Saturday Sci-Fi Spectacular, vol 1

War for the Planet of the Apes
Upgrade
High-Rise
Alien:Covenant
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It's a rare occasion when I get an evening to myself, nevermind a full day, where I can just linger and do nothing.  A few Saturdays back I wound up in that very scenario, with the kids off visiting with grandparents, the wife out RPGing for the night... all I really had to do was walk the dogs and feed myself, which left me with many hours to fill in very much the way I would have filled a sleepy Saturday some 25 years ago: movie marathon.

But what to watch?  My ability to watch movies became very limited once children came along, not to mention competing forces of epic television, streaming services and a new revolution in comedy via podcast and standup.  What to watch?  Do I spend precious minutes that turn into dozens of minutes scrolling through feeds, or thinking about my sizeable, if aged, DVD/Blu-ray collection?  What to watch?  And how to program this mini home festival so that it feels like a cohesive whole?  I've missed so many films over the years that I still want to watch, but so many competing for attention I'm always at a loss on where to start.  What to watch?

I settled on watching science fiction movies from the past few years that I've been meaning to get to.  In a couple instances, they were the latest chapters in series that I've enjoyed or was invested in.  In another case it was picking back up a movie I started watching but didn't finish.  Just narrowing down to a genre and also a time frame made it so, so easy to just dive in and start watching.  I knew where I wanted to start, and where I wanted to end, which made the middle relatively self evident.

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War for the Planet of the Apes (2017 - d. Matt Reeves - netflix) was the easiest choice.  I love the Planet of the Apes franchise.  The original pentalogy is always watchable and fascinating (save the last one, Battle for the Planet of the Apes which may well be worse than the Tim Burton/Mark Whalberg misfire), and this modern series reinvented the story brilliantly, from the traumatic animal abuse in Rise of the Planet of the Apes to the emotionally affecting Shakespearean drama Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, these are legitimately great films.  The fact that I didn't see War for the Planet of the Apes in the theatre and basically let it dangle on the vine for years after it's post-theatre release speaks ill of my devotion to the series, but I do love it.

This third installment opens with literal war.  A waning humanity desperately clawing at relevance by murdering apes with their guns, but apes are smart, and tactical and have the advantage of the war being on their turf, in the forest.  But Cesar (the brilliant Andy Serkis) sees the writing on the wall. The more desperate the humans become, the more dangerous, so their home is only protected, only safe for so long.  It's time to leave.  As the community of apes prepares to leave for new land, a strike force infiltrates the ape's forest home at night, in the process killing Cesar's mate and first born son.

The anger and rage towards humanity that Koba felt - and Cesar fought against - in the last installment starts to boil inside him.  He abandons his tribe for revenge, but without his leadership they are taken captive.  Cesar was blinded by his own grief and fury, and his society pays the price.

There's actually very little direct war, in War for the Planet of the Apes, as it's mainly a prison camp/prison break style movie with a lot of dramatic motivation.  Cesar and The Colonel (Woody Harrelson) are the main focus of the film, with Cesar desperate to get his society away from human influence, while the Colonel fights the inevitible (the plague that made apes smart across the globe are making humans mute and depreciating their intelligence) thinking that eradicating the apes will stop anything.  At the same time, he's preparing for war, not just with the apes, but an opposing human faction.

Certainly the messiest of this latest Planet of the Apes series, it's still a very engaging, gripping, entertaining 2 hours and 20 minutes of drama and adventure.  It's a literal technological marvel how seamless the CGI apes fit within their surroundings, how natural they feel to the environment.  You're not seeing a performer or special effects, it feels like you're watching actual apes who are amazing performers.  How can you not just adore Bad Ape (a bald chimpanzee played by Steve Zahn) or Maurice the wise orangutan (played by Karin Konoval)?  I want to hug them so badly.

If anything didn't work in the film, it was the tail end of the climax.  Without spoiling anything, it sets up a new threat for the apes, then immediately dispenses with it.  It's a very strange moment that is meant to be ironic, but not the comedic kind of irony that it pretty much is.

Based on where War for... ends, I don't know where the franchise goes from here.  This truly feels like closure.  Whether it attempts to reinvent the original (which was tried with the Tim Burton venture...a financial success but not a creative one) or if it has a new path it could forge in a futuristic ape society that would in any way appeal to a human audience, I don't know.  This trilogy was full of surprises and deeply resonant characters that show exactly the right way to reboot an older property for modern times... by telling a good story not rehashing an old one.

(I can't believe how terrible most of the posters were for this movie)
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My second movie for the evening was Upgrade, the 2018 action-thriller from Australian director Liegh Whannell.  I had heard about this movie via The Weekly Planet podcast shortly before it came out.  The hosts of The Weekly Planet were both rather taken with the style of the film, and how technically accomplished it was for its very small budget.

The story is set in a sort of 5-mintues-into-the-future type scenario, in a world where the technology we're just on the cusp of standardizing has become standard.  Fully integrated home systems with voice activation and AI response cues and self-driving cars are a the forefront in this film.  Our lead character, Grey (Logan Marshall-Green) is a luddite in this integrated world.  He likes to be disconnected and repairs vintage muscle cars for a living.  He's wary of technology, but not outright disdainful.

While he and his wife are traveling in her automated car, the vehicle goes haywire, taking the wrong course and putting them into the dangerous surroundings of the city.  There they are accosted by three men who execute them, or so it appears.  Grey survives and battles with full body paralysis, grief and depression... until one of his muscle car clients, a wealthy technology magnate, offers him an experimental trial implant that would cure his paralysis.

When Grey accepts he's surprised at how quickly he's able to move, but even more surprised to find an artificial intelligence speaking directly into his head.  The AI wants to aid him in his quest for justice/revenge and when Grey's physical limitations are met, the AI takes over.

The film's sensibilities are very 1980s without seeming dated (it may be a little cliche, but it's definitely playing into those cliches).  Whannell approaches the storytelling and design in a way that wouldn't be out of place in a vehicle starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, or Kurt Russell in their prime.  If anything it does a better job at modernizing the Robocop story than the 2014 version does.  At the same time, there's a synergy with Alex Garland's Ex Machina, where this feels like the action-oriented younger brother, a little less mature, a little less heady but similarly stylized.  Or maybe it's a next-generation tale in the world of Person of Interest.

Where this film feels innovative though is in the fight sequences.  Whannell and team have crafted a stunning new method for capturing dynamic and kinetic fights.  Whenever the AI takes over Grey's body the camera starts tracking Marshall-Green's movements precisely.  Every twist, tilt or punch has a corresponding camera move that just cranks us the momentum of these well orchestrated sequences.  It's rather ingenious.

I have to say I loved this movie.  It's an instant classic of action and sci-fi in my book.  I can't believe Toast hasn't written about it yet (though I'd be dismayed if he hasn't actually seen it).
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I was super keen to see High-Rise in 2015 as I had just become acquainted with director Ben Wheatley's Kill List and was intrigued by his style and sensibilities.  The poster and the trailer for High-Rise seemed downright Cronenbergian in their tone and aesthetic (I'm most definitely thinking of Shivers as a big inspiration here) and I was in for it.  I intentionally kept myself in the dark about what it was really about, the few glimpses I caught was all I needed to see.

In my head I was also thinking this was some sort of Demon Seed situation, where the technology in a high rise tower goes haywire and starts manipulating its residents.  But it turns out, there's not a damn bit of science in this fiction, unless you consider architecture science.  Though, the tone here is once more 5-minutes-into-the-future, but it's five minutes into the future of 1975

Based off the book by J.G. Ballard (who wrote Crash, which Cronenberg adapted), the titular high-rise of the film is part of an experimental neighbourhood, the first finger in a hand formation.  The concept is of a microcosm of society with different classes of people living on different levels in the building.  Though work happens in town, not in the building, almost everyone's leisure time is spent in the cinder and concrete monstrosity they call home.  They all seem to be very enamored with it at first, but the class structures start to poke through and eventually decay any and all goodwill between men.

The first act introduces this place and a cross-section of the people in it, the second half chronicles the slow degradation of the relationships between them, and the third act is all madness and rioting and orgies abandoning all sense of self.  In the collapse of civilized society, everyone kind of winds up the same.  The inference is that perhaps the complex's designer, as played by Jeremy Irons, did use some forms of satanic symbolism in the overall design, and the concept of a hand reaching up from beneath the earth to pull everyone down.


It really does owe a lot to Shivers, but the same allegory of societal structures is at play here as the most-definitely-sci-fi film Snowpiercer but the two stories do play out quite differently.  Our focal character here is not underclass struggling for justice and truth like Chris Evans in Snowpiercer but rather a middle class/straddling upper class Tom Hiddleston, someone who from the middle can see the struggles on both sides, and doesn't know where he belongs (he doesn't really belong at the bottom nor the top).  It's an interesting film, to a point, but it doesn't really hold together fully as a narrative, and the characters exist to represent their class rather than have any real individualism or personality.  In the end I struggled to maintain interest, as the last act of debauchery is tedious and loses the plot, if there ever really was one.

(unlike War for the Planet of the Apes, the High-Rise posters are pretty great)
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And finally, the last film for the evening, because I wanted it dark, was the latest in Ridley Scott's exploration of the Alien franchise.  2017's  Alien: Covenant is a serves as prequel to his 1979 classic as well as sequel to his much-maligned-but-loved-by-me 2012 outing Prometheus [link to my take...Toast's take on Prometheus is here, we disagree!]


I know that Prometheus as the sum of its parts isn't a great movie, but there are so many of those parts that I just love that I can watch it over and over again without any voice nagging in the back of my head about the quality or plot holes or absurdity.  I just enjoy it.

The critical response to Covenant was even worse than Prometheus but I thought that maybe Scott was on the same track, that he was going to still be operating at a level of insane and awesome individual bits that don't coalesce as a whole.  But even the scant few Prometheus defenders I knew didn't have much good to say about Covenant, which wasn't a good sign.  As such I skipped it in theatre, and then avoided it on VOD, and even still kept passing it by on the streaming services.


I did still hold out hope that everyone was wrong, that I would find a movie in here that I could appreciate, like Prometheus.  But no.  This is trash.  It's a garbage film full of dumb characters doing dumb things, getting in stupid situations that make no sense, and having dumb conversations about which dumb thing they're going to do next.  It's awful. It's a Z-grade horror film with an A-grade budget that wants to provide world building and an origin story but in a most shoehorned fashion.

The opening scene takes us back to David's creation (David from Prometheus as played by Michael Fassbender), his education and his evolution. He's the malevolent force of the picture full of other malevolent forcest.  Following the end of Prometheus David has returned to the Engineers home in their own ship carrying a payload of bioengineered weapons which he's set loose and eradicated their society.  But David has left a homing beacon running, which brings a new crew of colonizers to this planet teeming with bad shit.  There are so many malevolent forces!  Too many.  Way too many.  It's stupid how many malevolent forces there are.  No human should be able to survive a minute on this hellscape planet David has created and yet we keep following the cast around as if there's some hope that any of this will turn out well.

This film is tragically unentertaining.  The characters, with the exception of David and Walter, are boring and thin.  David and Walter, however, are both artificial intelligences that are explored, but not explored very well.  The film should fully revolve around these two characters, but it gets distracted too often with its human cast (and killing them off) to the detriment of really getting into any sort of commentary about the nature of AI (as unnatural as it is).  There is some thinking about the nature of creation and evolution but even that seems rudimentary and not well crafted.

This is science fiction, but the science part of it feels left on the floor and repeatedly stepped on like a doormat.  I hated this movie.  What a waste of time and money (and I'm not even talking about my time or my money).

(Toast's take on Covenant is here, we disagree, in that I hated it so much more than he did)