Robert I. Katz's Blog

It is rarely difficult to tell when a movie was made. What seems futuristic today seems weirdly discordant and indicative of its time tomorrow. It has been said that 1984 was not about 1984; it was about 1948.

There are some few exceptions. Bladerunner and Alien, both made many years ago, still look (to me, at least) futuristic. They both avoided jargon and the scruffy, lived in look of the depicted worlds seem universal. I'm not sure that the same can be said of Star Wars. The upbeat tone, the shaggy hair, the almost-Western clothing of Han Solo and the faux-Eastern robes of the Jedi seem very 1970's.

The phenomenon was much more apparent in older works. Films and books from the 1940's and 50's seemed to assume that people in the future would look, talk and act just like them, and since they no longer do, it all seems rather naive and out-of-time.

It's a problem for science fiction that purports to be set in the future. One way of dealing with it is to invent everything. Don't have your characters look and speak as they do when the work is made. Have them look and speak and act like nobody has ever done, and they will always seem somewhere, and somewhen, far away.

This is a discussion of the movie, not a review. If you haven't yet seen it and don't want to know what happens, you might want to skip this.

So, not to beat around the bush, I don't understand the mostly positive reviews of this film. The characters are supposed to be professionals. They're the crew of a colony ship, named Covenant. Yet they are almost universally incompetent, stumbling from one idiotic decision to another. Early in the movie, lightsails are deployed in order to gather energy. There is a burst of energy from space that damages the ship, largely because the lightsails are deployed. The crew, most of whom are in cold sleep, are awakened. The captain's pod malfunctions and he is killed. This all makes sense except for the incredible coincidence of the energy burst just as the lightsails are in operation.

They then discover a transmission from an unknown world that for reasons that are never disclosed was somehow missed when this sector of space was surveyed. The planet looks better than their original destination so the captain, against the advice of the first captain's widow, who is next in line for command, decides to check it out. According to the reviews, the new captain is incompetent, but that's not entirely true. Aside from doubting his own judgment and being a little dogmatic, he makes basically reasonable decisions, until he decides to look down into an alien pod just as it's opening. Bad idea.

This is an Alien movie, but the franchise is not new, and at this point, aliens popping out of peoples' bodies is barely even startling. One by one, the crew is wiped out. We know it's going to happen, so it becomes almost boring. There's the usual frenetic action, little of which we come to care about.

This franchise went off the rails with the third film, where Newt and Hicks, main characters from the second film, the superb Aliens, are dead as the movie begins. The third film was not a bad film, except that the audience and fans were betrayed in the very beginning by the unexpected and foolish decision to so casually eliminate characters we had come to care about.

In Alien: Covenant, Ridley Scott has decided to embrace the mistakes of the past. Elizabeth Shaw, the protagonist of Prometheus, is dead at the beginning of this film, even though Prometheus ended with Elizabeth and David, the dismembered android, flying off to discover the secrets of the Engineers. Exactly how Elizabeth died is not made clear, but it is implied that she was killed by David.

All of this serves to warn the viewer that nobody is worth caring much about because, in the end, they will be vehicles for pointless action and then, most likely, discarded.

In this film, the crew lands, two are infected with a virus which turns into chest-poppers and it is revealed that David, who had landed, along with Elizabeth, some years before, has transformed the Engineers' original terrifying creation into the even more terrifying xenomorph of the original films, all because he resents his status as a creation/slave of the Weyland Corporation. He wants to create, you see, on a Wagnerian scale. This grandiosity is a recurrent theme in the film.

We never see the Engineers except for a brief flashback of David releasing the virus and thereby destroying the inhabitants of the new world.

So the big questions raised in Prometheus--how did humanity begin, why did the Engineers seemingly decide to destroy their creation (us) and maybe themselves--are not answered and the big bad turns out to be a disgruntled robot. Oh, well, maybe the answers will be coming in the next one but at this point, I really don't care.

I was on a panel at a convention a few years ago when one of the participants (I forget his name) said something that struck me as very smart. He said that there were two types of stories, particularly in science fiction and fantasy: superman stories and non-superman stories. A few things instantly occurred to me. Number 1, he was right. Number two, I like superman stories, not literally perhaps, but I very much prefer reading a story where the protagonist is highly competent and is fully capable of dealing with his dilemmas and conflicts.

Some authors are really excellent at this. Elmore Leonard comes to mind. He often presents his characters as middle of the road but then they surprise you. Mr. Majestyk, for instance, is a watermelon farmer whose farm is coveted by the bad guys. It turns out that the eponymous title character was formerly a special forces soldier who knows just how to deal with bad guys. La Brava, a former secret service agent (and many others) was similar.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, for a counter-example, is a famous book that always left me a little cold. The main characters are buffeted by fate. They're not particularly competent and I never enjoyed reading about them.

Does this make me shallow? Maybe, but we all like what we like; we enjoy what we enjoy and there's no accounting for taste.

My own books feature protagonists who are not exactly supermen but who are very, very good at what they do. I tend to think that most readers, in the end, prefer it that way.

When I was a kid, I spent much of my time reading, science fiction mostly, but I also spent a lot of time watching movies and even tv. I find that now, many years later, I spend even more time reading but I spend very little time on film or television. The world is too much with me.

Looking back, I never really approved of any of our presidents...maybe Kennedy, but I was very young and he was glamorous and exciting. After that? Johnson had Vietnam. Nixon is obvious. I voted for Carter but his ideas were foolish. In retrospect, Reagan did good things for the economy and the world but I didn't see any of that at the time. Ford seemed an amiable dunce. And so on. The difference between then and now is that the world was not in our faces. The political situation was background, not foreground to my daily life. With the proliferation of channels and options, constantly plugged into the web, I'm always more than a bit aware, and at least a bit concerned. It's always fermenting in the back of my mind.

I find myself withdrawing, or trying to. And yet, each morning, I switch on the computer and with trepidation, there it all is. Will we nuke North Korea? Will North Korea nuke us? Will the EU finally collapse? Will the seas rise? Will my house in the Low Country soon be underwater? Will the Cumbre Viejo volcano on the island of Las Palmas collapse into the sea, sending a 1000 foot wave across the Atlantic to swamp the Eastern Seaboard? So much to worry about...

Anyway, I find that a good novel tends to ratchet down the tension. Movies, however, even the most fantastic, are just a bit too much like real life.

I will, however, see Alien: Covenant as soon as it comes out.