Michael Fassbender – Blood and Porridge

August 19, 2024August 22, 2024

God save the queen

© Brandywine Productions / 20^th Century Fox

I see a new Alien movie has just been released. Entitled Alien: Romulus and directed by Fede Alvarez, it’s had variable reviews – for instance, Peter Bradshaw gave it two stars in the Guardian, Kim Newman gave it three stars in Sci-fi Now and John Nugent gave it four stars in Empire. My tastes generally align with Newman’s, so I suspect if I go to see it, I’ll find Alien: Romulus a middling cinematic experience. I suspect too the critics reacting most positively to the film are secretly doing so out of relief that co-producer Ridley Scott didn’t insist on it having Michael Fassbender play a certain, cocky android spouting tediously about the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Anyway, this gives me an excuse to reprint something I once wrote about James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), the second entry in the series. Film fans will probably spend the rest of time arguing about whether it or Ridley Scott’s 1979 original is the best Alien movie of all, but Aliens is probably my favourite. That may be because I first saw it in a more conducive environment – a packed cinema in Aberdeen shortly after its release, where the audience initially didn’t know what to expect but certainly showed their appreciation when the thrills started coming. (Whereas I first saw Scott’s Alien at a gathering of my high school’s film club, where the building tension was seriously interrupted by a ten-minute break when a teacher had to change the reels on the projector, and I watched the movie surrounded by loudmouth, smartass, wanker-teenager schoolmates.)

Here, then, is my paean to Aliens… With some bonus Father Ted.

© Hat Trick Productions / Channel 4

Scene: The living room of the Parochial House on Craggy Island during a 1996 episode of Father Ted. The elderly and infirm Bishop Jordan, one of a visiting trio of church dignitaries, has just been explaining how he had a heart attack last year and needs to avoid having sudden surprises and shocks.

Father Dougal (bellowing at the top of his voice): AAAAAHHHHH!

Bishop Jordan almost suffers a heart attack on the living room sofa.

Father Ted (seeing Bishop Jordan’s distress): Dougal! What are you doing?!

Father Dougal: Sorry, Ted – I just remembered Aliens is on after the news!

Father Ted: Dougal, for God’s sake! (To the stricken Bishop Jordan, who has almost collapsed off the sofa.) I’m sorry, Bishop Jordan! (To Dougal.) Did you not hear what he’s saying about his heart?

Father Dougal: I know, but it’s just that it’s the Director’s Cut! Come on everyone, let’s all have a lads’ night in!

Father Ted: Dougal, just shut up! (To Bishop Jordan.) Ha-ha. A heart attack? That’s rare enough these days.

Bishop O’Neill (trying to help Father Jordan back onto the sofa): There were certainly a lot of prayers said for Bishop Jordan –

Father Dougal: I don’t know why we can’t look at Aliens –

Father Ted: Dougal! Bishop O’Neill is speaking.

Father Dougal: But… They’d love it, Ted!

Father Ted: No, they wouldn’t!

Father Dougal: But bishops love sci-fi –

Father Ted: DOUGAL! WE ARE NOT WATCHING ALIENS!

© Brandywine Productions / 20^th Century Fox

Like Dougal in that old episode of Father Ted, I still get irrationally excited when I discover that James Cameron’s Aliens is about to get another airing on TV. And during the first occasion I watched it, there were a few moments when, like the beleaguered Bishop Jordan, I thought my heart was about to pop. Yes, Aliens is a film that gets the adrenalin sluicing through you like almost no other.

It’s remarkable that the film achieves this when it’s a sequel. One of the Great Laws of the Cinema is that, compared to the original films, sequels are almost always rubbish. Certainly, that law seemed to hold true in the 1980s, when cinema audiences were subjected to such puddings as Halloween II (1981), Grease 2 (1982), Rocky III (1982) and IV (1985), Jaws 3-D (1983), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and Rambo III (1988), Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986) and Beverley Hills Cop II (1987). Oh, and Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1981), which was directed by a certain James Cameron…

Aliens’ task was particularly daunting. It was to be the follow-up to Ridley Scott’s magnificent haunted-house-in-space movie, 1979’s Alien.

It’s unsurprising that while Cameron was shooting the sequel at Buckinghamshire’s Pinewood Studios in the mid-1980s, he had to put up with a sceptical British crew who were of the opinion that this bearded early-thirty-something Canadian wasn’t fit to lick the boots of the mighty Ridley. Mind you, the contempt was reciprocated by Cameron. A man used to pursuing his vision with the single-minded ruthlessness of The Terminator (1984) – the film that he’d directed between the Piranha sequel and the Alien sequel – Cameron was not impressed by the crew’s Great British working practices like stopping every couple of minutes to have a tea-break.

The resulting movie shows no disrespect to Ridley Scott or the original Alien. It simply takes a very different approach to the hideous, slimy, fanged, multi-jawed, acid-blooded title creatures. Whereas Alien sets one of them loose in a giant spaceship and Scott milked the scenario for all the clammy, claustrophobic horror it was worth, Cameron unleashes a whole army of them in and around a base on a distant planet and declares out-and-out war on the bastards, courtesy of a well-armed platoon of space marines who’ve journeyed there in the company of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, heroine and sole survivor of the first film. Yes, there’s clamminess, claustrophobia and horror to be found in Cameron’s vision too, but that doesn’t prevent Aliens from also being one of the best action films ever made.

That’s not to say that Aliens is a non-stop rollercoaster from start to finish. Cameron actually takes his time getting his characters to the base (after contact with the 160-strong space colony there is suddenly and mysteriously lost). Wisely, and unlike a lot of directors of scary movies who’ve come since, he gives the audience a chance to get to know, and get to like, his characters. So that when hell does break loose, halfway through the film, we’re genuinely on the edge of our seats because we’re rooting for those characters to survive.

Cameron does such a good job of it that, 38 years on, I still know those characters like they’re dear old friends. There’s Michael Biehn’s reliable Corporal Hicks, who packs an old pump-action shotgun alongside his space-age weaponry (“I like to keep this handy… for close encounters”) and who finds himself in the unexpected position of platoon leader after the aliens’ first onslaught wipes half of it out. There’s Lance Henriksen’s Bishop, the regulation android whom Ripley – mindful of what happened in the first movie – is extremely wary of; though after he’s saved her and saved the other surviving humans three or four times (even after he gets ripped in half) she comes to the realisation that he’s a good, if synthetic, bloke.

© Brandywine Productions / 20^th Century Fox

And there’s the motor-mouthed Private Hudson, played by the late, great Bill Paxton, who gets the film’s best lines. This is both before the aliens show up, when he’s a swaggering, show-offy git – “Hey Ripley, don’t worry. Me and my squad of ultimate badasses will protect you… We got nukes, we got knives, we got sharp sticks!” – and after they show up, when he’s a quivering, whiny git – “Hey, maybe you haven’t been keeping up on current events but we just got our asses kicked!”

But Aliens is no simple testosterone-fest. Dougal in Father Ted might have earmarked it for a ‘lads’ night in’ but it’s also, subversively, a chick-flick. At its heart are no fewer than four powerful female characters. There’s the splendid Sigourney Weaver, of course, back in the role of Ripley – though it’s in Aliens that both Weaver and Ripley properly achieve the status of cinematic icons. There’s Carrie Henn as Newt, the waif-like little girl who’s the colony’s only survivor and who, gradually, awakens Ripley’s maternal instincts. While Ripley spends the original movie reacting to and mainly running from the horrors around her, it’s thanks to Newt that in Aliens she becomes increasingly proactive and ends up running at them. Admittedly, that’s when she’s armed with a M41A Pulse Rifle / M240 Flamethrower.

And let’s not forget the impressive Private Vasquez, played by Jenette Goldstein, who’s more than a match than any man in her platoon. “All right,” she snarls at one point, “we got seven canisters of CM-20. I say we roll them in there and nerve-gas the whole f***in’ nest.” And when she’s not shooting down aliens, she’s shooting down Hudson’s bullshit, as happens in the following famous exchange: “Hey Vasquez. Have you ever been mistaken for a man?” “No. Have you?”

The film’s final trump card also takes female form: the Alien Queen. Here, Cameron combines the design of the original alien, by the Swiss artist H.R. Giger, with the concepts of an egg-laying queen termite and a tyrannosaurus rex. He creates a twenty-foot foe of terrifying savagery, strength and tenacity. And when she comes bearing down on Ripley at the movie’s climax, it’s clear to the audience that this is the showdown between the Big Bad Mommas. By this time, the Queen has seen her whole hellish brood wiped out. Meanwhile, Ripley is determined to defend what’s left of her family – Newt and the now-incapacitated Hicks and Bishop – to the death.

What more can I say? Aliens remains exhilarating nearly four decades on. Slowly and inexorably, the first half of the film winches you in. Thereafter, you find yourself strapped into a thrill-ride there’s no escape from. In the words of Private Hudson: “We’re on an express elevator to hell, going down!”

© Brandywine Productions / 20^th Century Fox

February 15, 2022

Who is the Macbeth-est of them all?

© A24 / IAC Films / Apple TV+

I recently watched The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021), directed by Joel Cohen (without, for the first time ever, his brother Ethan co-directing) and starring Denzel Washington as William Shakespeare’s king-stabbing, crown-grabbing Scotsman. Meanwhile, in the role of Macbeth’s spouse, the ruthless Lady Macbeth, is Cohen’s real-life spouse Frances McDormand. It’s difficult to sum up my reaction to the film. I suppose you could say: liked it… stopped liking it… started liking it again.

The opening sequence, the aftermath of the battle between Scotland and the combined armies of Ireland and Norway, takes place on a beach. Thanks to Bruno Delbonnel’s monochrome cinematography, it’s palely, clammily and impressively atmospheric. Mind you, within a couple of minutes of hearing the performers’ accents – Ralph Ineson speaking broad Yorkshire, Harry Melling speaking broad RP and Brendan Gleason speaking broad Irish – you realise this isn’t going to be a particularly Scottish take on the Scottish play.

Enter Washington’s Macbeth, speaking broad American, and Bertie Carvel’s Banquo. They encounter the Weird Sisters (Kathryn Hunter) and hear their fateful prophecies. Soon after, the prophecies start coming true as Macbeth is made Thane of Cawdor thanks to his valour during the battle. And the plot – literally a plot, with Washington and McDormand conspiring to kill Gleason’s King Duncan and seize the Scottish throne – is underway.

So, for me, the film gets off to a strong start. I went off it, however, when the action relocates to Macbeth’s castle, where Duncan spends the night as a guest, and we get the build-up, execution and aftermath of his murder. Ironically, this was because of something many critics have praised the film for, its stylised sets and lighting, which give the castle’s interior the look of a perspective-bending M.C. Escher illustration, shot in the manner of a German expressionist silent movie or a 1940s American film noir.

My problem was that the shafts of stark white light (necessary to produce the black shadows elsewhere) and the sense of silence, stillness and solidity evoked by the sets make a nonsense of Shakespeare’s theme that, by murdering Duncan and violating the human social order, Macbeth sparks a chain reaction with violent effects in the natural world too: “Where we lay / Our chimneys were blown down and, as they say / Lamentings heard i’ th’ air, strange screams of death / And prophesying, with accents terrible / Of dire combustion and confused events… / …Some say the earth / Was feverous and did shake.” Well, you don’t get any impression of falling-down chimneys, lamentings, dire combustion, confused events and feverous earthquakes in an environment as still and sombre as this. In fact, there’s little suggestion that night-time occurred at all – the castle windows seem to blaze permanently with light.

I actually didn’t respond well to the overall, stylised, sometimes artificial look of the film, though I suspect that’s just me. I spent some of my formative years in Scotland, so to me the places mentioned in the play – Glamis, Cawdor, Fife – aren’t just names but real geographical locations. I prefer Macbeth movies with proper Scottish landscapes, with primordial mountains, moors, glens and lochs that to my mind create an appropriate backdrop for the dark and bloody goings-on.

However, The Tragedy of Macbeth regained my interest later on. The sequence where Macbeth has his second meeting with the Weird Sisters is staged with wonderful inventiveness and thereafter the movie gets its second wind. The slaughter of Macduff’s family is impressively done too, conveying the cruelty of the deed without descending into a bloodbath. (As the first murderer assaults one of the young Macduff-lings, he utters the memorable Shakespearean cry, “What, you egg!”, although the punning follow-up line, “Young fry of treachery!” is excised here. Also removed is the doomed youngster’s exclamation, “He has kill’d me, mother!” At school, while my classmates and I studied Macbeth for the Scottish O-Grade, we found this really funny for some reason.)

One thing many critics have remarked upon is the age of the two leads. Washington and McDormand are both in their late middle-age, no longer able to have children. This makes their murder of Duncan and the seizing of the throne more egotistical – they aren’t doing it for their line, which doesn’t and won’t exist, but purely for themselves. Their childlessness, of course, contrasts with the fecundity of the two thorns in their sides. Banquo has a son, Fleance, and Macduff has a whole brood of kids. It also underlines Macbeth’s wariness of Banquo, for whom the Weird Sisters prophesise: “Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.”

Elsewhere, my impression of The Tragedy of Macbeth was that some things worked well and other things less well. Kathryn Hunter is splendid as the Weird Sisters. There’s only one of them who’s flesh and blood, though that twisted, contorted body of hers seems to be inhabited by the spirits of all three. The figures of the other two only materialise in the physical world as reflections – Macbeth’s and Banquo’s first sighting of them, at the edge of a pool, is memorably creepy. Perhaps Hunter’s performance gets slightly too Andy Serkis at times, but it’s still very effective.

On the other hand, the promotion of the character of Ross (Alex Hassell) from being one of the original play’s interchangeable Scottish thanes to, here, being a Machiavellian, possibly even supernatural, manipulator who’s playing both sides – he delivers the warning to Lady Macduff about Macbeth’s evil intentions, but also turns up as the mysterious third murderer who does for Banquo, and there’s even a suggestion that he has a hand in Lady Macbeth’s suicide – is intriguing but doesn’t really come off. With the Weird Sisters, the play already has Machiavellian manipulators. It doesn’t need any more.

It’s interesting to compare this Macbeth with the cinematic adaptations that have come before. I preferred it to the Justin Kurzel-directed version, released in 2015, which despite a great cast – Michael Fassbender as Macbeth, Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth, David Thewlis as Duncan, Paddy Considine as Banquo, Sean Harris as Macduff – seems rather subdued, thanks to the amount of low-volume muttering and mumbling going on that takes the fire out of Shakespeare’s lines. It also chops out parts of the play that, while admittedly hammy, I’ve always enjoyed, for example, the post-regicide comedy relief with the porter, and most of the “Double, double toil and trouble / Fire burn and cauldron bubble” hijinks with the Weird Sisters. At least in The Tragedy of Macbeth these are reinstated. Stephen Root gives a funny turn as the porter and Joel Cohen seems to relish the macabre incantations of the Weird Sisters: “Finger of birth-strangled babe / Ditch-deliver’d by a drab / Liver of blaspheming Jew / Gall of goat and slips of yew…” Well, he did start his movie career as an assistant editor on Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981).

Still, the 2015 Macbeth looks lovely and it satisfies my craving for proper Scottish landscapes in a Macbeth movie. Many of its outdoor scenes were shot on the Isle of Skye, although admittedly parts of it were also filmed in England, at Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland and Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire. Also visually striking is the sequence where Macbeth squares up to Macduff. Their swordfight takes place against an infernal, almost hallucinogenic orange-red backdrop while Birnam Wood burns off-screen. For yes, the scriptwriters cooked up – and ‘cook’ is the operative word – a novel way of bringing Birnam Wood to the castle on Dunsinane Hill.

For me, though, the best movie Macbeth is Roman Polanski’s version of it back in 1971, which had Jon Finch and Francesca Annis in the lead roles. This made a big impression on me. I was 15 when I saw it, so no doubt one reason why I took to it was because the film’s qualities – its simultaneous bleakness, bloodiness, bawdiness, gothic-ness, gorgeousness, rebelliousness and artiness – mirrored the mix of emotions and hormones seething at the time in my teenaged self. And no doubt I felt a connection with the film too because Finch and Annis were both so young when they made it. In fact, their youthfulness suggests they have little power to control their destinies. They’re swept along with events, propelled by dark forces that are both political and supernatural.

Polanski’s Macbeth was disliked by many critics, upset by its violence and disturbed by the fact that Polanski’s recent past had been pretty violent too. In August 1969, his pregnant wife Sharon Tate and four others were butchered at his home in Beverly Hills by followers of the hippie-cult lunatic Charles Manson. Pauline Kael, the film critic for the New Yorker, even wondered if Polanski’s staging of the murder of Macduff’s family was an attempt to replicate the carnage that Manson had authored in his own life. Famously, the film’s screenwriter, Kenneth Tynan, challenged Polanski about the amount of blood shown in this scene – to which the director retorted, “You should have seen my house last summer.”

Incidentally, the exteriors in Polanski’s Macbeth look rugged enough to be Scottish, but the film was actually shot elsewhere, in Wales (including Snowdonia) and north-eastern England. And, yes, Northumberland’s Bamburgh Castle makes an appearance in this version too.

One other cinematic Macbeth I’ve seen is the 1948 production directed by, and starring, Orson Welles. I watched this on TV a long time ago and wasn’t impressed by its apparent staginess and melodramatics – by then I was in thrall to the Polanski version. However, lately, I’ve watched a few parts of it on Youtube and revised my opinion of it somewhat. Yes, it’s cheap. Welles made it for Republic Pictures, a studio that normally specialised in low-budget westerns, had to shoot it on some of Republic’s leftover western sets, and had only a 23-day shooting schedule. But scenes like Act 3 Scene 4, where Banquo’s ghost shows up at the feast with ‘no speculation’ in its eyes and shaking its ‘gory locks’ at his killer, are surprisingly well-staged. Though I suppose you’d expect that from Welles.

There are problems, however. Though he was only 33 at the time, Welles was already getting portly and resembled Falstaff more than Macbeth. It doesn’t help that he appears in an eccentric costume that, he grumbled later, made him look like the Statue of Liberty.

And then there are the accents – dear God. Welles’s American cast dial the fake twee Scottish-ness up to 11 and roll their ‘r’s for minutes at a time. Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth is shrill and hard to listen to and even Welles himself, during his more excitable moments, sounds like Scotty in the original series of Star Trek (1966-69). Meanwhile, the Weird Sisters’ accents are so piercing they remind me of those advertisements that Scottish children’s entertainer and showbiz personality Molly Weir used to make for Flash, the household cleaning agent, back in the 1970s: “Flash cleans baths without scr-r-r-r-ratching!”

And on that topic… While one of the play’s strengths is that it can be adapted to countless different settings and styles, I would one day like to see a truly Scottish film version of Macbeth, with authentic Scottish actors and accents as well as those brooding Scottish landscapes I’ve talked about. You can’t claim, as you might have been able to in the past, that there aren’t enough bankable Scottish actors to draw audiences to it. Not with the likes of Peter Capaldi, Robert Carlyle, Robbie Coltrane, Martin Compston, James Cosmo, Brian Cox, Kate Dickie, Lindsay Duncan, Karen Gillan, Shirley Henderson, Jack Lowden, James McAvoy, Kelly Macdonald, Ewan McGregor, Kevin McKidd, Bill Paterson, Dougray Scott, Ken Stott, David Tennant, etc., on the go nowadays.

Hell, I’d even pay money to see Gerald Butler as Macbeth. Cawdor Has Fallen, anyone?