by eabaker » Thu Sep 28, 2017 3:56 pm
The other night, Jenn and I finally watched both Alien: Covenant and La La Land. Thoughts on both below...
Alien: Covenant
Basically, they seem to have just recycled some philosophical stuff that had already been dealt with in Prometheus, and then intermingled it with some half-hearted attempt to, I dunno, rehash Alien but turned up to 11. The result is hollow mess. I've noticed that some people seem to really like the first half, but hate the second half; others really hate the first half, but love the second half; I'm in the camp that didn't find anything very memorable or impactful throughout. As best I can tell, this movie mostly serves to clarify the direct connections between Prometheus and Alien, for anyone who simply wasn't paying enough attention previously.
La La Land
Well, it looked gorgeous. But... Look, I'm someone who goes into a story more for the emotional/character threads than for the mechanics of plot, but that doesn't mean plot is irrelevant; without an effective plot, those character beats have no organic root. That is very much the case with La La Land; the relationship arc between the characters seems to happen not because of any natural causes, but because those are the beats that the filmmakers assigned. The result is every bit as superficial as if there was a big, convoluted plot but no emotional through-lines to track. And the songs just had no impact on us at all.
Musicals are one of those genres that I really love when they're done right, but that makes me especially rough on them when I don't think they work. I feel like La La Land really exemplifies everything that people who hate musicals accuse the genre of being. It's all sentiment with no substance.
Last night, to cleanse our pallets, we watched Alien. It's one of the movies we've watched together most often, but Jenn had never seen the 2003 cut, so we opted to watch that version instead of the theatrical.
Look, either way, Alien is a great movie, and I really like a lot of the material that Scott added back in for this cut. I mean, Alien could run three hours, and I'd be into it the whole time. The most talked-about added bit, of course, is the cocoon scene near the end, which I do enjoy, but I also find a bit jarring with the rest of the movie's tone; it's all the smaller character and logistical bits added back in that I really like. However, I don't really care for the tightening up of a lot of the more tense scenes; it is still very much a slow burn of a movie, but its almost hypnotic quality is slightly reduced by becoming a little bit choppier.
Whatever. It's Alien, and in either version it's about as near to perfection as any movie has ever gotten.
Tokyo, a smoldering memorial to the unknown, an unknown which at this very moment still prevails and could at any time lash out with its terrible destruction anywhere else in the world.