Tag: Alien

10 – Look to the Heavens (Brightburn)

Moving quickly but cautiously you descend the spiral staircase, down into the coolness of the earth, down into the unknown, down into a dead end? Why would there be an exit down here, all you’ve done is trap yourself, but what other option is there?

You continue down, the string of bulbs lighting your way as the stair spirals ever onwards. Deeper, deeper, dee…you falter as the floor levels out, your foot coming down hard. 

You peer out into a large rectangular room, stone pews are arranged in two lines facing a stone altar, just like up above. This room is a duplicate, but unlike the dusty neglected chamber in the church this place has seen plenty of use. The altar has a richly embroidered, deep red cloth neatly arranged on its top. A pair of ornate gilded chalices sit either side of a stone tablet which on closer inspection is covered with a strange symbol carved over and over into the surface, like two Carets either side of a capital T, or an M over a T, it isn’t clear. Whatever the symbol’s meaning, it certainly isn’t something you’d expect to find in a church.

Behind the altar you see a faint red glow, a passage leading further into the crypt, a way out?

As you head along the passage the red glow becomes stronger and a low humming noise begins to resonate all around you, inside you, pulsing, like a heartbeat. All of a sudden the passage opens up into a large cavern bathed in a red glow, the light emanating from an otherwise black metallic looking object at its centre. The humming is louder now, growing in volume with every passing second the pulsing getting faster, overwhelming your senses, a drumbeat against your skull, THOOM-THOOM-THOOM-THOOM-THOOM!

Everything goes black.

Another one from 2019, this time I’m reviewing David Yarovesky’s Superhero gone awry film ’Brightburn’.

This was one of those films I remember seeing trailers for and thinking “Huh, that looks interesting” so of course I promptly forgot about it till I eventually saw it a couple of years later on one streaming service or another. I remember enjoying it quite a bit, enough to justify buying it on Blu-Ray, putting it in the crosshairs of the random number generator. Which brings us here, to this review.

If you’ve seen Superman, and I imagine a fair few of you have, then you know how this film starts. A baby crash lands on earth in an alien capsule, on a farm, and is raised by the couple who live there. Everything’s pretty normal until one day the capsule activates and Brandon, the child, starts to exhibit superpowers and his personality changes, for the worst. For the spoiler free section that’s all you’re getting of the plot. It’s a horror film, something had to go wrong…right?

The first thing I wanted to discuss regarding this film is a subject close to my heart. Violence, gore and film classification. At university, whilst doing an entirely unrelated subject (Illustration) I wrote my dissertation on violence in film and television and the ups and downs of this interest me to this day. In the UK, since the new millennium, there’s been a big reduction all round in the harshness that films are rated. So when you see that copy of ‘The Terminator’ in a shop and it’s a 15 and you say to yourself “Wasn’t that an 18?” Yes. Yes it was, until the year 2000.

Getting to the point of all this. I was going to say ‘Brightburn’ should be an 18. But it turns out the uncut version (Exclusive to 4k, wtf film studios!) IS an 18 and the 15 version I have on Blu Ray has a couple of cuts. Having said that, my point still stands. Despite these 2 cuts (and an altered scene) the film still felt veeeerry gory for a 15 with some graphic injury detail and a lot of the red stuff. Studios, stop cutting films to get yourself a lower classification, it annoys us over 18s and really does nothing to protect those the ratings are designed to protect, especially when the cuts are so minor!

Rant over, and in case you wondered what a lover of horror is doing saying something negative about gore, it’s not the gore that bothers me, in fact it was pointed out to me that I was grinning while some of the particularly nasty stuff was happening, I love that shit, give me more of it, but don’t try and shoehorn it into a 15, give it the respect it deserves.

The film’s premise and story are fairly interesting, though everything happens pretty fast. It’s rare that this is the case, but I think the film could have done with being half an hour longer or at least spent its time more wisely. We don’t really get to know Brandon enough for us to view him in anything other than a negative light, similar to my feelings in ‘Us’ but this time it’s one of the main characters. ‘Descent into…’ films work best when we get to see who we’re losing and I didn’t get that here.

Brandon’s parents are a bit of a saving grace in this regard. It’s them who we get to see bear the brunt of Brandon’s changes, emotionally at least. They love him, that much is clear, and though their reactions are different we can see the pain being caused to them both. In a way they’re the main characters, they’re the ones we care about. Brandon himself is just a threat to move the story along, but he could have been more.

The sound design was well done, some cool ominous alien voices and effects with great use of bass, it was very effective in making Brandon seem even more threatening and gave the film an epic feel where relevant.

Score time. Another tough one, the score actually came down as I was writing this review and I decided upon 3 Notepads out of 5. There was a lot to like here. The premise was interesting and a fairly popular ‘What if…’ scenario, at least in my mind. Most of the acting is good, particularly Brandon’s parents played by Elizabeth Banks and David Denman, who you really feel are losing everything, and it’s got some great set pieces. Ultimately though it’s Brandon himself and our lack of compassion for him which lets down the film the most. This wasn’t ever going to be a 5, but it should have been a 4. It had all of the ingredients but the end result was a little bland.

**WARNING** SPOILERS BELOW **WARNING**

Welcome to the spoiler section. This is the part where I can bring up some specific parts of the film which I’d like to talk about more, whether they be good, or bad.

Let’s talk cuts. I made such a big deal about this in the main review that I felt I should expand upon it now that I can talk specifics.

Firstly we see a lady get a shard of glass into the centre of her eye. These are the two cuts, in the 15 version we’re missing a close up of the shard in the eye with a trickle of blood, yet we still get to see her slowly pull said shard out of her eye accompanied by a stream of blood, it’s just shorter, because, you know, that’s fine.

The altered scene is when Brandon kills his uncle. He picks up his truck and lets it fall front first into the floor, the steering wheel smashing the Uncle’s jaw off. In the unaltered scene we see his jaw fall mostly off before he grabs it with his hand and holds it back on whereas in the 15 version we cut to a view of the broken window. OK fine that make sense. But then 30 seconds later he dies, his hand falls away and his jaw again falls mostly off, but this time it’s a close up and we see everything. It’s so bizarre to me, the cuts honestly don’t make much of a difference as far as I’m concerned.

I’d like to expand a bit on what I felt was missing with Brandon. The idea is that Brandon was a great kid who suddenly started acting off and aggressive and we see him become what he was presumably sent to the planet to be, an exterminator once activated. Think ‘Dragonball Z’s’ Goku meets order 66 from ‘Revenge of the Sith’. The thing is we barely get to see him being a good kid, it’s essentially covered by showing us 1 minute of home video footage during the opening sequence of the film. This is where some extra time would have been most effective, we need to really get to Know Brandon and most importantly like and emphasise with Brandon before his fall into darkness can truly be effective. We just get to see a slightly odd kid become very odd, very aggressive then full on psychopath with little in the way of development. OK so perhaps the signal from the space ship  instantly flips a switch but it would have been good too see more conflict within him and some genuine remorse to make the fall all the more effective.

As I stated in the main review it’s the parents who you feel for the most and the tragedy of being killed by their own adopted son. To be fair the Dad was an idiot who tried to shoot his son in the back of the head so his death was somewhat inevitable and also pretty silly, laser eyes through the eyes and all. The Mum though, she spends the whole film trying to see the good in Brandon and her death is entirely…oh no wait she also tries to kill him, never mind.

Right! Think I’ll end it there. I’ve got a plane to catch…

3 – How do you like your Eggs? (Alien)

As you stare at the TV screen, engrossed, a respectable looking man in a tweed suit walks into shot and turns to camera.

Scientists have yet to determine the age of the craft, or who created it. What they suspect is…hold on…it looks like the first team is returning, perhaps they can…oh…I think somebody is hurt. Dave, cut it there, we’ll do some interviews once we find out what’s happened.

That’s all there is.

Willa steps into the room. The TV screen has turned to static.

Local kid found that tape floating in the brook just east of town. Strange thing is, nobody has any idea where that was filmed. Oh the island is small, but it’s also big at the same time, like a scrunched up piece of paper. You never know what’s hiding round the next bend.

So! How do you like your eggs?

Once again it seems the random number dice Gods have been kind to me. Today’s film is not only my favourite in the Alien franchise, but one of my favourite films of all time.

Alien is a household name when it comes to either the Science Fiction or Horror genres and is probably the film most people think of when asked to name a film which straddles both. We’ve all seen it (We’ve all seen it right?) but we’re still going to review it, Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic, Alien.

The story of Alien follows the crew of the Nostromo, a commercial towing vessel. The ship intercepts a signal from a nearby planet and the crew heads down to the surface to investigate. Once there they discover an alien craft with an organism onboard, an organism which soon has the crew fighting for their lives.

I don’t remember how old I was when I first saw Alien. It was certainly when I was younger than the film’s 18 rating, likely watching a late night TV edit, but I didn’t care, and probably wasn’t aware, I just knew it by reputation. This was one of those films that everyone had to have seen, you were a real grown up if you could say that.

Since then I’ve seen Alien an unknown number of times in various forms, cut for TV, uncut and finally the Director’s Cut. This is one of those films that I’m very happy to own on Blu-Ray, it’s a beautiful film with a stunning sense of enormous scale and claustrophobia at the same time. The iconic look of the alien and its surroundings is the work of Swiss artist H.R. Giger. The organic but, well alien, look of his designs adds hugely to the feeling of unease and fear we get from the alien itself. The design is so important to the film that it’s one of those, sadly rare, times when the average viewer is aware of who created it.

Every time I watch Alien, I’m reminded how timeless it is. Partly this is due to its sci-fi future setting but mostly for me it’s because the film is so tight, it’s so focused on the small crew of the Nostromo and we are so engaged and on edge for almost the entire film, that we don’t have time for reflecting on the depiction of computers or characters’ hairstyles. All of that other stuff becomes iconic and I feel myself believing that it’s entirely what things could look like in the early 22nd century (The far future setting certainly helps as it’s a long time before anybody’s going to be able to call Ridley Scott out on that.)

So hey, this is a horror review, is Alien a horror? As a whole series I think it becomes a matter of opinion and certainly varies a little by film, but this film? Damn straight it’s a horror, it just happens to be set in space. Alien, when you really break it down, is a slasher film. A group of people, being hunted down and taken out one by one by a seemingly unstoppable foe. Slasher, and a terrifying one at that. The claustrophobic setting of the Nostromo, the body horror, the excellent creature effects, the eerie score, and the superb acting keep you paranoid and in suspense for most of the film.

I was going to point out a few stand out members of the cast, but that would be doing a disservice to the others. They are all excellent, from the comic relief (Well as much as a film like Alien allows it) duo of Harry Dean Stanton’s Brett and Yaphet Kotto’s Parker. To Sigourney Weaver’s no nonsense Ellen Ripley, they all do their part to immerse you in the film’s universe and make it real to you. The Alien itself is a true monster, it’s both beautiful and repulsive at the same time, a marvel of design with a reproductive cycle to keep you awake at night.

All of these things come together to create something very special and that’s why I’m (unsurprisingly I imagine) going to award Alien, 5 Rolled up Magazines out of 5. This is a true masterpiece, a candidate not just for best sci-fi horror, but for one of the best films period. A film which stands the test of time and feels as new as the day it was released, but then you don’t need me to tell you that, you’ve seen it, right?

**WARNING** SPOILERS BELOW **WARNING**

Welcome to the spoiler section. This is the part where I can bring up some specific parts of the film which I’d like to talk about more, whether they be good, or bad.

So now that the 3 people who haven’t seen Alien have left the room let’s indulge in some specifics, starting with the iconic Chestburster scene. This scene is fantastic, the mood of the film turns lighter briefly with Kane seemingly fully recovered from his ordeal with the face hugger, everyone’s smiling and joking when suddenly Kane starts convulsing. The crew hold him down and we meet the alien for the first time as it bursts bloodily from Kane’s chest. It’s so visceral and such a contrast to the relaxed feeling moments before that it continues to be shocking with every watch.

Another sequence of the film I love, and one which shows that Alien isn’t just a one trick pony, is the scene where Dallas is crawling around in the air ducts trying to flush the alien out. The paranoia and the claustrophobia in this scene are intense. Every junction in the ducts has multiple directions the alien could come from and the crew’s simple tracking device does nothing to ease the tension. In the end it’s a simple jump scare, but it works.

Let’s talk about Ash. He could just have been a particularly zealous crew member. He could have been a character who was killed for his error of overriding Ripley and bringing Kane back onto the ship, that could have been the limit of his involvement. Many films would have done that. Not here. Having Ash turn out to be an Android, and one programmed to make sure the alien is recovered, crew expendable, really comes out of nowhere. We’re busy worrying about where the alien is and who it’s going to kill next when suddenly there’s another threat, one which we had no idea about, we didn’t even know Androids were a thing! Ian Holm is fantastic and somehow manages to make a scene where he tries to kill Ripley with a rolled up magazine scary, rather than ridiculous.

Ripley has a reputation for being a bit of a badass, but that mostly comes from the sequels, here she’s more of a hardass. She’s far from being a damsel in distress but she’s certainly terrified by her situation and to be honest it’s another thing that I love about this film. She isn’t a superhero, she’s just doing the best she can and keeps her head when those around her are panicking. Ultimately she defeats the alien, blasting it out into space, but it feels like a desperate fight for survival rather than plot armoured inevitability.

Whether you prefer this, or its admittedly excellent sequel Aliens (That’s usually the extent of it, I don’t know many people claiming it’s Alien: Resurrection) this is where it all began and where many other films in the sci-fi horror sub-genre got their inspiration.

This is Emma, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.