Alien: Covenant offers more than you might expect

The crew of the good ship Covenant

One of the most interesting things about the futuristic world set up in Alien: Covenant is that the Alien movie franchise has never existed, otherwise the cast wouldn’t do half the stuff they do. Ridley Scott’s original Alien (1979) reinvented the old dark house movie in space in the process transforming the formula into the ‘old dark spaceship’ genre.

Alien: Covenant is a handsomely mounted excursion into old dark spaceship territory. Everything you expect to happen does happen as the crew of the freighter Covenant, carrying 2000 souls to a new future somewhere in the galaxy, run into trouble. Repairs are made, crew members are lost, and then they pick up what appears to be a phantom distress call. Plainly the 1979 movie does not exist anywhere in this universe.

They answer the call and discover a seemingly perfectly habitable planet in a place where no such body should exist. They have barely arrived when they split up into small groups, poke around in dark, creepy caverns and generally expose themselves to everything that they shouldn’t including some especially savage xenomorphs, as we have come to call the real stars of the Alien franchise. These are new and varied forms but all equally voracious. What they are and how they came to be here are questions for another day as the movie quickly descends into a frantic bid to escape with their lives.

So far, so good. This is a perfectly serviceable genre movie. One of the joys of genre however is what you are allowed to do with the subtext. As long as you deliver all of the generic tropes on the surface, you can explore all sorts of things in the background. Neil Blomkamp did it with District 9 (2009), a sci-fi film about apartheid, while Frank Darabont did it with The Mist (2009), a creature feature about religious fundamentalism, and now Ridley Scott gives us an Alien movie about the philosophical battle of science versus faith.

Alien: Covenant isn’t really an Alien film, it’s a Prometheus film and continues some of the notions raised in that 2012 film. The human cast of this film, gamely led by Katherine Waterston in sub-Ripley mode, are eminently disposable. The real star of the film, and the character in which, for me, the real theme of the film resides, is Michael Fassbender reprising his role from Prometheus as the synthetic custodian of the mission.

Fassbender wanders through the film quoting Shelley and doing a fair impression of Ernest Thesiger’s Doctor Pretorius from Bride of Frankenstein (1935). This is not really a monster movie, Alien: Covenant is a 21^st century movie masquerading as a 19^th century Gothic novel.

Through Fassbender the film examines some ethical issues about the nature of life and creation, and – by extension – the nature of God. This might be more than the audience bargained for but it doesn’t matter, if you choose to ignore it you can sit back and enjoy your old dark spaceship flick.

As in all of Ridley Scott’s movies Alien: Covenant is an incredibly well made film. The production design is magnificent and the sound design is especially impressive. But what lingered longest for me were the ideas that Scott is trying to deal with and they led to Alien: Covenant being a much more interesting film than I anticipated.

For the Guardians of the Galaxy, it's a family affair

After the success of the first film in 2014 Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is the equivalent of that difficult second album. You have to try to repeat the original triumph as well as justifying your existence with a little extra for the fans.

For the most part this film achieves what it sets out to do but at times it does feel a little bit like a place-holder. There is a strong sense that, as the first part of the third wave of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this is something of a bridgehead to the Marvel Cosmic Universe. As such nothing of significance really happens  in narrative terms; indeed you could argue that the most important part of the film’s narrative comes in one of the film’s five – that’s right, five – post-credit sequences.

Having established the Guardians in the first film, this one concentrates on defining relationships between the characters; like almost everything else this summer it’s about family. Ostensibly it is about Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) and his search for his origins which leads him to his real father, the splendidly named Ego (Kurt Russell). As originally conceived by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1966, Ego, the Living Planet was a villain of sufficient scale to tax The Mighty Thor. Here he is a little more manageable by adopting human dimensions but there is still something not quite right about his attempts to win Dad of the Year.

Otherwise the relationship between Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) is examined as are those between Drax (Dave Bautista) and Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and Yondu (Michael Rooker) and, of course, the ‘unspoken thing’ between Peter and Gamora.

In plot terms the film is quite flabby, as those seventies Marvel galactic epics tended to be, and could easily lose 20 minutes. However it survives on the grace notes with witty one-liners, clever Marvel Easter eggs, and the charm of Baby Groot; nowhere more so than in a very clever opening actions sequence to which the rest of the film never quite lives up.

The film’s greatest strength is its visuals with the scenes on Ego’s planet especially stunning. This is the first film shot on Red’s Weapon 8K camera and the richness and depth of the colour palette is breath-taking. It is almost, but not quite, enough to distract you from the fact that nothing much is going on.

Like the first film this one is pretty much arranged around Peter Quill’s mix tape and given that we end the film with him having access to many more songs then this is a franchise that’s going to be around for some time. I don’t have an issue with that – the first film set a high bar but this one, for all its shortcomings, is still pretty entertaining.

And as for those end credits scenes; three are okay, one is absolutely crucial, but the last one is flat out hilarious and a real treat for long-time comic fans.

Their Finest is definitely Bill Nighy's Finest

Sam Claflin, Gemma Arterton & Bill Nighy

The value of the British film industry to the war effort in the Second World War cannot be underestimated. The great Michael Balcon of Ealing Studios was the driving force behind a wave of films which, with the support of the War Office, united the nation after the miracle of Dunkirk.

There were those, such as the Northcliffe Press and some members of the peerage and nobility, who felt that it was not our war and we should basically leave the Germans to it. However there was also a feeling that the ruling classes were mismanaging the war and leading us to certain defeat. It was films such as The Foreman Went to France (1942), Nine Men (1943), and, especially, San Demetrio London (1943), which tapped into the solidarity of the ordinary British men and women. This national consensus went a long way to maintaining resolve in the face of desperate losses and ultimately winning the war.

Their Finest is a touching, bittersweet romance very much in the mould of those Balcon films. Former secretary Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton) gets a job at the Ministry of Information writing propaganda short films. She is seconded to a major studio – presumably Korda Studios – to work with bright young scriptwriter Tom Buckley (Sam Claflin); they need someone to write the ‘slop’ – women’s dialogue – to make the films more appealing to women on the home front.

Catrin comes across a story of two young women who took part in the rescue of Dunkirk. The story is less heroic in truth than it appears in the media but that doesn’t stop them. To paraphrase John Ford, when the legend is bigger than the truth they decide to print the legend.

Their Finest concentrates on the making of this film. The only available star is a fading matinee idol (Bill Nighy) and there are lots of other compromises, not least fitting in an American war hero to placate US audiences. But the make do and mend nature of the filming process becomes a metaphor for the state of the nation.

The performances from Arterton and Claflin are very good and a host of starry supporting turns – Eddie Marsan, Jeremy Irons, Richard E. Grant and others – all do very well. This however is Bill Nighy’s picture from top to bottom; he is a fine actor but I doubt he will ever be better. He perfectly captures the ego, the venality, and ultimately the fragility of the fading star. Terrific stuff.

Lone Scherfig’s direction is perfectly judged. She gets the tone of the film exactly right, it is never maudlin or mawkish. This is a period where the threat of sudden and violent death is ever-present and this makes for a balancing undertone to the inevitable romance between Arterton and Claflin. That said, the film avoids the more obvious clichés.

Editor Lucia Zuchetti also does a wonderful job in capturing the mood of the piece. She has an unerring eye for the grace notes; the realisation of the Arterton – Claflin romance, for example, or a surprisingly heartfelt wrap party in a village pub. It is these details that make Their Finest such a rich and rewarding experience.

The final sequence where we watch the audience watch the movie we have just seen made is magical stuff, very reminiscent of Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes (1992). It is here that we finally understand that ultimately Their Finest is a film about the transcendent power of cinema and it captures it perfectly.