The new “Alien: Covenant” boasts stellar production design, Michael Fassbender’s subtly masterful dual performance and thoughtful musings about the creation of life.
But that’s not why anyone is going to see it. They want to see how Ridley Scott’s prequel to his groundbreakingly gory, 1979 “Alien” — a film that delivered on its pitch line “In space no one can hear you scream” — tops the chest-bursting slaughter of the original sci-fi classic.
“I think Ridley’s first line was, ‘We’re going to make a hard R-rated film, and we’re going to need a lot of claret,’ which is a term for film blood,” “Covenant” producer Mark Huffam remembers in the film’s production notes.
Whether or not he knew it at the time, Scott’s film wound up not only competing with fond, nightmarish memories of his first bloody masterpiece, but with a 2017 movie planet in which “Covenant” is only one in a parade of releases that spray the claret like a bunch of drunken Xenomorphs.
From the aestheticized executions in “John Wick: Chapter 2” and Wolverine’s gritty, R-rated and fan-pleasing “Logan” rampages to the more satirical bloodshedding of “The Belko Experiment” and “Free Fire,” moviegoers are experiencing a concentrated blast of extreme mayhem. Judging by the looks of such upcoming releases as “Atomic Blonde,” “The Bad Batch,” “Kingsman: The Golden Circle” and Darren Aronofsky’s “Mother!” (have you seen that poster of a beatific Jennifer Lawrence holding the muscular heart she apparently just tore out of her chest?), this year may well go down as the most violent in movie history.
Quite a statement, that, and certainly one that rests more on impressions than on anything that can be quantified. There is something about this wave of graphic, high body count thrillers that seems significant, though. Sociocultural observers might suggest that this is what you get when a belligerent new president comes to town and the whole political system seems to be in constant, angry chaos.
But keep in mind that this year’s movies were made before any of this became the norm. The more immediate, and probably accurate, observation is that, like in Stanley Kubrick’s brutalist cinema classic “A Clockwork Orange,” violence seems to fuel creativity. And, for a variety of reasons, filmmakers were given opportunities to indulge both urges in hopes the results would sell.
It worked with the “Wick” and “Logan” franchise entries, which pumped box office-improving new artistic blood, along with the liquid kind, into their respective series. (While it’s unlikely “Covenant” will feel like an improvement over “Alien” in many people’s minds, its back-to-basics fright mechanisms should be better received than Scott’s previous, quizzical prequel, “Prometheus,” was.)
The movies with more than mayhem on their minds haven’t done nearly as well, it should be noted. Ben Wheatley’s “Free Fire,” actually the smartest of the lot with its escalating lampoon of the absurdity of gun violence, has naturally also been the least popular. And while the James Gunn-written cutthroat corporate romp “Belko” has made a not-bad-for-a-cheap-indie $10 million domestically, that’s infinitesimal compared to what the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies he directs earn.
According to Gunn, though, that’s a reason why talented, successful filmmakers are drawn to the kinetic possibilities of tearing people apart.
“There’s something that’s fun about pushing cinema to the extremes,” Gunn told the Southern California News Group in March. “I think it’s a reaction to the other type of cinema which is very popular, which is the big, huge, super-clean, sometimes awesome cinema, that sort of big spectacle film. I think that there’s a desire to go see something that’s a little dirtier and a little bit uglier, and that’s where ‘Belko’ and ‘John Wick 2’ and ‘Logan’ and these other movies come in.”
To a more commercial point, upping the theatrical violence quotient may also be a reaction to growing competition from streaming and cable’s ever-less-censored, ever-so-“dark, dark, we’re so dark” Peak TV. How you gonna get ’em into the theaters when there are red weddings and zombie apocalypses aplenty to watch at home? Offer an even more intense, Roman circus-style spectacle sounds like an answer.
Of course, shocking violence has been a calling card of American cinema ever since that cowboy sent 1903 audiences ducking for cover when he fired a revolver straight out of the screen at the end of “The Great Train Robbery.” While gunplay remained a staple throughout the Golden Age of Hollywood, as self-censorship loosened in the 1960s and ’70s — first with Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” and later with “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Wild Bunch,” “Clockwork Orange,” seminal Coppola and Scorsese works and many others — increased explicitness in onscreen carnage often accompanied great moviemaking.
It also led to a whole lot of gratuitous junk. For every cool John Carpenter or David Cronenberg horror “Psycho” paved the way for, tons of mindless slasher and, later, torture porn films clogged venues. Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti Westerns and “Dirty Harry” films, decried for their casual sadism at the time they came out, are now appreciated as genre masterpieces. Endless, vengeance-glorifying knockoffs of those, whether “Death Wish” or “Rambo”-style, are rightfully not so highly regarded, although they may have been some of today’s violent filmmakers’ favorite movies growing up.
Anyway, the occasional pieces that emphasized the ugliness of violence while indulging in its vicarious thrills — Oliver Stone’s “Platoon,” Eastwood’s own “Unforgiven,” Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” David Fincher’s “Fight Club” — have earned both acclaim and profits. That’s cycled around again recently, what with “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “The Revenant” dominating the 2015 Oscars and 2016’s ultra R-rated superhero spoof “Deadpool” cleaning up good reviews as well as money.
All of which lends legitimacy to what may simply be a bunch of filmmakers working out their darkest fantasies on screen or just getting high on virtually and figuratively getting away with murder. Whether this year’s results will match the bloodiest benchmarks of the past, regardless of how many root canals Charlize Theron needed after making “Atomic Blonde,” only the future will tell.
If 2017’s new brutalism sells enough tickets, though, it’s a dead-on prediction that those sociocultural commentators are really going to have their work cut out for them over the next several years.
