Black Bag (2025)

George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) went to a club to meet Philip Meacham.  Meacham explained that the agency had a traitor.  He provided a list with 5 names.  One of the names on the list was Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett), who happened to be George's wife.  In order to ferret out the rat, George invited all of them to dinner at his home.  George is a gourmet; he also drugged the food.  Once everyone was sufficiently lubricated, the game began.  Make a resolution for the person on your right.  It turned out that everyone was sleeping with everyone else, but nothing to mark out a traitor.  However, after dinner, George spotted something amiss that implicated his wife.

In the week that followed, George investigated the suspects, including his wife.  His investigations led to further incriminating evidence against his wife!  Even if she was guilty, he would protect her.  He needed to thwart a clandestine plan while keeping his wife safe.  The crisscross of lies led everyone to suspect one another.

The climax was something of a letdown.  It is a replay of the original dinner party with life on the line.  That the villain grabbed the gun provided by the host as though it was actually useful was beyond foolish.  Of course, it's a dummy gun.  How in the world could anyone - especially someone who works in intelligence - believe a loaded gun would just be offered?

Fassbender plays George as a flat, emotionless man.  He makes Roger Moore's raised eyebrow look like Shatnerian overacting by comparison.  He is a cold calculating machine with a keen eye for deception.  Cate Blanchett is similarly limited in emotional range.  It definitely gives the impression that these spies are focused and unflappable.  By contrast, the satellite operator, Clarissa, has wide emotional swings and the psychologist, Zoe, felt very normal as a person.  Pierce Brosnan plays Arthur Stieglitz, the chief of the agency.  It is not a good role, as he gets outmaneuvered by his subordinates and seemed to be oblivious to what was happening.

The movie feels like an old British spy thriller in the vein of The Ipcress File or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  There is a lot of dialogue and no action.  This is more of a whodunit than a spy movie.  That the villain proved to be sloppy and incompetent was disappointing.

Just okay.

Alien: Covenant

The movie opens on Earth with David (Michael Fassbender) having a discussion with a middle-aged Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), setting this scene decades before the events in Prometheus.  The story resumes a decade after the Prometheus went missing.  Walter (Michael Fassbender) is aboard the Covenant, a colony ship bound for Origae-6.  The ship is struck by a neutrino burst that requires waking the crew.  Several colonists and Captain Branson are killed in their stasis pods.  First Mate Christopher Oram (Billy Crudup) becomes the new captain and the new first mate is Dany Branson (Katherine Waterston), the grieving wife of the deceased Captain Branson.  While repairing the damage, Tennessee (Danny McBride) intercepts a signal - clearly human - from a nearby planet that appears to be a near perfect planet for a colony.  Though Dany advises against it, Oram changes course to investigate.

 

The planet looks great and even at the landing site, Oram starts plotting where to build the new colony.  Of course, a couple of crewmen are soon infected with a parasite that quickly grows into a xenomorph.  Disaster follows catastrophe and the surviving crew are rescued from rampaging xenomorphs by the arrival of David, formerly of the Prometheus.  David explains how Dr. Elizabeth Shaw died when they crashed on the planet and the planet is devoid of any non-xenomoprhs because of the parasite.

 

The movie is engaging and generally fun though often the suspension of disbelief becomes impossible.  The cluelessness of some characters grates although not as much as in Prometheus.  There is some great action and all the standard tropes one expects from an Alien movie.

 

Spoilers beyond this point

 

Oram is abysmally stupid.  Oh, and he is very religious.  Therefore, devout people are stupid and make terrible decisions.  I see no other reason for highlighting his religiosity.   First, showing absolutely no sympathy, he literally orders that there will be no observance of the death of Captain Branson and is later irritated that Dany and several others had an impromptu funeral for him.  Seriously?  How much more unsympathetic can we make this idiot?  The ship arrives at the signal origin and the majority of the crew go to the planet to investigate its habitability and the source of the signal.  They are not wearing any sort of air filtration as they exit the ship.  I'm sure it will be fine.  No, it turns out that it isn't fine.  The landing craft is destroyed and the survivors are stranded.  Oram finds David communicating with a full-grown xenomorph that has clearly just killed one of the crew in an area that David had assured them was safe.  Does Oram shoot the clearly treacherous android?  No.  Does he restrain him?  No.  Does he tell the rest of his crew?  No.  Our genius, devoutly religious captain follows David into the bowels of the complex and then, with further assurances that it is perfectly safe, approaches an alien egg that opens when he gets close.  Then, with added prompting to take a look, sticks his face in it to see what that thing is under the surface.  Hello, Facehugger.  Now, if he hadn't already seen an alien burst from one of his crew, this truly clueless decision might have rated slightly lower on the abysmal stupidity scale but not by much.  Sadly, he is not the stupidest character.

In the most brainless move ever, Dany leaves Walter to fight it out with his identical twin, David.  When 'Walter' rejoins her later, she has no doubts that it's Walter.  After all, Walter has only one hand and the android that just climbed aboard has only one hand; it must be Walter.  Back on the Covenant, a xenomorph has burst from one of the survivors and starts killing the remnants of the crew.  It is left to Dany, Tennessee, and 'Walter' to kill it.  At the end, Dany has just put Tennessee in his stasis pod and climbs into her own.  Walter is just activating it when she asks a question that Walter should be able to answer but isn't.  Oh no!  You're not Walter!  Gee, how did you not see that coming?  How did you not have some means of confirming that you came back with the correct android?  Heck, even if you did come back with the right android, it probably would have been wise to jettison him into space just to be certain.

 

In a flashback scene, we are shown that David hovered over the Engineer city and unleashed the plague that was meant for Earth.  The whole planet was swept of all animal life.  But this doesn't fit what we have seen previously.  We are led to believe that the Engineers abandoned LV-223 - the planet from Prometheus - hundreds of years ago but we have the Engineer homeworld in range of a comparatively ancient ship.  Huh?  Also, if David only committed planet-wide genocide in the last decade, where are all the cities and ruins?  Even from space, the Covenant should have been able to see that a vast and highly advanced civilization had lived here.  Why no satellites in orbit?  This spacefaring race seems to live primitively.  Surely, David didn't arrive on the only spaceship on the planet and their must be some means of traveling from population center to population center.  Or did this one dinky city constitute the whole of Engineer population?

 

Walter observes that David is insane.  Sure, he is a nutter but he's also stupid.  His goal is to get off the planet with his 'children.'  He practically danced with glee when he heard there were 2,000 colonists on the Covenant.  The last thing he should be doing is infecting the crew that might get him off the planet.  Heck, with every infected individual, that is one more mark against Tennessee launching a rescue.

 

If Tennessee had any sense, he would have set course for Origae-6 as soon as he learned his wife had died when the lander exploded.  Even if he does rescue the survivors, they absolutely, positively must been in quarantined, not mingling with the 3 crewmen who didn't set foot on the death planet.

 

It was enjoyable while watching it but collapsed under the weight of its stupidity when I had an opportunity to think about it.  Leave your brain behind - most of the Covenant crew did - and enjoy the popcorn fun.

Assassin's Creed

The opening text explains that the Assassins exist to protect the Apple (of original sin infamy) from the forces of the Knights Templar.  Fine.  But then the story opens in 1492.  Um, the Templars were disbanded in 1312.  Well, the Assassins are a secret order so I suppose the Templars are now a secret order as well.  But then Torquemada, infamous as the Grand Inquisitor or the Spanish Inquisition, declares victory for the Templars when the Apple is in his grasp.  Um, the Templars were burned as heretics in 1312; not really a good fit for a fellow associated with burning heretics.  Maybe this is suppose to be irony.  Okay, I'm drifting.  It is 1492 and Aguilar (Michael Fassbender) has a finger sliced off as part of his initiation into the Assassins.  He speaks the Assassin's Creed, which boils down to 'the ends justify the means.'

 

In the present, Callum "Cal" Lynch (Michael Fassbender) is led to the death chamber in Huntsville, TX where he is executed by lethal injection.  And then he wakes up at the Abstergo Foundation in Spain.  Not clear on the particulars of how this was accomplished though Dr. Sophia Rikkin (Marion Cotillard) was present at his execution and is also the chief researcher at the Abstergo Foundation.  Maybe the switching of the lethal drugs was left on the cutting room floor.  Beyond saying he killed 'a pimp' and he appears to have no regrets about it, we don't get the backstory on how he found himself on death row.  Awesome character development so far!  It turns out that Cal is a direct descendent of Aguilar.  The Abstergo Foundation has a means of reading memories from genes.  The process involves 'synchronizing' Cal with his genetic ancestor and allow him to 'act out' particular incidents.  Thus, we see the wildly outlandish adventures of Aguilar, martial artist and parkour expert.

 

Of interest, Cal is only the most recent of Sophia's subjects.  He meets several others who are generally hostile.  The synchronizing process provides memories, abilities, and attitudes of their genetic ancestors.  That the Abstergo Foundation is aware of this side effect and yet keeps these people around is inexplicable.  The Templars are essentially resurrecting assassins and then letting them wander the halls.  Worse, the facility security guards are bumpkins who are easy prey to these skilled assassins.  No one saw this coming?

The action scenes are epic and mostly done without CGI, they are nonetheless ludicrous.  During an escape, Aguilar leaps from a tower and plunges toward the ground.  Before he can presumably splatter on the pavement, Cal desynchronizes and has a seizure.  Did Aguilar die?  No.  Cal links up again and we see the further adventures of Aguilar.  How exactly did he survive that fall?  Magic?  Why are Spaniards in league with the Sultan and are troubled that the Reconquista is on the brink of its final victory?  Is Aguilar Muslim?  Why is it that the Templars will use the Apple to dominate the world but the Sultan will not?  Are Catholics less respectful of free will than Muslims?  After decades of reversals on the Iberian Peninsula, why is the Apple housed in the last remaining stronghold in Spain rather than Bagdad?  The action is set in 1492 while Granada was the last remaining Islamic state; did the screenwriter know that Granada surrendered on January 2nd?  Spring-loaded wrist blades may be useful as a hidden weapon but are impractical for melee.  Parkour only dates back to the 1980s, not the 1490s.  When Aguilar escapes with the Apple, why would he give it to Christopher Columbus?  Aguilar insisted that Columbus take the Apple to his grave.  Of course, Columbus has had more graves than most.  He was first interred in Valladolid, Spain.  Then he was moved Seville.  From Seville, his remains were transferred to what is now the Dominican Republic.  When France took the island, his remains moved to Havana, Cuba.  When Spain lost that, his remains returned to Seville.  Luckily, the Apple never got lost along the way.

Why is there always a murky fog when viewing the scene from above?  It is like they used cut scenes from the video game that didn't quite work on the big screen.  What is the deal with the eagle?  Constantly, there is this eagle soaring at incredible speed over mountains, valleys, and cities, offering an eye in the sky before zooming to the action of the characters.  Does the assassin turn into the eagle?  Is that how he survived the suicidal jump?  The omnipresence of the eagle required an explanation.  Maybe it would all make sense if I had played the video game.

As if all those failings aren't enough, the characters are universally unappealing.  There is no reason to like Cal beyond the fact that he is the protagonist.  The 'heroes' win not because they are more skilled or smarter but because Sophia and her father (Jeremy Irons) are so profoundly stupid that they allowed a growing cohort of assassins to congregate near the heart of the operation.  It would be one thing if all of them were actively being genetic synchronized but most of them were done.  Why not kill them?  At least send them to another facility.  Villain stupidity saves the world again.

It has its moments but is mostly mediocre.  Skip this one.