Tag: Ridley Scott

Napoleon

Posted on by Eoghan Lyng

The film opens with the titular character (Joaquin Phoenix, bringing an uncertain birdlike quality to the performance), walking through the French debris, his eyes peering at the revolution on the streets. Electing to defeat the “Royalists and the English”, he rises through the social rankings, when he meets Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby, in a role that is weirdly underdeveloped, despite the actresses sterling credentials), and falls head over heels in love. Her presence is a common distraction: No one has ever cast such a spell on him, and the strength is such that the thought of another man beside her repulses and infuriates him in equal measure. But as he rises to the rank of Emperor, pressure is put on him to sire an heir, and he grows dubious of Joséphine’s ability to produce a successor for him.

Napoleon is an ambitious film, spoiled by the lack of an emotional centre. Phoenix, all furrowed brows and frenzied laughs, is a curious choice for the French leader, and his brio sits at odds with the bedroom scenes, where Napoleon repeatedly fails to satisfy Joséphine’s secret desires. She shacks up with a younger, more handsome man while her husband is away at war.
Phoenix is better during the battle scenes, although he is underserved by the camera work, which flits from one angle to another, confusing the narrative in the process.

The battle in Russia – all white specks and dark hues – comes across worst of all, and Scott makes little effort to distinguish one army from the next. A film of this magnitude is bound to take liberties with the historical sources, and – while the depiction of Waterloo might ruffle a few feathers – it does present some flavour of the tactics of the era. Less happily, the battle scenes are done with nary a flourish nor a feature. If the audience hears a footstep, then a soldier is about to be killed. There are no surprises, no red herrings; nada.

Napoleon also disappoints in its depiction of women. Joséphine anchors her husband’s desire, but she spends much of the film offscreen, and her presence is only mentioned via flashbacks and letters. In essence, Kirby is there to be plucked by a ravenous husband, who twists and turns until he exhausts himself. The only other female character of note is Marie-Louise, a 15-year-old who weds Napoleon after the annulment of his marriage to Joséphine, who speaks of her attraction to the French Emperor, before following him to his bedroom. Glaringly, she is never seen or heard from again. This wouldn’t be such an issue if it wasn’t for the fact that the film opens up with Marie Antoinette’s execution, which Scott films with giddy, semi-schoolboy like glee.

Ridley Scott’s latest historical drama is disappointing. Considering the talent – an Oscar winning lead matching with a director of Scott’s calibre – this could be one of 2023’s most memorable works. Instead, what we get is something that is bland, banal and driven by old fashioned, sexist ideals. More happily, the film highlights Napoleon’s unquestioning desire to win no matter the cost. The film closes out with a memorial of sorts to the many men who laid down their lives for his Empire, cautioning viewers to the promises of idealistic young leaders in the process.

Napoleon is in cinemas on Friday, November 22nd.

The Last Duel

Posted on by victorfraga

Ridley Scott returns to the historical epic, a genre he previously explored with films like Gladiator (2000) and Kingdom Of Heaven (2005). It isn’t as good as the former but it is a welcome departure from Scott’s irritating insistence on reviving the Alien franchise. Set in 14th century France, it opens right before the titular clash between Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) and Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver) as Marguerite (Jodie Comer), Jean’s wife, anxiously awaits. The rest of the story is a three-part examination of how we got here, told through the perspectives of Jean, Jacques and Marguerite. It’s a refreshingly measured affair that trades the bombast of Gladiator with a more contemplative meditation on gender dynamics.

The most interesting aspect of The Last Duel is its three-part structure inspired by Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950). Each main player is viewed through different lenses, which brings more balanced characterisation than is typically found in single-protagonist narratives. Le Gris is more than just a pure villain, Carrouges is less heroic than he initially seems, and Marguerite is given necessary attention despite being somewhat at the mercy of her surroundings. Given the issue at hand is sexual assault this structure affords useful insight into the differences between male and female perceptions of rape. The script is written by Damon and Affleck, who chose Nicole Holofcener to write Marguerite’s side of the story, a choice which effectively translates on-screen. Part of the intrigue is seeing how each new viewpoint builds or disproves the previous one and where the truth starts and ends. The film avoids black and white characterisation, instead offering the evidence as perceived by each character – this gives it a necessary sense of honesty. It is a shame that this structural conceit wasn’t marketed more – perhaps the film would have performed better if it had been.

This triptych angle also gives the climactic duel the weight it needs. We are invested in each of the characters and feel concerned for the possible consequences. It doesn’t hurt that Scott has lost none of his knack for staging a breathtaking action sequence. Every blow, fall and near-miss is viscerally felt – it’s a brutal fight that stands out as one of the best in its genre.

The rest of the film looks great. Even in his lesser work Scott has maintained the ability to create immersive, beautifully detailed sets, and The Last Duel is no different. Instead of being generically fancy the candle-lit rooms and intricate costumes give the environment a crucially lived-in quality absent in most period pieces. The only issue the film has in this regard is that the colours are muted, which will render it dull to some. Thankfully, Ben Affleck’s Pierre shows up every now and then in flamboyant, gold-covered dress to bring life to the visuals.

Frustratingly, this historical detail does not extend to the accents and dialogue. Every English-language period piece set abroad has to get over the hurdle of how to depict other cultures – this was a problem with Chernobyl (Craig Mazin, 2019) and The Death Of Stalin (Armando Iannucci, 2017), and it’s a problem here. Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Adam Driver are odd choices to play French nobles, so there’s a constant suspension-of-disbelief there. Perhaps because of this, the cast adopt generally English accents, although French singing appears every now and then. This would be fine if such accents were consistent, but they are not – Affleck and Damon struggle to conceal their Americanness which leads to an unwanted, underlying sense of parody that threatens to derail the seriousness of the drama. As well as this, the language itself suffers from inconsistency as the dialogue fleets between Shakespearian and contemporary speak. Perhaps this wouldn’t be as annoying if the film wasn’t so visually precise, but it is, so it is.

Ultimately The Last Duel suffers most from a lack of mystery. Even though the smaller details are revealing, the wider issue of who is at fault and who isn’t is obviously apparent very early on. At one point the on-screen text even states that Marguerite’s version is “The truth” – a film that revisits the same event three times needs more intrigue than this. Rashomon works because each perspective is different enough that the search for truth feels worthwhile. The absence of such distinctions doesn’t stop the final duel from being intense but it does add to The Last Duel’s forgettable quality.

Scott’s drama is a discursive, meditative affair which is unlikely to completely blow anyone away. Its failure is sad in the sense that it proves the notion that non-franchise, mid-budget films are dying a slow death, but it does also seem like its audience is limited to history buffs and cinephiles hoping for a Ridley Scott rennaissance.

In the end, The Last Duel is a generally decent film that benefits from narrative nuance and some brilliant direction from Scott – but it is inessential.

The Last Duel is in cinemas on Friday, October 15th. On most VoD platforms in June.

Memory: The Origins Of Alien

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

When Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) first came out, no one knew about its most notorious scene. These days it’s been so referenced in films, television and popular culture that everyone, it seems, does so. If you’ve never actually Alien, treat yourself to watching it before seeing Memory: The Origins Of Alien. Or, indeed, before reading this review.

You’d be forgiven, as this new documentary starts, for thinking you’d wandered into a different film. Spiders on sun-drenched stone surfaces. Footage of Greek temples. But then, visuals clearly inspired by Alien show three Furies waking up on the floor of a spaceship interior and advancing towards camera. The voice-over invokes the myth of Clytemnestra and the Furies, although they are referenced rather than well explained so you’d be advised to click through the above links or google and look up references to them before seeing the film.

Greek temple/Furies bookend notwithstanding, this generally excellent documentary about Alien isn’t quite as integrated a whole as 78/52, director Philippe’s prior, terrific documentary about Alfred Hitchcock, the making of Psycho (1960) and the shooting of the infamous shower scene. However at a pitch level Memory: The Origins Of Alien at least follows a similar model: an examination of a film with a key shocking scene which resonated heavily through popular culture both at the time of its initial release and ever since. In the case of Alien, that would be the so-called chest-burster scene in which John Hurt, seemingly recovering from having an alien entity known after the film came out as a face-hugger clamped to his face with a tube inserted into his mouth, which creature has disappeared, being interrupted when eating a meal with crew mates by his suddenly becoming very ill before an alien entity fatally bursts out of his chest.

Alien differs from Psycho in that while Hitchcock’s film very much conforms to the idea of film director as auteur – there are other collaboators however (despite a specious argument that surfaces from time to time that Saul Bass not Hitch shot the shower scene) the whole thing was Hitch’s vision – Alien is somewhat problematic in that regard, being the product of at least three separate minds: US writer Dan O’Bannon, Swiss artist H.R.Giger and British director Ridley Scott. One can certainly play auteurist games with Alien and talk about it in terms of Scott’s wider body of directorial work, but no serious attempt at understanding the film can fail to examine the contributions of the other two contributors.

Indeed, watching this documentary, if anyone can lay claim to being auteur of Alien, it would be O’Bannon who wrote it and spent $1 000 of his own rather than the production’s money to hire Giger to make sketches and designs on paper before Scott became anywhere near involved. For a while, it was set to be directed by Walter Hill, a director who writes most of his films, but he wasn’t especially enamoured of the project and eventually left to make Southern Comfort (Walter Hill, 1981). Hill’s name remains on all the Alien films as producer. A good half of the current documentary is devoted to O’Bannon, with a little interview material augmented by considerably more interview footage of his knowledgeable wife Diane. There’s a short if informative section on Giger and then, finally, the last half hour or so covers Scott’s involvement and the actual shooting, including the chest-burster sequence.

That makes the whole very much a film of two halves – the O’Bannon half and the Scott half. The O’Bannon half is the better one, packed with fascinating insights which make you want to go back and watch the original film all over again. The brief Giger section is just as good, although there’s not all that much of it. In the Scott section, Scott comes over as the right person to direct the film, in tune with O’Bannon and Giger, but there’s a sense in which Alien is more O’Bannon’s baby than Scott’s. Scott brought Giger back onto the project after Giger had been dropped against O’Bannon’s wishes during the period when Walter Hill was the director.

A number of pundits wax rather too lyrical about Alien and there’s no mention of the embarrassing moment after the chest-bursting in which the little post chest-burst critter hilariously dashes off screen like the Road Runner from Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoons. The interviews in 78/52 threw all manner of light on various aspects of Psycho; those in Memory: The Origins Of Alien are a little less critical and a little more adulatory, which doesn’t do the piece any favours.

Yet, flawed as both Alien and this documentary may be, the former remains one of the great filmic SF texts while the latter proves a mostly worthwhile and compelling companion piece. If it doesn’t attempt to cover the series of films that followed – a little more on Scott and Prometheus, in particular, would have been good – it nevertheless throws considerable light onto how Alien got made (and how it very nearly didn’t) and most definitely merits just over an hour an a half of your time.

Memory: The Origins Of Alien is out in the UK on Friday, August 30th, and then on VoD the following Monday, September 2nd.. Watch the film trailer below:

Alien

Posted on by victorfraga

It is hard to decide where to begin. There are just so many reasons why Alien is dirty movie. I say more: it is the most subversive Hollywood movie ever made, alongside Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Plus it’s incredibly influential. In 2008, the American Film Institute ranked it as the 7th film of all time in the science fiction genre, while Empire magazine named it the 33rd greatest film of all time. It forever changed the way we see science fiction, women and sex. It spawned seven spin-offs (including the prequels and the crossover with Predator franchise). Yet none of these movies is nearly as powerful and remarkable as the original film.

Alien is based on a story by Ronald Shusett and Dan O’Bannon, who also penned the film script. It follows the crew of spaceship Nostromo, who encounter a deadly, extremely aggressive and resilient extraterrestrial creature set loose on the spacecraft. Six members of the crew are killed one by one in the most horrific and gruesome ways. The cast is stellar (no pun intended). They include Tom Skerritt (Captain Dallas), John Hurt (Executive Officer Kane), Veronica Cartwright (Navigator Lambert), Ian Holm (Science Officer Ash), Yaphet Kotto (Engineer Parker) and the late Harry Dean Stanton (Engineer Brett). The seventh crew member and the only survivor is Warrant Officer Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver, in a career-defining role).

But why is Alien so dirty? First of all, it changed the way we see women in film. It was the very first Hollywood blockbuster to feature an action heroine in the leading role. Prior to that, women were portrayed as either secondary or vulnerable, reliant on the mighty male in order to make decisions and to achieve their objectives. Feeble creatures prone to cowering. Victims of violence. Victims of gaslighting. Hitherto there were no true heroines in sci-fi and action movies. many film historians and feminists consider Ripley a watershed in the history of filmmaking.

However, Ripley wasn’t your average Hollywood woman. She was masculinised. Her hair was short, she wore trousers, her name was unisex. In fact, her role was originally written for a man. Many people believe that this was a creative choice, and the only way Ridley Scott found to portray an empowered female. Because of this masculinization, both character and actress became Lesbian icons. All of this happened long before the New Queer Cinema movement (of Todd Hayes, Greg Araki and others) was born in the 1990s, with openly homosexual characters.

The final sequence of Alien – when Ripley is alone in the spaceship with the creature and about to go into stasis – has been widely interpreted as a Lesbian act. Ripley appears in her underwear (pictured at the top). The curvy and slimy creature – sensual in a very twisted way – is to be seen in the background. Old-fashioned horror theory states that the monster is always female, the Freudian penis envy being their biggest driving force. The alien creature is indeed female. In David Fincher’s Alien 3 (1992), we find out that the alien had previously impregnated Ripley with her embryo (possibly in this sequence), despite the human being blithely unaware of it. Non-consensual sexual interaction, it seems. Luckily for all of us, the graphic details and the precise nature of this Lesbian impregnation have never been revealed.

There’s more sexual violence and symbolism. The facehugging creature attached to John Hurt’s character Officer Kane represents the male fear of forced penetration (oral rape). And the infamous chestbursters equate to the male fear of giving birth. In the 2002 TV documentary The Alien Saga, Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon explained, “I’m going to attack the audience. I’m going to attack them sexually”. Ridley Scott has also discussed the sexual connotations of Alien in various interviews.

Now it’s time you watch Alien again and come up with your own dirty interpretations. Horny, wet and otherworldly fun!

The 40th anniversary 4k restoration of Ridley Scott’s Alien is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, March 1st.

Alien: Covenant

Posted on by victorfraga

This is Ridley Scott’s third Alien movie as director. His second Alien (1979) prequel or first Prometheus (2012) sequel – take your pick – is more like the former than the latter. On the one hand, its sci-fi ideas are more coherent and in line with other Alien franchise outings; on the other, unlike Prometheus it doesn’t periodically throw out lots of new ideas mining some of Alien‘s unexplained elements. Yet it does refer back to Prometheus.

In what is perhaps its most epic sequence, two spaceships dance in flight watched by a crowd of bald humanoids last glimpsed at the opening of Prometheus while a deadly virus is released into the atmosphere.

Before that sequence, there’s a whole civilisation of charred or petrified bodies amidst otherworldly, ancient classical architecture which suggests Scott is revisiting the Roman world of Gladiator (2000) or toying in his head with a film about Vesuvius erupting onto Pompeii. Again, take your pick.

The aliens come in two main forms – a new one which is small, white and possesses a tail poised like that of a scorpion and the familiar xenomorph of earlier franchise entries. The special effects – creatures, spaceships and more – are top notch, which is a definite improvement on Alien where one or two effects scenes never quite worked.

The whole endeavour starts off promisingly enough in a scene where the android David (from Prometheus and again played by Michael Fassbender) talks with his corporate human creator in a futuristic looking balcony room. This is paid off later when David crops up having piloted a spaceship to the planet to which the spaceship Covenant and its crew – which includes the latest generation android Walter (Fassbender again) – are attracted by a mysterious distress call.

You can probably see where this latter plot strand is going and that is at once the strength of the film and its weakness: it’s a rehash of Alien. So on one level it will deliver what everyone wants and do well at the box office but on another the further into the proceedings you get, the more it feels like it’s playing it safe. That said, it occasionally throws the unexpected into the mix – the two androids kissing one another, for example.

As in the original, there’s much more metaphorical (plus towards the end actual representation of) sex. The human crew are all couples. Some of the metaphorical material is pilfered wholesale from Alien – dark passageways looking like overhead backbone and rib cages, people running breathlessly through claustrophobic spaceship corridors moving in and exhibiting facial expressions suggestive of sexual ecstasy. And the final reel posits a couple indulging in foreplay in a shower before they’re attacked and penetrated by a third party in the form of a malevolent xenomorph.

However, for all its faults Prometheus took a lot more risks, even down to its title not including the word ‘Alien’. It could so easily have been called Alien: Prometheus. If you take Alien: Covenant as a none-too-deep sci-fi horror flick, it works fine with shocks, scares and twists in all the right places but if you’re expecting another Prometheus expanding the franchise’s mythology or another Alien expanding its sexual symbolism in numerous weird and wonderful directions you’ll be largely disappointed. Masterwork or wasted opportunity? Again, take your pick.

Alien: Covenant was out in UK cinemas in May, when this piece was originally written. It’s out on iTunes on September 4th. On Disney + UK on Friday, March 18th. Also available on other platforms.