that is apocalyptic in its yawing ambiguity. Yet the shift works because Penn is so clear in his objectives. Without making any explicit political claims or stating a party affiliation, Penn has crafted a deeply political film, one that looks at our most trusted institutions and sees only chaos. I'm sure that Penn was commenting on Watergate and Nixon, but Night Moves resonates just as strongly in 2017 as it did in 1975. We're just as trapped as Moseby, and that's just the way Penn would have it. I am at a loss how this one got lost in the sands of time - it's one the defining films of the 1970s.