Reviews

The actor playing Angel is particularly weak (and became increasingly theatrical throughout the episode) but shouldn't shoulder the blame alone. The writing was pitched as half swashbuckler and half comedic caper but mostly fell flat. The attempts at exploring identity politics via Angel and Spock were well intentioned but honestly cringeworthy. Similarly, Pike's cunning plan to cook his way to freedom was simply too ridiculous. The ships wheel finished me off - because Pirates, geddit? I do hope this wasn't an indication of the direction of future shows.

OK, that's perhaps a little unfair. But relatively accurate when you compare Scott's original hard nosed masterpiece to this Saturday afternoon pseudo intellectual space bonanza. It talks about man's origins and the afterlife but only manages to give us bad tempered marble men and scary squids.

Fassbender's solitary scenes at the beginning are by far the film's best as his android character tends to the upkeep of the ship while the rest of the crew are in cryogenic suspension. He watches films and bleaches his hair. He perfects cycling while playing basketball and reads the dreams of his crew members. His performance (more than the writing of him) is the single redeeming element of an otherwise mediocre production.

The rest of the cast are given little to do with Theron, Katie Dickie et al woefully underused. Swedish born Rapace (original Dragon Tattoo trilogy) proves once again she's got the goods but her on-screen love interest, the blandly handsome Logan Marshall Green, is totally outclassed by her and they have zero chemistry.

It has some moments of decent tension and gross out horror, but where these things in the original Alien were tempered by silence and sparse naturalistic dialogue. Here the dialogue is occasionally daft, often used to smooth over poor plotting and pacing is not nearly so well judged. The result is a film that neither fully convinces as horror nor fulfills it's promise as a return to 'proper' sci-fi. For all the fanfare about this being Scott's return to the genre this more carries the signature of those who made the recent Star Trek movie and the series Lost. While no meagre qualifications, they seem odd choices for an Alien prequel and the film only confirms it.

For all the visual bells and whistles, Sir Ridley has taken his own cinematic gold and sadly spun straw. Unlike Lucas, he can be forgiven for this middling attempt at a prequel but if this is a sign of things to come he'd do well to leave Blade Runner sequel-less.

...it wasn't anywhere near as bad as I'd expected.

The problem is that it follows one of the most revered horror/sci-fi franchises in movie history. Judged in that context, sitting alongside Scott, Cameron and Fincher's entries (perhaps I shouldn't exclude John McTiernan's original Predator movie too, although it's not quite on a par) it will seriously disappoint. However when I consider Paul W.S. Anderson's 'AVP' travesty, which was so slight it was hardly an adaptation of a video game and more a re-enactment of several levels, this sequel appears to me a considerable improvement. An improvement no doubt due to the absence of Paul W.S. Anderson, who is only working due to the popularity of the games/franchises he frequently ruins.

Granted, with clunkers like "but the government never lies" the dialogue is not this film's strength, and nor are the performances which range from so-so to pretty awful. What the film does achieve is putting the audience in the centre of the chaos. Like many of the best zombie movies, if you allow yourself, you inevitably begin to imagine yourself in that bleak situation. The directors keep an intensity and pace that is consistent throughout. Somehow, despite the film's many flaws it is an engaging ride. And thankfully, in contrast to it's PG-13 rated prequel, this R- rated entry doesn't pull any punches on the gore front...

Giger's Alien design still retains it's power today and it is a chilling concept of putting Aliens on a recognisable contemporary earth. Indeed, these are the film's most successful moments: the alien at the child's bedroom window; the alien in the high school pool; the alien in the maternity ward and amongst the new born babies. In the late eighties Dark Horse released a series of comics which were to continue the story of 'Aliens'. These were great black and white Gothic nightmares featuring an Alien outbreak on earth. If only the film could have measured up to the promise of these books we would all have had a real treat. As it is, it only hints at what might have been, but with a concept so chilling this is still worth a look.

Essentially if you are expecting a worthy successor to either franchise, you will surely be let down. However, if you watch it for the teen schlock horror, monster mash B-movie rental it is, you'll likely have an hour and a half of creepy fun. It's not good, but it's not awful either. And some credit must go to 'The Brothers Strause', for they partially succeeded where Paul W.S. Anderson failed utterly.

I can't help imagine what might have been in more capable hands. Hey ho. Now grab some beers and go to your nearest rental store (it's not worth buying!) and treat yourself to a guilty pleasure. Just don't tell Ridley.

With regards to the first three, I'm a big fan. Even 'Doom' has it's moments. For sure, the minute you start to question realism in these movies, you're lost. The thing falls apart and you've wasted the price of a ticket. So, any argument that begins with 'I just don't believe' or 'that would never happen' is already null and void. When you go see an Indy movie, you leave that stuff in the foyer. As far as believability goes, yes, this one steps dangerously over the line even for an Indy movie. But that's not the real problem. It's also worth pointing out that 'Doom' being centered around a Thuggee cult in India was perhaps the most 'realistic' of the three, but also easily the weakest (until now...).

So, if you haven't seen it yet and you've never seen an Indy movie - go and watch 'Raiders' instead. If you have, no-one could dissuade you from going, but you will be disappointed. My advice is to save your money for Batman: Dark Knight, or even X-files 2 - both will most likely be much better than this. Talking of which, this time, we're firmly in the realm of the X-files. However, X-files was occasionally successful because it often presented the issue of little green men with reserved distance and a modicum of well judged scientific seriousness, much like (to a greater extent) Spielberg's own 'Close Encounters'. Indy, on the other hand, has always been about the ride, Saturday Matinée thrills & spills rather than overt chin rubbing. So, while in principle, I've no problem with this subject matter, it doesn't belong in an Indiana Jones movie. One of the ideas on the table was the City of Alantis. Better. More Indy.

Yes, I smiled. I even laughed sometimes, but the majority of those gags are only likely to work on the fans, because they're self referential. They're same kind of chuckles that are brought on by your uncle telling the same old gags he tells every Xmas. They get less amusing every year, but you laugh anyway. Funnily enough, the whole film feels like a hokey Xmas reunion, remember the Star Wars holiday special? The ultimate in badly done self parody, this is at least better than that - but it's not a million miles away.

Frankly, it all went wrong in the first 10 seconds. Spielberg said he wanted to take it back to the gritty, seat of your pants style of the first three. A mountain of dirt forms the paramount logo. Then comes... A FRIKKIN CUTE CGI GOPHER!!! WHAT?!? This has George Lucas written all over it. In fact, did anyone notice how it even looked a bit like Lucas? The distinct lack of a chin made it a dead ringer. From here on in, the litany of misdemeanours is endless. Indy in a persil white T-shirt shooting the breeze with Jim Robinson? Sure, they had T-shirts in the 50's but... it just feels wrong. And Jim Robinson has come a long way from Ramsay st. He must have the best agent in the world. Bouncer's dream indeed.

And the spaces. Spaces are important in an Indy movie: Castles, tombs, temples, palaces, caves etc. Notably one person who didn't rejoin the crew for this film was Production Designer Norman Reynolds. It shows. His work was always memorable from Marion's bar in Nepal and the 'Well Of Souls' in Raiders to the Ventian library and the final resting place of the cup of Christ in Crusade. These spaces are unforgettable, cinematic and distinct. You can recall them long after seeing the movie. This film had a succession of utterly forgettable boxes that felt very 'TV'. The warehouse? A big box filled with little boxes. The CIA interrogation room? Oxley's cell? Uninspiring boxes. The place where they find the skull? An underground box, and the skull is just unceremoniously lying in the corner. The camp in Peru? A square. The swamp? A square sand pit in a studio. You get my point. It feels lazy. The last space with the 13 aliens was mildly interesting. At least it wasn't a box.

While on paper, bringing back Marion Ravenwood seemed like a good idea, it wasn't. The chemistry is flat, and her part was written with all the charm of a brick. Similarly, the mighty John Hurt was woefully underused and looked like a fifth wheel with the air let out. On the up side, Harrison was in good shape. Had he been fed better lines, he would have been just fine. Sure, he's getting on a bit, but he certainly doesn't look ridiculous, as some had feared. He IS Indy (unless you put him in a T-shirt). Also, it's easy to see why Spielberg is so happy about Shia Lebeouf, he's a real talent. The nuclear test site sequence was genius. And the punch up amongst killer ants was the part that truly felt like a proper Indiana Jones movie. But, for every one of these good things, there are several bad ones: Kung fu 'zombies'? Shia Lebeouf swinging, tarzan style, on vines with CGI monkeys? And that ending? Unforgivably daft. Therein lies the answer to what's wrong with this fourth installment. While it's a almost a prerequisite for an Indy movie to have unbelievable things that probably couldn't happen in reality, there should always be a balance. Maybe they could have tackled even this subject matter if they'd done it right, and walked that tightrope, but when things are more silly than fun, more referential than original and more like a video game than an action sequence then it isn't Indiana Jones any more. It's The Mummy or Tomb Raider. Or worse, as 007 is Indy's spiritual father, then it is perhaps appropriate to draw comparison with another self parodying abomination: 'Die Another Day'?

That's not good enough - because we've waited too long, with reason to expect far better.

It's interesting to note that when scripting this film Bergman would not have been much older than his protagonist: the 28 year old Ballet dancer Marie. Marie is someone who has spent the majority of her adult life building a wall around herself, her primary purpose in this is protection against the ghosts of her past. Although, we suspect, the wall may not have fully achieved this aim, it has succeeded in preventing her from truly making contact with the world, and, those who love her from ever reaching her. This is represented physically in the difficulty her young lover (the journalist) has in penetrating the theatre foyer at the beginning of the film. One gets the sense that Marie is doomed to drift through life, forever looking backwards, over her shoulder. When an ex-lover's diary is mysteriously delivered to the theatre she is forced deeper into herself, to confront a past she has locked away for the last fifteen years.

We are then presented with these memories that the diary provokes and this is when the film truly comes alive. ALIVE is the key word here as Bergman paints for us, in a way that so few other's are able, a vivid picture of the essence of young life and falling in love for the first time, stomach butterflies and all. Her relationship to Henrik, a older local boy she meets whilst staying with her aunt is depicted expertly in such a way that Bergman's dialogue dances, and his scripting skills truly shine. In this field, he must have been way ahead of many of his contemporaries: their personalities are quickly and efficiently drawn so as to be absolute, their teasing banter is playful, unpredictable and a joy to witness. There is a magical scene in which the two young lovers begin to pencil various characters from their lives upon a record sleeve. Unexpectedly (especially in a Bergman film!) these drawings spring into life re-enacting a comic version of the lives of their real counterparts. In terms of Bergman's filmography these scenes are unique in their lightheartedness. However, this IS a Bergman film and, as surely as autumn and winter must follow summer, the light must be balanced by an equal amount of dark.

As in Wild Strawberries, the narrative structure unfolds in a series of flashbacks that masterfully deliver vital information in such an order that ensures their emotional impact. The ballet scenes are of note as they are shot with a beautiful quietude that reflects the understated nature of the whole film. 'Summer Interlude' seems to assert the importance of embracing the here and now, of venturing into the shadows to confront one's ghosts, and laying them to bare in the sun. The alternative, it seems, is not really living.

This is not typical Bergman fare, it is not nerve shredding drama on an epic scale, nor is it a challenging psychological abstraction that pushes the medium of cinema. Rather this is a moving little tale of remembered intimacy: small, but perfectly formed.

I'll start by placing my heart on my sleeve. There are things to enjoy here, but more I see of his films, the more I become very skeptical of Mr Wenders.

First of all it's toooo long. Very little of any real consequence happens in the first HOUR. That first hour should have been cut, by at least half. Too many ponderous repetitive scenes with exactly the same function to describe: the wonder of being alive, the majesty of the microscopic. Yes, it's sometimes great when a film takes it's time, I'm an admirer of many works like this, particularly the fiercely conceptual films of Andrei Tarkovsky, whom Wenders dedicates this picture to (although does not merit comparison with), but when a film lulls you into a coma at four o' clock in the afternoon through directionless pontification, that's a problem. Any illusion of profundity comes from the poetry that accompanies the beautiful photography of french master Henri Alekan. I think these elements deserve a solid ground to rest upon, and a film centered around such themes requires at least a modicum of genuine spiritual insight, the same amount say, that Tarkovsky had in his little finger. Frankly, Wenders fails to provide that here, so much of the film appears as mere whimsey.

Perhaps it is worth seeing for a few choice moments (Bruno Ganz and Peter Falk are good value) and the photography alone, but what are you left with when you remove the spectacle? For me it's a simplistic, faintly immature idea about an angel falling (literally from the heavens - yak) in love with a girl and turning human, so that he can experience LIFE with her. So then they hook up at a Nick Cave gig and live happily ever after.

NB: The lyrics of the Nick Cave tracks (of whom I'm also an admirer) 'The Carney' and 'From Her To Eternity' are uncomfortably 'on the nose' in this context, despite Cave and his Bad Seeds looking uber cool during their performance.

I admire his readiness in finally admitting it on the recent DVD release, but it doesn't surprise me at all that Wim Wenders considered ending his film with a slapstick pie fight (he actually shot that scene) between the two (now human) angel pals. In fairness to Wenders, he states himself that he made the film very quickly, occasionally stopping to ask himself what the hell he was doing, but to me, that shows. The whole film, though not failing to occasionally dazzle, to even stimulate existential thought, or to raise a smile or two, is ultimately pure artifice. It is unfocused, unbalanced and missing a sure hand.

Emperor Wenders hid his painfully slight premise behind these pictures and poems and hoped no-one would notice that he isn't wearing any clothes. Trouble is, no-one did.

I saw this film as a child and I loved it. There is always a danger of great disappointment involved in returning to such films, as more often than not, one's childhood memories of the work are far superior to the work itself. Not so here.

Notably, this film is what John Badham did when, following the barnstorming success of Saturday Night Fever, I imagine he could have done pretty much anything he wanted. It's not perfect, but what's right with it far outweighs what's wrong. It's a de-saturated, monochromatic, gritty Gothic affair. The production design takes painstaking (pun?) lengths in achieving meticulous period detail. The John Williams score is rich, stirring and uncharacteristically creepy. The performances are uniformly solid and underplayed, while the script is a clean, intelligent adaptation; structurally tight, with dialogue that is never fake nor flowery but sufficiently dramatic and, where appropriate, faithful to the Yorkshire/Whitby dialect with minimal embarrassment. Jonathan Harker's burning jealousy of his fiancé's obvious attraction to Whitby's latest neighbour and the consequent rivalry between these two men is so tangible you can feel the heat from the blood boiling in Harker's veins. Donald Pleasance is the best I've ever seen him, and Laurence Olivier is convincingly grave as a dutch Dr Van Helsing. The scene in which these pair enter the mines below the cemetery and discover the living corpse of Mina, (daughter of Van Helsing, in this adaptation), and subsequently do away with her, is in turn unforgettably chilling and movingly tragic.

The bat, which was so often the Achilles heel of so many Dracula stage and screen productions, is impressive here, save for, rather unforgivably, a handful of totally unnecessary close-ups of the creature's head. In fact, if the film falls down anywhere, it is here, in the special effects. Benefittingly greatly from predating CGI, the filmmakers have, within their restrictions, found some elegantly inventive in-camera (or cutting) solutions. For example, the Count's transformation from man to wolf as he leaps out through Van Helsing's window is inspired. That said, there are instances such as the aforementioned 'bat-head close-ups' or the last scene in which, now at sea, a frail Van Helsing somehow attaches Dracula to a hook that sees the vampire lifted to the skies and into the glare of the burning sun. This whole sequence, from the unbelievable 'hooking' and through to the Count's peeling fake tanned skin culminating in the crappy black kite seen in the last shot, is unfortunate, mainly because it is the final scene. It is conceived and executed, not least by the make-up/effects team, without the invention or good taste we had seen elsewhere.

Ultimately though, this is a vastly underrated 'DRACULA', and thus far, for my money, the best*. Perhaps with this recent DVD transfer (region 2&4), this forgotten gem will be re-evaluated.

(*I exclude from that category however, both Murnau and Herzog's Nosferatu movies. They have a merit all of their own; they are largely unromantic (though some might argue still erotic) and, unlike this version, the Hammer series or Coppola's movie, they exist outside of the enormous influence of the Universal/Lugosi series. It would then, be unfair to judge them based on the same criteria as the others, for they have a wholly different purpose.)