All the Money in the World (2017): adapted by David Scarpa from the book by John Pearson; directed by Ridley Scott; starring Michelle Williams (Gail Harris), Christopher Plummer (J. Paul Getty), Mark Wahlberg (Fletcher Chase), Romain Duris (Cinquanta), and Charlie Plummer (John Paul Getty III):
Once upon a time, American oil tycoon J. Paul Getty was the richest man in the world. And once upon a time, Kevin Spacey played him in this film!
Ridley Scott replaced Spacey after allegations of Spacey's sexual improprieties hit the press, resulting in a re-shoot with Plummer subbing for Spacey.
Plummer is excellent, all rotted and wormy noblesse oblige as the eccentric billionaire. When his namesake grandson gets kidnapped in Italy, Getty is less than helpful to the boy's desperate mother, divorced from Getty's addiction-addled son.
It's not a great film, but it certainly holds one's interest. Michelle Williams is terrific as the mother. Near the end, one realizes that one of the reasons Scott did the project was so that he could do an extended homage to Citizen Kane. There are certainly worse reasons to make a movie. Recommended.
John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (2001): written by Larry Sulkis and John Carpenter; directed by John Carpenter; starring Natasha Henstridge (Lt. Ballard), Ice Cube (Desolation Williams), Jason Statham (Sgt. Jericho), Clea DuVall (Kincaid), Pam Grier (Commander Braddock), and Joanna Cassidy (Whitlock): Grungy, grimy sci-fi horror-Western from the great John Carpenter. It's worn really well, possibly because it's the antithesis of today's PG-rated, CGI-heavy action movies. The cast is a hoot. Teaming up the Amazonian blonde Henstridge (Species) with Ice Cube is all sorts of awesome.
There's some smarts in the movie's back-story, and some thrills in the various explosion-heavy battles with the monsters on Mars. One sometimes wishes for better monsters. So it goes. The premise works as a weird sort-of-sequel to Nigel Kneale's Quatermass and the Pit (a.k.a. Five Million Years to Earth). Carpenter worked with Kneale while producing Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, for which Kneale wrote a screenplay that he then took his name off because of concerns about the film's violence. Hmm. Recommended.
Alien: 2003 Director's Cut (1979/2003): partially based on the stories "Black Destroyer" and "Discord in Scarlet" by A.E. Van Vogt; written by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shushett; directed by Ridley Scott; starring Sigourney Weaver (Ripley), Tom Skerritt (Dallas), Veronica Cartwright (Lambert), Harry Dean Stanton (Brett), John Hurt (Kane), Ian Holm (Ash), and Yaphet Kotto (Parker): As a restored, director's cut on BluRay, Alien looks terrific. It's like a whole different movie, with the looming alien ship and surrounding wasteland dominating the proceedings (and dwarfing the puny humans) in the first half. One forgets how gradually things build: it's nearly an hour before the real horrors erupt, but once they do, they come in a flurry.
The cast is uniformly fine. The Director's Cut adds in several scenes in which the cast interacts, countering the crew's isolation from one another in the original cut. Yaphet Kotto's Parker benefits most from the restoration -- he's clearly the second protagonist now after Sigourney Weaver's Ripley. Like her, he's also the voice of Reason throughout the film.
The set design and Ridley Scott's shooting of it is another character in the movie. The future has never looked like such a combination of the Gothic and the industrial. And there's the Alien itself in its various manifestations, kept off-screen or only partially glimpsed until the climax. It's still a masterpiece of design based on H.R. Giger's creepy ideas.
The re-insertion of a scene that prefigures the colonist-stocked alien 'nursery' of Aliens is the most gratifying addition, especially for those of us who first encountered the scene in Alan Dean Foster's novelization of Alien way back in 1979. A Lovecraftian, haunted-house-in-space masterpiece that's probably still Ridley Scott's best movie. No sequel or prequel has surpassed it in terms of a horror movie that combines the cosmic with body horror. Highly recommended.
The Martian: adapted by Drew Goddard from the novel by Andy Weir; directed by Ridley Scott; starring Matt Damon (Astronaut/ Botanist Mark Watney), Jessica Chastain (Mission Commander/ Geologist Melissa Lewis), Jeff Daniels (NASA Director Teddy Sanders), Michael Pena (Astronaut/Pilot Major Rick Martinez), Sean Bean (Flight Director Mitch Henderson), Kate Mara (Astronaut/ System Operator Beth Johanssen), Sebastian Stan (Astronaut/ Flight Surgeon/ Biologist Dr. Chris Beck), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Mars Mission Director Vincent Kapoor), Kristen Wiig (NASA Media Relations Director Annie Montrose), Benedict Wong (JPL Director Bruce Ng), Aksel Henie (Astronaut/ Navigator/ Chemist Dr. Alex Vogel), and Donald Glover (JPL Astrodynamicist Rich Purnell) (2015):
Zippy paean to engineering and science and those brave, stubborn humans takes the viewer to a (mostly) realistic Mars and the astronaut played by Matt Damon who inadvertently gets marooned there. While NASA tries to figure out how to save Mission botanist Mark Watney, Watney himself must figure out how to survive on a bleak and nearly airless planet. It's a movie (and a novel) very much of its time -- if that time were 1942 and this were a short story in Astounding magazine. That's a compliment.
As in a lot of Astounding stories, engineering and rationality and a Can-do spirit are the only things that will save the day. Well, and stubborn human camaraderie. The principals are all fine in their roles, though Kristen Wiig's character could have been played by anybody and Donald Glover's math whiz should have been played by nobody without much, much rewriting.
The Martian can hold its head up high in what is a very small sub-genre of film -- movies not based on real events that try to accurately depict space flight as it is known at the time. And it's far better than the two most notable films in that sub-genre, Destination Moon and Marooned. Somewhere, Robert Heinlein may be smiling, especially as his great YA novel Farmer in the Sky presented its hero with some of the same exo-agricultural problems experienced by Damon's astronaut here. Space farming is exciting!
The script is breezy but detail-oriented without being facetious or technobabbly, while Ridley Scott, in a return to form, lets the visuals support the story rather than overwhelm them. The Mars of this movie is a place of stark beauty and occasional terror. The final sequence goes one problem-to-solve too far in its approach (and replicates a fairly annoying bit of unworkable physics from Gravity), but overall this is a splendid science-fiction movie that combines a sense of wonder with an appreciation of the hard work and intelligence required to be an astronaut. It's sort of the anti-Armageddon. Highly recommended.
Listen To Me Marlon: written by Stevan Riley and Peter Ettedgui; directed by Stevan Riley (2015): Haunting documentary edits together various audio musings and recollections by Marlon Brando recorded by the actor over a period of decades. Mixed in are some staged shots, a CGI head of Brando, personal film and stills, and snippets of media reports on the enigmatic actor. Brando's childhood can't help but elicit sympathy, while his expression of self-judgment makes him an increasingly tragic figure as the documentary unfolds. I'd like the documentary to have had a bit more formalism in its presentation of events -- would it kill someone to put dates on the screen? -- but as a tone-poem about Brando, by Brando to a great extent, it's a terrific piece of pseudo-documentary. Recommended.
Prometheus: written by John Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, based on characters and concepts created by Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett, Walter Hill, and Ridley Scott; directed by Ridley Scott; starring Noomi Rapace (Liz Shaw), Michael Fassbender (David), Charlize Theron (Meredith Vickers), Idris Elba (Janek), Guy Pearce (Weyland), and Logan Marshall-Green (Charlie Holloway) (2012): The prequel to Alien (but only Alien and not the sequels or attendant Predator prequels), Prometheus looks fantastic and moves beautifully. I wasn't bored, and I didn't look at my watch for the whole two hours. Admittedly, that had something to do with the extremely comfortable theatre seats, but still...
On the other hand, Prometheus is a hilarious mess when it comes to science, character motivation, and basic plot logic. Somehow, this enriches the experience. You'll have a lot to talk about when you're done. Boy, howdy.
Billions of years ago, aliens start life on Earth. Well, maybe they start animal life on Earth because there's definitely vegetable life on Earth in the scenes we see. In truth, what they do makes no evolutionary sense, so I'm instead going to say that billions of years ago, an alien visiting Earth got drunk, passed out, and fell into Niagara Falls. Billions of years later and thousands of years ago, giant aliens left star maps all over the world pointing to a particular solar system.
And in the year 2091, a nefarious trillionaire named Peter Weyland (yes, the Weyland corporation, as of 2091 not yet joined with Yutani) sends a mission on the starship Prometheus to that star system for his own sinister purposes. The archaeologist who figured out the whole star map thing, Liz Shaw (Noomi Rapace), goes along, as does her partner/life-partner, a bunch of cannon fodder, an annoying business woman (Charlize Theron), a curious robot (Michael Fassbender), and an accordion-playing captain (The Wire's Idris Elba).
And in case you're wondering, the planet (well, technically a moon) they land on is not the planet from Alien. This is LV-223; that was LV-426. I note this to save you a lot of time trying to figure out how things ended up like they did for the beginning of Alien on this planet. It's not the same planet. Though if you want to believe they are the same planets to simulate our confused discussion at the end of the film, you'll have a good time coming up with scenarios that put the fossilized, gut-busted Pilot back in that funky space chair surrounded by giant eggs.
In any case, the Prometheus arrives at LV-223. Rather than survey the entire planet, it lands at the first visible structure. Against the Captain's warnings that sundown is coming (a warning that really only makes a huge amount of sense if the Captain's last mission was to the Planet of the Vampires), the scientists proceed to rush into the structure. Needless to say, shenanigans ensue, many of them caused by the simple fact that this is the dumbest crew of any Alien movie, dumber even than the crew in the godawful Alien Resurrection.
The pacing and visual design really carry this movie. It looks great. It moves like a rollercoaster. And Rapace (Lisbeth Salander in the original Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), Fassbender as curious robot David, and Elba as the Captain put in strong performances. Fassbender especially stands out, his character ultimately sympathetic despite the crappy things he does, or is ordered to do. There are clever character bits throughout related to David's fascination with Lawrence of Arabia and the Captain's interest in Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Theron is suitably icy playing, well, Paul Reiser in Aliens.
References and allusions are shovelled into the movie willynilly, and perhaps even higgily-piggily. Scott's own directorial efforts Alien (natch) and Blade Runner, Aliens, The Thing, several Doctor Who serials, the nightmarish Space: 1999 episode with the crazy-ass tentacle monster, David Cronenberg's The Fly, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, Quatermass and the Pit...it goes on.
Does anyone connected with the writing of this movie show the faintest understanding of how evolution works and how DNA develops? Hell, no. But to paraphrase a line from another Ridley Scott movie, I was entertained. Recommended.
