Alien: Covenant Review

The Alien series is on balance, as much about creation as it is about destruction. Prometheus attempted to steer the narrative away from genre archetypes that previous films relied on, instead focusing on Scott’s pet topic of man’s origin. The result of the attempt to square the history of the franchise against this new direction means that the overarching narrative has now reached MCU levels of baffling, with its twisted self-referential story, and a repetition of certain formulaic elements.

Alien: Covenant falls foul of these issues, ultimately robbing itself of any purpose as it is simply a stepping stone for a larger story. The film opens with Weyland (Guy Pearce) having a portentous conversation about mankind and their legacy with his uncanny artificial son (Michael Fassbender). We then skip forward to see a later android model, Walter (also Fassbender), attempting to correct a failure that threatens the lives of the cryogenically frozen colonists on the titular ship.

The disaster takes out the ship’s captain, who is also the husband of this film’s female centrepiece, Daniels. Katherine Waterston handles the central role well, largely playing up to the role created by Weaver’s Ripley - one of the many elements of previous films that are needlessly referenced. The crew are littered with famous faces like Danny McBride’s Tennessee and Billy Crudup’s Oram who both cause friction as their respective camaraderie and faith clash with their responsibilities, ostensibly justifying the rash decisions various members make later on.

Scott’s handling of pacing is tight, and the framing often beautiful as the planet's lush, harsh scenery lends a more feral slant to proceedings. The action that commences at planet fall is a heady mix of dread, gleeful body horror and abrupt violence. A cloaked stranger eventually rescues the crew and leads them to a desolate ruin which is a mix of the hellscapes of Bosch and the ruins of Pompeii, littered with allusions to Doré's art for Paradise Lost.

It’s clear that these classical references are not just skin deep, with a meeting between synthetic brothers allowing Michael Fassbender to dip his toe into some delightful thespian onanism over the meaning of existence. David teaches Walter how to play the flute (coming dangerously close to Bacall’s famous “you know how to whistle, don’t you Steve?”) and the pair batter through a bevy of aphorisms and other ostentatious literary quotations.

There's no doubt that these sequences are the best the film has to offer outside of its inventive body horror, and exploring the motivations and the character of David are the real guts of the film. The film's original title of Paradise Lost comes into play not only with evocation of that famous artwork, but also in David's close ties to Lucifer. The sequence between Weyland and David sets up the android as instantly frustrated with his master's inferiority and his implied subservience, and a flashback that shows David arriving in the Engineer ship and bombing them with the weaponised virus ends with a shot of him looking every bit the part of the angel cast out of heaven.

It's clear from the trajectory of Prometheus and Covenant that David is Scott's main focus, and his interest in the character shows. Plenty of time is spent exploring how he has been entertaining himself for the past decade, and its clear that he is enacting the role of the renaissance man, sketching his surroundings and cataloguing the planet like Da Vinci. His explorations extend further than simple cataloguing however, and he uses the rich Eden of the Engineer's planet to continue his experiments with the xenomorph virus, ultimately attempting to create the purest lifeform he can, in the hopes of taming it and surpassing his creators aspiration.

As with Prometheus, the theme of the fall of man is mused on heavily, with the planet acting as a spoiled Eden, ruined by a single infraction. Walter suggests to David that one note out of order can send a whole symphony crashing down, and it’s a line that lingers in the mind long after the film. Does it fully justify some of the baffling decisions made by members of the crew or is it just a reference that’s specific to android’s battle of wits?

Scott makes it hard to tell as so much of Covenant is retreading old ground. A tense and well choreographed action sequence between Daniels and the Alien (the real deal this time, not the Neomorphs of act one) subverts the conventions by being set in broad daylight, on top of a speeding mining platform to great effect.  A final act twist involving the identical androids is rendered moot by its inevitability, and an inability to do anything more interesting in the last few moments than repeat the same finale that the rest of the series has traded on for over 30 years.

There's definitely a greater desire to play with the DNA of the series on show here in places, but Scott is slowing this evolution down by resting on a handful of the same formulaic elements. By the time the film ends, it never really feels like it has accomplished anything beyond a few stand out thrills, and some piece moving that sees David returned to the flock.

Now that the Alien itself has been defanged through its constant overuse, and the ability to suspend disbelief at yet another crew of corporate bodies being devoured by the horrors of birth and capitalism is feeling besieged, the series needs to pull something special out of its kit to reinvigorate itself, lest it succumb to the same hubris that consumed Weyland.

Hyper Light Drifter Review

The opening scenes of Hyper Light Drifter are straight from the playbook of the early days of Anime on Western shores; Incomprehensible scenes of foreboding prophecy accompany a blast of light and disintegrating titans before a hint of story is teased: a white crystal just out of reach; encroaching inky tendrils; an devilish obsidian presence. An undisclosed amount of time later your charmingly animated avatar wakes up in a pastel world and staggers around with a distorted cough, hacking up pools of lurid blood. Where Hyper Light Drifter and those Anime broadcasts part ways is that the former is a complete and supposedly focused artefact, whilst the latter were often confusingly repackaged or unfinished articles. The reason their stories so often felt loose and disconnected were because they literally were, either through the lack of a second series or the mistranslation of script issues.

100 Really Great Games That I Love For Various Reasons

A forum I post on proposed a thread where we list our top 100 games. There were no rules, or restrictions, it was just a free for all where we could mix quality with nostalgia. I decided to write a few descriptions why for each game, because it seemed like a fun thing to do, but partly because I really like Tevis Thompson's Game Review Drabbles anddoing something similar felt like a fairly creative challenge. I don't care if I have avoided "the best" in a series, I have not played every game in existence, and to be honest that isn't what this list is about.

The Musical Counterpoint of Final Fantasy VII

This year, the Final Fantasy VII remake was announced as a real, actually going to happen thing, and lo, did the people rejoice. I decided to play it for the first time in well over a decade, to see if it lived up in any way to my lofty childhood/teenage memories. It was, in all honesty, a mixed bag. In short it was easier than I remembered, more tonally disparate than I was able to understand as a youngster, and wonkier in many other ways: those hideous mini game mechanics made my head shudder. The one thing that anchored it to my grand memories was the story - not its characters - and the counterpoint that the superlative music formed to that.

Before I carry on, I’ll point out that I’m working off Michel Chion’s idea of musical counterpoint - the notion that earlier film theorists rather wrong headedly adapted the word ‘counterpoint’ when they actually meant ‘dissonant harmony’. For Chion, the former term arranges music in parallel with the visual, the latter represents the juxtaposition between image and sound. Nobuo Uematsu’s virtuoso score form such a unique and deep counterpoint to the themes and visuals in FFVII, that it ensures it will forever stand the test of time. It works so well in fact, that I think the all the missals of praise directed towards the relevance and poignancy of the game can almost be entirely laid to rest at the feet of these compositions.

The Ambition of Absence in MGSV: The Phantom Pain

This entire post is a spoiler, as it analyses themes and concepts in MGSV that hinge upon a pivotal moment that will not be apparent to players who have not cleared all of the missions in the main story. Please proceed with caution.

Update: This article is also available as a video on youtube, if you'd prefer to digest it that way.

A Top 5

The Best of The Year(s)

We've all got the internet so all of our opinions are now Objective Fact, fuelled by hubris and recorded forever - a moment’s subjectivity crystalised in data for as long as Google pay their bills - remaining long after we've even forgotten why we arbitrarily decided to quantify things by year of release. I can't even remember what I did in July, so why bother? Future civilisations will hire cyber-archaeologists to pick over the sediment of the net and try and figure out why we were so obsessed with listing things in order, and they’ll teach nascent beings the ways of their forebearers, strange meaty things that had to interface with the internet through physical terminals, desperate to leave an edifying comment about each year: “Really, 2014 was a great year for film…”

That’s all inevitable. It shall come to pass. But until then, we’re stuck with listing things to make us feel like we have some worth, some meaning when weighed against the monolithic indifference of the universe, heat death, the inexorable march of time, etc

In celebration, here is a list of the five best things I did this year. They aren't even constrained by punitive concepts such as "dates". Instead, here is my clawing on the cave walls of the digital world. One day they’ll all mean nothing, but in the moment they really spoke to me.

Infinite Jest and The Sopranos: Annular and Eliptical

There are spoilers ahead, but i'll key you in to the knowledge that I knew all of these spoilers before undertaking any of the Fmega-works, and it didn't hamper my enjoyment of either of them, perhaps that's the point i'm trying to make in the end, about how these stories work, and what they mean to me.

That said, pertinent plot details of Infinite Jest, The Sopranos and Gravity's Rainbow are discussed.

The Avengers 4: Fuck off Marvel

Patient Zero

If there's any word cluster in films at the moment that I hate more than  "Seth Rogen Vehicle" or "Shaky Cam Possession Film" it's got to be "Marvel Cinematic Universe." This utterly loathsome phrase takes absolutely everything that's terrible about comics and packages them into flashy 2 hour, easily digested parcels that can be regurgitated at will by avid superhero film fans. I hate them because they are enablers, bequeathing fans with the ability to splutter ceaselessly on about how it's so awesome that so-and-so is going to be in Avengers 5 because of these incredibly clever hints in this litany of dross that you have to be a true fan to "appreciate".

"This place is like someone's memory of a town, and the memory is fading"

I'm increasingly wary of new TV recommendations, especially after the all that post-meth cook smoke was blown up so many collective asses that it got tiresome to even be involved in the show's culture (disclaimer: I like Breaking Bad but it isn't the be all and end all of TV drama) and because to even participate in conversations around the show without either being buffeted by so much screeching enthusiasm or labelled a disgruntled naysayer for having one bad word to say about any of the many elements of the show was an absolute impossibility, I tend to try and distance myself from the new stuff.

However, HBO have gone and put out something that piqued my intrigue so much that I just couldn't stay away. So instead I am going to spend the next couple of hundred words blowing smoke up the collective asses of those of you who read this. I love the series format on TV, though I often regret the time investment, especially considering the way it's frequently so reliant on commissioning and meeting episode quotas. It often feels like creators are wrestling with network and fan expectations and thus things pan out in uneven and bizarre ways. Sometimes this is good; it was great to see Jesse's character evolved into a fuller role in Breaking Bad than showrunner Vince Gilligan had intended, and sometimes this is bad: cancellation of shows like Deadwood, shows being dragged on past their sell by date like The X-Files and et cetera, et cetera et cetera. It’s an obstacle that few shows can guarantee that they can surmount.

Snippet

So there she goes, tracking one intact heel across cold damp pavement like a stylus across a record at the wrong speed, a chirpy pop song about nights of music and boys and fun turned into a lurching lullaby figuring it can afford to lament on too many doubles and mixers, too many ill-thought dance steps, floors too inconsistent in their texture leading to that fateful snap, broken heel, vodka and diet coke soaking through yesterday's dress bought in preparation for tonight's Big Night.

Blonde hair, stylish, with curls down past the jawline but matted in places by uneven hair spray application and eye makeup run panda-like around blood red eye whites and green irises from too much sweat, too many tears of laughter and maybe at one point rejection? Limbs hummed four four basslines from hours of music that all danced to a uniform beat. Friends left behind and still drinking the last minutes of Saturday night away, blissfully unaware of the drudgery of having to work shifts, scratch that, just unaware of work on every other Sunday before any kind of stupor induced privilege reared its incoherent head.Therefore, it was a common night, as common as any other and so just as damp, just as grey. 

Snippets of conversations perforated her eardrum like buckshot fired indiscriminately, catching the attention of the wrong person each time and so bottles are thrown like Model 24s from pavement to pavement, the road in between being already full of potholes taking on the appearance of a no-man's land in the corner of Kate's eye and now she's deciding whether to go prone and crawl until the volley from the German trenches is over.

Tenuously this line of thought leads her to believe that, maybe, amongst the British casualties she'll find her very own Owen or Sassoon, a soldier with the heart of a lover, a poet she can rescue from the trenches and retire to the countryside with as God Save the Queen peals out from village church bells over the hill to the east of their beautiful cottage as various cats and dogs languidly salute the cresting summer sun with a succession of stretches and yawns.

But as soon as that appealing vision of mid century bliss has bubbled to the surface like so many dreams coalescing together in the centre of a head of foam on a pint of beer she neglected during an ill-fated date last week, or the month before, or maybe even years ago, it's burst and as she's stooped in imaginary trenches she's hit by a burst of cold taut air as a double-decker hurtles past temporarily calling a ceasefire via the sheer brute force of steel and plexiglass, an all too corporeal forcefield being played upon by bursting bottles resulting in showers of beer, cider, budget brand alcopops and what she's sure is an uncommonly expensive bottle of a house red being thrown by who exactly in the crowd that can afford such wasteful aggression?A sprightly old man in vaudeville top hat and tails disappearing behind hollering students and men with sweaty red faces, hair gelled in spikes as sparse as trees in winter, salmon shirts and boot-cut jeans? It's all a blur and Kate tries to level out, internal spirit level currently hung with a “out to lunch” sign as she slurs “what time izzit?” as previous ballistics are replaced with an impromptu five a side match in the middle of no-man's land, bus bottling hijinks finally dissolving tensions between axis and allies at least long enough for interest in violence to wane as shares in kicking a leaky bottle of discount cider around are reaching unforecasted altitudes.

Gunslinger: A Tall, Improbable Tale

"Oh, Death... won't you spare me over 'til another year?"

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger has no right to be any good at all. It just hasn't earned it. There was no pre-release hype, no barrage of stylish trailers, no DLC promotion or any of the trappings of a hit, big or small. It doesn't even have a lineage that it can be proud of. Its forebearers are games that have all been given middling to poor reviews, with 2011's The Cartel being critically slammed. It goes without saying that Techland's fourth outing into the Juarez world was fated to be terrible.

And yet...

Stoker

Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode (Stoker, 2013)

Cakes are a staple of Park Chan-Wook's films. The tantalising Baker's Shop in Lady Vengeance reflects the delicious intricacies of the titular Lady's plan, and the dazzling white cake symbolises a purity she is desperate to regain. In Thirst, a fat patient regales us with a tale of generosity, of how he gave up his cake to a starving mother and daughter, foreshadowing his charity of blood later in the film. At the beginning of Stoker, the cake is a birthday cake, and it's candles are choked out as the life of Mr. Stoker ends, and the innocent of another is snuffed.

Language Games: Clones

"I'm a clone, I know it and I'm fine."

After dabbling for a few years in writing my thoughts on games down in words and forms that other people could understand instead of keeping my feelings restrained exasperated abandoning of pads and grunts of joy/despair from in front of a screen in the safety of my own home, I've progressed onto tackling the idea of consistently trying to review games, and I'm starting to think about how hard it is to actually write about games well. Part of the issue resides in the idea that a game is inexplicably tied to its mechanics and presentation in a way that other mediums aren't (bear with me) and this poses a unique challenge to a reviewer, with three of the choice issues being: how do I explain these mechanics which at there most basic are “Push A to do B” without boring people, how do I separate the my inability to control a game well from the actual quality of the control scheme, and how do I talk about something that is mechanically similar to dozens of other titles without falling back on those titles?

I think these are all fairly interesting ideas so I decided to postulate a bit on them and write about them, and tackle them in three separate bits. Obviously I don't write for any big sites or anything, but these issues have cropped in my very basic communications about games with others, and are issues with the vocabulary around gaming that exists so far. So maybe there are examples of reviewers out there doing it right, or maybe I've missed communities where these issues are resolved through deft prose and delicate syntax, but as far as I'm aware that isn't the case. Anyway, onwards.

Atoms for Peace - Amok

 

Before I get into this, where do we stand on Radiohead, and inimitable, pipe-cleaner-construct-attached-to-a-subwoofer front man Thom Yorke? As a band, they’ve managed to attract as much ire from people as they have praise, with decade old letters page bickering spilling out on to YouTube comments:

“Thank Radiohead for real music!” vs “If I wanted to bore myself to death I’d listen to paint drying.” “Thom’s dancing is transcendent…”vs “He looks like a washed up hippy on a vibro-plate…”

Music Journalism also seems to be undecided on how to treat them. Everything they release is scrutinised as a grand gesture, a bold epochal statement, a dinosaur of a band managing to function on the good will of a slavish following of fans much like the grinning bears that jostle for space in so much of their associated artwork. Is it possible to just ignore this reverence that has been thrust upon them, and digest their music in a totally neutral zone?

Renovation (part1)

Renovation

March 17^th 1987

Hello. Hi. My name is Mike.

The doctor has told me to start writing this dumb diary because he thinks it might help. As if I've not got enough on my plate already! He says, “Mike, I know what it's like, sometimes you want to say things but you think they are things you can't say – you think people will make fun of you for saying them, but you don't need to show them to me or anyone, just write them down.”

I guess the doc has a point, but it still feels dumb.

I'm gonna try and keep it up maybe a week or two at the most, before I get real busy. Work is good at the moment, Joe and Charlie say we've got projects to keep us busy up until August, which is good 'cos Louise has some time off around the end of August and I think we could both do with some kind of holiday, it's been a long year.

Anyway, this week we're up at some old house way out in the woods somewhere. I'm not a very good writer, I don't describe so good, but it's beautiful: real old style house, all wood with a raised porch and that kinda thing. One half is modernised, and that's where the family who are paying us have been living, but they want the rest renovating and made hospitable for the winter.

The Woods

It was a warm and proud autumn afternoon. I stood gazing down some forgotten opening that seemed to beckon me invitingly, like some deep and curious lagoon. Mottled leaves lay strewn over the path towards the opening as though they were pages from old discarded books. I cast a timid glance over my shoulder.


Far behind me, the party was still in full swing. Chatter and laughter floated on the humid breeze, as light and delicate as bubbles fizzing in the glasses held amongst the many guests. I had slipped away from my own celebration after being admonished in my advances upon a female guest I had been assured was of the same mind as me, that I was handsome and she was fair, and we would both be interested in a small dalliance. I had clearly been misinformed, likely intentionally, and was greeted not with a soft caress of the cheek but with a cold, sharp explosion from a glass of some cocktail or other. She left in quite a flustered state and all about me guests pointed slack jawed or giggling. For a moment I felt embarrassed, betrayed even, but life goes on and I had merely retreated to let the guffaws and cat calls simmer down. It was during my reflection on the events that had passed that I shortly came to notice a faint and sickly smell coming from a part of my garden that I could not quite recognise, not that this surprised me as I did not frequent my garden other than on social occasions. Intrigued by the odour, and uninterested in returning to the party any time soon, I mopped my brow with a handkerchief and set out into the shaded retreats of my estate.

This album is forgotten

According to a recent BBC article, Nottingham is the second worst city in the UK for illegal downloads. the most shared artist in my fair city is Ed Sheeran. In fact, the entirety of the UK seem to think that they can't last without Sheeran in their lives, so they've decided to illegally download his album instead. I could go on about how I dislike Ed and his novelty micro-acoustic guitar, his beige demeanor, his MOR, milquetoast, pointless, translucent music, and his fan-base, who mistook his rendition of Wish You Were Here for a 'new track' of his at the Olympic Closing Ceremony (there is a special kind of stupid happening there, and it probably needs an entire post to get to the bottom of) but really I just wanted to use the article as a jumping off point for a bit of spiel.

A step away from misogyny

Games are for men, or more specifically they are for teenage boys. Despite surveys that tell us that the average gamer is around 30 years old and that 47 per cent of them are female the demographic that the majority of releases, be they triple A or bargain bucket, are aiming for a predominantly male teenage audience. With this week's furore over John Hemingway casually calling Borderlands 2's easy to co-op skilltree 'girlfriend mode', to the immature and frequently frightening responses in June to Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes Vs Women Kickstarter project, it is clear that attitudes in the gaming world, including reluctance to address a female audience combined with the casual misogyny slowly bubbling away in male-dominated studios and awareness of these issues are causing focus to be more frequently placed on these subjects.

Whilst reactions remain varied from the audience, these community wide missteps have been covered extensively by other more prolific writers and I shall leave their deconstructions of the holistic issues aside to instead concentrate on a few of the games out there, those that can be viewed as partly progressive, and potentially even gender neutral, and how even a developer who gets it right can subsequently mess it up.

It's all to easy to simply lay blame equally across all titles and genres and point the finger indiscriminately, but there are titles that appear to have grasped the concept of gender neutrality, if only where it matters most: the player's avatar.

Whilst Walking

The other day I was walking home and I got cussed by a teenager in a wheelchair. The other day is a poor quantifier, it was last week actually, on a particularly sunny day. I walk past the Aspley Neurodisability Centre twice everyday. Once to work, and once on the way back. I have a vague history that faintly links me with the place but that is just something I smile about every now and then, and hardly very interesting. I also walk past an All Girls School, so my walk home is rife with chances for faux pas as it is, without being cussed by a teenager who I think it is safe to assume had some neurological disability. I don't even know if that is the correct terminology, if that is the right thing to say in the world of "Politcal Correctness gone mad" even though political correctness isn't mad at all bar a few exemplary cases, and is in fact a pretty good thing as it stops us all walking around sounding like paragraphs in articles written by Richard Littlejohn or Aidan Burley.

So, I was cussed by this teenager in a wheelchair, and it was fairly surreal. I walk everywhere, and if I can't walk somewhere I take the bus or I get a friend or family member to drive me there. I am absolutely confident that I should never be let loose behind the wheel of a car, but I can't say for certain that I will never end up in charge of one of those metal boxes hurtling down a road near you, in the future. I take a kind of fantastical pleasure out of being driven around by other people, even on the bus, where I like to think it is because I am simply to important to drive myself, but that isn't the case. As established, I was listening to some music, which music isn't important, but it was sunny so it was unlikely to have been anything that you could stick under the 'dance' or 'electronica' labels, so you can rule them out, with certainty. I had my headphones in, and I noticed a group of teenagers or 'youths' all amassed on the little wall in front of the building and instantly realied that, as the sole other occupant of this pocket universe, I was going to be noticed.

And lo, I was noticed.