#barbie & her android boyfriend ken
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Fandom: The Barbie Movie (2023) Word Count: 2.3k Relationships: Ryan Gosling's Ken X Margo Robbie's Barbie Tags: Pre-Relationship, Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Android ! Ken, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Unresolved Romantic Tension AO3 Link
Description: Barbie needs to bring a plus one to a social gathering. Who better to bring than the totally not an android, definitely human, Ken?
Part 2 to my Barbie & Her Android Boyfriend Ken series! Part 1 Here
#archive of our own#yes maddy writes#fan fiction#the barbie movie#Ryan gosling's ken#margo Robbie's barbie#barbie & her android boyfriend ken
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Alien: Covenant, or the loony perplexion of my dreams
Last weekend I was in the mood to see a big stupid film, so I went to see Alien: Covenant. I can now confirm that, if bigness and stupidity are what you are looking for in a movie, it does not disappoint on either count. However, it also contained enough nuggets of fascinating bizarritude to keep me surprisingly entertained on a damp Sunday afternoon.
“Anyway, here’s Wonderwall.”
As a result, I now have a few Thoughts™ that need an outlet, and since these include spoilers for both this film and its precursor Prometheus, I have placed them behind a cut for your reading convenience. It won’t be a spoiler or a surprise to hear that most of them are about Michael Fassbender acting peculiar, in all senses of the word...
I have a vague sense that I should say something about the bits of this film that do not involve Michael Fassbender pissing around, but hey, what is there to say? There’s a bunch of charisma-lite expendables on a spaceship, all with a tendency to make ridiculous plot decisions under pressure, and the only suspense involves which order they’re going to die in, and how messy each demise will be. (Clue: mostly pretty messy.) At least Katherine Waterston, who’s this instalment’s Rent-A-Ripley, doesn’t have to run about in her knickers at any point. Does that count as progress?
Frankly, I blame cuts to the Weyland-Yutani health and safety department. Those poor sods must spend all day losing arguments with people who want to do galactically stupid things like building a medical bay with a smooth floor that gets lethally slippy at the first sign of leaking bodily fluids. Let’s face it, you’d soon be wishing for a Xenomorph to turn up and put you out of your misery.
Katherine Waterston wishes she’d stayed at home and played with the Nifflers, instead of coming on the galaxy’s most depressing camping weekend.
Now, if you've heard anything about this film, you may know that there are two Michael Fassbenders in it. One Fassbender plays David, the sociopathic android synthetic whose hair-bleaching, bike-riding, Peter O’Toole-fancying shenanigans were the best five minutes of the annoyingly silly Prometheus. The other Fassbender plays Walter, the resident synthetic on the Covenant, who looks exactly the same but with better hair, a better grasp of sanity and a ropey American accent instead of a ropey English one. Now, this double casting might seem like an actor-flattering Hollywood vanity move, but nope, it’s actually a stroke of genius, because the minute there are two Fassbenders on screen instead of just one, everything gets a lot more strange and interesting and homoerotic and baffling and delirious and did I say homoerotic? yeah I did but I’ll say it again.
David had to go a long way to find a recycling bin big enough for all his empties.
Of course, you may recall that by the end of Prometheus, David’s head had parted company from the rest of him, and he was sailing into deep space with Noomi Rapace, heading for what I idly imagined might become a gender-flipped remake of that weird Doctor Who romance between a man and a sentient paving slab. But alas, poor Noomi carelessly forgot that David had tried to kill her horribly in the previous film, reattached his head, and promptly lived to regret it.
Since then, however, David has been getting up to all kinds of stuff, including but not restricted to:
psychotic obsession
advanced Alien-breeding
genocide
growing out his bleach job
making himself a cloak to maximize his apocalyptic windswept posing aesthetic
scarily over-romanticizing his non-existent relationship with the woman he messily killed by drawing lots of be-tentacled fan art of her (oh, and leaving her mutant corpse lying around in his cabinet of creepy curiosities for passers-by to stumble over)
thinking up poetic yet ominous phrases to intone doomily at dinner-party guests, if he ever has any
In short, he’s become the ultimate Alien fan-boy, perpetually disappointed that no one else understands how cool Aliens are, OR how his ideas of how the plot should go are TOTALLY the best, OR why the best thing to do when unexpected visitors turn up is to retire to a dark corner with himself and engage in a spot of autoerotic conversation.
Modern cinema does not include enough scenes in which an actor talks to an identical copy of himself about fingering and holes. Discuss.
Still, what I enjoyed most about this movie is that it offers so much space for silly spin-offs. As @hellotailor so pertinently points out in this review, David’s years of solitude have turned him into a dead ringer for Riff-Raff from the Rocky Horror Show, complete with lank straggly hair and predilection for pseudo-incest. This concept makes me want both a) an Alien: Covenant vid to the tune of The Time Warp, and b) a Rocky Horror remake in which Michael Fassbender plays EVERY SINGLE PART. But since the gods of pop culture have yet to give me that, I will have to make do with David’s whole-hearted embrace of his role as Satanic Mechanic, conniving his way through this cataclysm of daftness with glitter-eyed glee. I did enjoy the shout-out to the best bleach-haired android in Ridley Scott history – namely, Roy Batty in Blade Runner – but David’s pseudo-seduction of his “brother” Walter was surely the highlight, making even Data and Lore seem well adjusted by comparison. Shame the much-touted Fassbender-on-Fassbender kiss is a chaste affair rather than a fangirl-pleasing tonguefest, but it’s tricky to know how much further they could have gone: this Guardian review suggests David is "as flat-fronted in the trouser department as Barbie’s boyfriend Ken", but who knows whether this is a deliberate plot point or just a costuming quirk (nobody wants a cling-fit catsuit with unflattering lumpy bits, after all)? Still, I imagine plenty of fan imaginations will fill those gaps in soon enough...
I’ve also got spin-off ideas for the slightly less kinky crowd. The scene with the white wriggly Alien neomorphs running about in a field made me think of psychotic sheep, so when David turned up in his Jedi cosplay cloak, my first thought was “it’s Bo Peep!” Now I want to see both a) David in a frilly shepherdess costume, caring for his fuzzy Alien flock and b) a Shaun the Sheep/Alien crossover. Let’s face it, it’d be a glorious and fitting follow-up to Pingu meets The Thing...
#alien covenant#michael fassbender#alien: covenant#katherine waterston#ridley scott#movies#welcome to my dire necropolis please wipe your feet
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Alien: Covenant review Ridley Scott’s latest space exploration feels all too familiar
Scotts sequel to the Prometheus prequel is capably made but plays like a greatest-hits compilation of the original films freakiest moments
Its back, with its vicious little fangs, squidgily formless body and nasty receding skull that swoops and tapers down the back of its neck, like the helmet of an Olympic cyclist. Ridley Scotts parasitic space alien has returned for this watchable if unoriginal sci-fi thriller though it doesnt grow all that much these days. Michael Fassbender is back, too, as the creepy deadpan robot who glides around in the style of a Jeeves/Lecter hybrid, wearing a tight-fitting outfit apparently made out of nylon, and in which he appears as flat-fronted in the trouser department as Barbies boyfriend Ken. And Scott himself has again returned to the helm of the Alien franchise he effectively created with the first film in 1979, before ceding directorial control to James Cameron, David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet for the sequels, and others for the novelty bouts with Predator.
This movie is a sequel to the prequel Prometheus, which Scott directed in 2012, a movie that was there supposedly to set up the events in the first film, all about a space quest for mankinds Dniken-esque origin on other planets. Prometheus was set in 2094; this is happening 10 years later, in 2104, with a colonist ship, called the Covenant, travelling for years through space, intended to set up a plantation on a distant world which appears to have the means to support human life. But the terrified crew encounter an awful truth about the Prometheus, as well as a sharp-toothed, uninvited little guest.
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Alien: Covenant trailer
Of course, it is futile to concern yourself with the timeline of the Alien films when effectively they are happening in parallel, not in sequence. They are variations on the same theme. The one change is that Prometheus and Alien: Covenant take the legendary android reveal at the end of the first Alien, and matter-of-factly incorporate it into the prequels as part of the establishing premise.
This film inflates Fassbenders robot role hugely. He first appears in an eerie, interesting opening sequence which the rest of the film cannot really match: a huge white room, with a grand piano, a panorama-window showing some generic alpine landscape, a full-scale model of Michelangelos David, and other high-art objects. There we find Fassbenders robot being questioned by his testy scientist-creator Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) and invited to choose a name for himself, the robot hubristically says David, after the statue.
Key component: Michael Fassbender as David in Alien: Covenant. Photograph: Mark Rogers/Fox Film
Inspired by his own achievement in fashioning this humanoid robot, Weyland himself insists that there must be a creationist meaning and purpose to the universe, a religious theme that is, vaguely, to recur. In Prometheus, Noomi Rapaces space voyager Dr Elizabeth Shaw wore a cross around her neck; in Alien: Covenant a crew member wears the cross of David. It could be a reference to the robots name.
But when we recognise this robot again, on board the Covenant, there are some immediately obvious changes, whose point is revealed later. A freak electrical storm awakens the crew prematurely from their artificial hibernation (rather as in the movie Passengers, with Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, which riffed on the idea slightly more interestingly) and a calamity means that the unlikable rationalist Oram (Billy Crudup) is promoted to captain, with Daniels (Katherine Waterston) and Tennessee (Danny McBride) his immediate subordinates. The catastrophe means his crew are reluctant to resume their deep sleep and instead become fixated on an alternative possibility: another planet, hardly a few weeks voyage from their current position, on which there appears to be evidence of human life and which presents itself as a ready-made new home.
Should they chance everything by going down and taking a look? Should they, much more to the point, walk around down there without their protective helmets and spacesuits on, so that evil spores from little pod-like growths can get into their ear canals and up their noses? Have these people learned nothing at all?
Just as in Prometheus, the action is opened out from the claustrophobic confines of the spaceship to the vast prospects of a distant planet, which turns out to be a mix of Pompeii and Easter Island. There is a wonderful long shot of the explorers in the darkness of this planet, the tiny green beams of their torches darting around them.
The vu has never been so dja: its a greatest-hits compilation of the other Alien films freaky moments. The paradox is that though you are intended to recognise these touches, you wont really be impressed unless you happen to be seeing them for the first time. For all this, the film is very capably made, with forceful, potent performances from Waterston and Fassbender. That franchise title is, however, looking increasingly wrong. It is a bit familiar.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us
The post Alien: Covenant review Ridley Scott’s latest space exploration feels all too familiar appeared first on AlienVirals.com - Latest Alien & UFO News.
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Prototypes and Platinum Blondes
Fandom: The Barbie Movie (2023) Word Count: 1.4k Relationships: Pre-relationship, Margot Robbie's Barbie X Ryan Gosling's Ken Tags: Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Android ! Ken, Engineer ! Barbie, Unresolved Romantic Tension AO3 Link
Description: Mattel is the nation's top robotics company, and their newest line of romantic companion androids (The Ken Line) is officially underway. It's up to Barbie to get the prototype up and running.
Of all the projects Barbie has worked on in her career at Mattel, this one has got to be the most…ambitious. She can do it, of course. One doesn’t just graduate from MIT, land a job at the nation’s most prestigious robotics company, and build their way up to lead hardware engineer without knowing their stuff. But being tasked to help design a prototype for a line of romantic companion androids was definitely not on her bingo card.
She’s engineered plenty of androids that serve different functions in the past decade. Androids that are designed to take on high-risk, hard labor jobs like oil rig operators and nuclear waste managers. This project is a very different direction for the company. Barbie has to admit, it’s been a daunting task. She’s used to coding and programming androids for physical tasks. Designing an android with an identity, complete with flaws and skills and hobbies, is an entirely different ballpark.
The android’s factory name is K-0080. It’s printed on the bottom of his left foot and a manual on/off which is disguised as a birthmark on the base of his neck. He is the first of his kind, a prototype for what Mattel hopes to be their most commercially successful android line yet. The Ken Line. Ken because, apparently, Kenneth means “good-looking.” Not Barbie’s first choice. He’s been officially powered on for just shy of forty-eight hours now. Enough time to test out his primary functions, sensory motors, and reflexes. That’s the most fun part for Barbie when it comes to engineering. She likes to pretend she’s in a game show called “Can the robot do the thing?” Can he button up his own shirt? Can he do ten jumping jacks in a row? Can he walk in a straight line all while touching his nose with his pointer finger?
In K-0080’s case, the answer is a resounding yes.
Right now he sits behind her on an examination table in the testing lab. He looks around curiously while swinging one of his legs like a little kid. That is kind of what he is right now. He has been programmed with the basics: speaking and understanding English fluently, reading and writing, mathematics. But that’s about it. Barbie glances over her shoulder to look at him. His face is cycling through a series of expressions like he is trying them on his face for the first time. Finally he settles on one that mimics confusion.
Barbie has to admit, Gloria didn’t cut any corners with designing the android’s physical features. There’s a reason she is the head of the visual design department. The androids Barbie has made in the past have been humanoid, but their primary function was labor, not aesthetics. Most of the time they were missing key human attributes like hair and skin. But not K-0080. He looks more human than some actual people Barbie has met in real life.
It is obvious that Gloria put an immense amount of attention to detail into this prototype. There is thought and care with every eyelash and freckle on the android’s face. A conscious decision was made on the exact shade of platinum blonde for his hair. He has a lean muscular build which suggests athleticism, but the lack of calluses on his hands indicate that he doesn’t get his physique from weight lifting. For god’s sake, K-0080 has pores.
K-0080 catches her looking at him. He hasn’t been programmed with his full personality yet, so he doesn’t startle or get shy. He just maintains unabashed eye contact and asks, “What are you doing now?”
“I’m finishing up the transfer for your identity software so you aren’t just a one-dimensional love-bot,” Barbie tells him as if he will understand a single thing about what she is talking about.
“So cool,” K-0080 responds. She does a double take at the hint of Californian accent in there.
It’s a very personal response for an android that is still only half-done. Did Kate put some of his traits in the original data upload without telling anyone? Barbie wouldn't put it past her to sneak something like that in there, after all everyone in the office calls her Weird Barbie because of their similar faces and her eccentric behavior. The two of them just pretend they don't know it.
When the android doesn’t react further, she returns to her computer, skimming for any errors that cropped up in the download for Kate’s code. And the code is extensive. Mattel spared no expense in polling target audiences for the type of “romantic companion” they wanted. They conducted numerous surveys on personality traits, hobbies, and qualities that people found most attractive. Even K-0080’s voice was hand picked. Barbie does not envy the poor intern who had to marathon hundreds of romantic comedies to create the perfect vocal blend of male Hollywood heartthrobs. What the company has settled on is this: K-0080 is to be a beach-loving, optimistic, charmingly awkward boyfriend-type with a soft spot. People want a companion they can fall in love with, but not one that is so perfectly superior that it ruins the illusion.
With Gloria's expert eye and Kate's creative genius, all Barbie has to do is put the puzzle pieces together. She isn’t the romantic type, honestly, but it’s a simple task with all the heavy lifting already done.
She sets the data files to transfer. With a sigh she stands up out of her desk chair and stretches. Her joints all pop in succession, an embarrassing reminder that this last month and a half she has been spending more time sitting at her computer designing a robot with a fake social life than she has being, you know, actually social. K-0080 tracks her movements with his eyes. They’re a shade of blue that is entrancing without tipping into uncanny valley territory.
If the trial period goes well, orders for more Ken Line androids will go into effect. That means different skins, personality traits, heights, weights, every customizable quality will be on the table. More variation means more opportunity to widen the customer demographic. She approaches the android and considers this potential future. Will K-0080 be the only one of his line to look like this? Or will people love him so much they’ll want an exact replica, leading to advertisements and billboards showcasing identical androids? She walks in a slow circle around him. What will become of this model specifically in the grand scheme of things?
When she stops in front of him again, K-0080 smiles up at her with a dreamy sort of affectionate expression. Barbie can’t help the heat that rushes to her face. How has he mastered that already?
The moment breaks with the chiming of her computer. Data Transfer Complete the screen reads. Below that, a horizontal bar is filled in with a hot pink color, and to the right end of the bar is a 100% symbol. Barbie removes the microchip from her computer and brings it over to K-0080. She carefully folds back the cartilage of his right ear to expose the port in his skull. It’s a lot like an SD card for a camera, or a hard drive for a computer. The android is a vessel that stores information, and that information is transferred from the microchip. K-0080 has the capacity to learn dozens of languages, skills, and even fabricated memories and storylines. Kate calls it a “roleplay treasure trove.”
She steps back after inserting the microchip, then walks around so that she faces the android once more. K-0080’s face shifts to a neutral expression as he absorbs the influx of new information. A silver loading symbol replaces the irises around his pupils, gradually filling up with the same pink color as on the computer. When it is full, his irises fade back to their regular ocean-blue.
This project has been years in the making. Years of blueprinting, engineering, researching, and it all comes down to this. The gravity of the situation is enough to make Barbie’s heart race.
“Alright, let’s test you out. What’s your name?” Barbie asks.
K-0080 seems to ponder the question, as if he is searching through his internal database for the correct response. His reaction time will get quicker with time, Barbie knows. He’ll need to go on trial runs. Mattel will be bringing in real people to go on “dates” with the first ever romantic companion so he can get real world experience. K-0080's code grants him the ability not only to gain knowledge from a single data transfer, but to pick up knowledge firsthand. The possibilities are literally endless. As if he is fully aware of this unprecedented accomplishment, K-0080’s lips stretch into a confident grin.
“My name is Ken.”
#yes maddy writes#I DO NOT UNDERSTAND SCIENCE FICTION OR ROBOTICS DOES IT SHOW#archive of our own#fan fiction#ryan gosling's ken#Margot robbie's barbie#the barbie movie#barbie & her android boyfriend ken
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I've been writing angst for several days and needed to break up the fog with something happy and silly, so here is a rough draft snippet of part 2 to my Barbie & Her Android Boyfriend Ken AU:
~~
“This is a bad idea,” Barbie says. “This is a bad, horrible idea.”
On the screen of her phone, Kate shakes her head. “What are you talking about? This is a great idea! It’s the perfect opportunity to see what he can do!”
Barbie paces the length of the hallway with her phone in hand. She takes a peek through the cracked open door to her home office. Ken is still in there, spinning slowly in her desk chair and staring up at the ceiling. He’s been at it for ten straight minutes, and she wonders if dizziness was left out of his programming.
She returns to pacing outside the room. “I can’t bring the world’s most expensive android prototype to Gloria’s vow renewal ceremony!”
“Well you should’ve thought that through before you brought the world’s most expensive android prototype home with you,” Kate reminds her.
She’s right. Barbie knows she’s right. But she’d let her curiosity get the best of her. Ken had been online for three full weeks now, and so far Mattel had only let him stretch his legs to go between the showroom—a large windowless space designed to look like a standard apartment’s living room, complete with a double sided mirror so executives and engineers could look in without being noticed—and the engineering lab. Ken wasn’t being used to his fullest potential, and none of the executives would listen to Barbie whenever she brought up bringing in real subjects for Ken to interact with.
They were wasting him. They were impeding his progress, and she had no idea why. She’d tried keeping him distracted for a while, going so far as working overtime just to sit with Ken in the showroom watching television with him. Gloria had even been kind enough to bring some board games from home to test out Ken’s reaction speed. They all learned the hard way through several games of Uno and Candyland just how much of a competitive streak the android really had.
But as the third week of movie marathons and board game nights came to a close, Ken suddenly expressed something to her that just about broke her heart.
“Barbie, I’m bored.”
So that’s how she ended up here, at home with a platinum blonde android sitting at her desk. It had been embarrassingly easy to get him into her car. He could walk by himself, and didn’t hesitate to follow her to the parking garage. All he needed was a hoodie and some sunglasses to conceal his face from the security cameras, and then they were free. She had every intention of bringing him back, of course. Just after he got a little outdoor time. It was for research!
“It’s for research!” She says aloud.
“Exactly! What better way to research his capabilities than by putting him in a social gathering setting?” Kate’s phone shakes as she props it up against something and leans back on her couch. She whistles sharply and Tanner, her golden retriever, jumps up on the couch for a snuggle.
“Listen,” Kate starts. “Allow me to impose upon you some Weird Barbie Wisdom.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call yourself that,” Barbie laments. Kate waves her comment away with a dismissive hand.
“You know just as much as I do that Ken needs practice. The investors are going to want to see him in action sooner rather than later, and with the way things are going he won’t be ready. All of our hard work is going to go down the drain if we do things by Mattel’s book.”
Kate pauses to fend off Tanner when he stands on his hind legs to lick her face.
“The executives are a bunch of nepo-babies who don’t know their head from their ass when it comes to robotics. You gotta start taking risks.”
“But what if something goes wrong? What if Ken isn’t ready to be around all those people so soon?” Barbie bites her thumbnail subconsciously.
A bitter tang hits her tongue and she purses her lips in disgust. She drops her hand back down to her side. Of all the times she’d tried to stop biting her nails, it had been Ken who really got it to stick. Last week while they’d been watching Bring It On, one of her favorite so-bad-it’s-good comfort films, he noticed her nibbling at her thumb. She did it when she was stressed, bored, or deep in thought. At that point her poor thumb was almost completely bitten down to the skin, leaving it red and raw looking.
Ken had gently grasped her wrist and brought her hand down, interlacing their fingers. She’d turned to him, caught off guard by how careful his touch was.
“You shouldn’t do that. It looks like it hurts.” He’d told her.
Two days later when she came into work, he’d been so excited to tell her that he and Gloria had spent all weekend looking up ways to quit the habit of nail biting. He recommended she get bitter tasting nail polish so that she would no longer get satisfaction from biting, even going as far as to spend ten minutes breaking down all the best brands by price, brand, and product reviews.
“If the whole thing goes tits up, you’ll have me and Gloria there as backup. We’ll get him out of there with some excuse about food poisoning or being late to a self tanning appointment, whatever.”
Kate scratches the underside of Tanner’s chin, and the dog starts kicking his back leg so hard against the couch cushion Barbie can hear the dull thumpthumpthump of his paw through the speakers of her phone.
“But I’m not worried. We did a great job with Ken’s programming. He’ll be a natural.”
Kate’s general “it’ll all work out” attitude always had a way of convincing Barbie into things she didn’t want to do. She has a feeling this was going to be no different. She sighs, but before she can respond with another excuse not to go through with this, Ken speaks from inside the office.
“Barbie? Who are you talking to?”
Barbie pushes open the door and enters the office. She turns her phone around to show Ken her screen. “I’m on a call with Kate from work.”
Ken gets up to see her phone better. When he’s closer, his face lights up in recognition and he grabs the phone from Barbie’s hand.
“Hi, Kate from work!” He exclaims excitedly, his wave at the camera a blur of motion. “Love the new mohawk.”
“Thanks, Ken!” Kate responds just as excitedly. “I was thinking about dying it a crazy color. Maybe half purple and pink, or ombre.”
As Ken and Kate become invested in the topic of hair color options, Barbie shakes her head and takes a seat at her computer desk. Looks like she’s going to have to go shopping for men’s formal wear.
#yes maddy writes#fan fiction#ryan gosling's ken#margot Robbie's barbie#the barbie movie#barbie & her android boyfriend ken
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Thinking of Android ! Ken going to a pride parade with Barbie, Gloria, and Weird Barbie. They run into some counter protesters raving transphobic shit and Ken stands just beyond the barrier watching them curiously, learning and observing.
One of the counter protesters, a real pearl-clutching Karen, looks at Ken, this handsome manly man dressed in his iconic jean vest with pride pins on the collar. She says "God gave you a penis! Don't rebuke the lord's gifts!"
And Ken is still a prototype android mind you. He looks like a human in every way that matters, but the engineers didn't bother with details like genitalia. And since he is still pretty new to some of the lingo and topics of conversation in society, he doesn’t really understand.
He was programmed not to lie to humans so he just plainly tells the Karen like it is obvious: "I don't have a penis."
The Karen is so apalled she is stunned into silence as Ken is dragged away by his human friends to go do pride flag face painting.
#no cops at pride just android ken#the barbie movie#ryan gosling's ken#head canons#barbie & her android boyfriend ken
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Alien: Covenant review Ridley Scott’s latest space exploration feels all too familiar
Scotts sequel to the Prometheus prequel is capably made but plays like a greatest-hits compilation of the original films freakiest moments
Its back, with its vicious little fangs, squidgily formless body and nasty receding skull that swoops and tapers down the back of its neck, like the helmet of an Olympic cyclist. Ridley Scotts parasitic space alien has returned for this watchable if unoriginal sci-fi thriller though it doesnt grow all that much these days. Michael Fassbender is back, too, as the creepy deadpan robot who glides around in the style of a Jeeves/Lecter hybrid, wearing a tight-fitting outfit apparently made out of nylon, and in which he appears as flat-fronted in the trouser department as Barbies boyfriend Ken. And Scott himself has again returned to the helm of the Alien franchise he effectively created with the first film in 1979, before ceding directorial control to James Cameron, David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet for the sequels, and others for the novelty bouts with Predator.
This movie is a sequel to the prequel Prometheus, which Scott directed in 2012, a movie that was there supposedly to set up the events in the first film, all about a space quest for mankinds Dniken-esque origin on other planets. Prometheus was set in 2094; this is happening 10 years later, in 2104, with a colonist ship, called the Covenant, travelling for years through space, intended to set up a plantation on a distant world which appears to have the means to support human life. But the terrified crew encounter an awful truth about the Prometheus, as well as a sharp-toothed, uninvited little guest.
Alien: Covenant trailer: Ridley Scott returns with sci-fi thriller
Of course, it is futile to concern yourself with the timeline of the Alien films when effectively they are happening in parallel, not in sequence. They are variations on the same theme. The one change is that Prometheus and Alien: Covenant take the legendary android reveal at the end of the first Alien, and matter-of-factly incorporate it into the prequels as part of the establishing premise.
This film inflates Fassbenders robot role hugely. He first appears in an eerie, interesting opening sequence which the rest of the film cannot really match: a huge white room, with a grand piano, a panorama-window showing some generic alpine landscape, a full-scale model of Michelangelos David, and other high-art objects. There we find Fassbenders robot being questioned by his testy scientist-creator Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) and invited to choose a name for himself, the robot hubristically says David, after the statue.
Key component: Michael Fassbender as David in Alien: Covenant. Photograph: Mark Rogers/Fox Film
Inspired by his own achievement in fashioning this humanoid robot, Weyland himself insists that there must be a creationist meaning and purpose to the universe, a religious theme that is, vaguely, to recur. In Prometheus, Noomi Rapaces space voyager Dr Elizabeth Shaw wore a cross around her neck; in Alien: Covenant a crew member wears the star of David. It could be a reference to the robots name.
But when we recognise this robot again, on board the Covenant, there are some immediately obvious changes, whose point is revealed later. A freak electrical storm awakens the crew prematurely from their artificial hibernation (rather as in the movie Passengers, with Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, which riffed on the idea slightly more interestingly) and a calamity means that the unlikable rationalist Oram (Billy Crudup) is promoted to captain, with Daniels (Katherine Waterston) and Tennessee (Danny McBride) his immediate subordinates. The catastrophe means his crew are reluctant to resume their deep sleep and instead become fixated on an alternative possibility: another planet, hardly a few weeks voyage from their current position, on which there appears to be evidence of human life and which presents itself as a ready-made new home.
Should they chance everything by going down and taking a look? Should they, much more to the point, walk around down there without their protective helmets and spacesuits on, so that evil spores from little pod-like growths can get into their ear canals and up their noses? Have these people learned nothing at all?
Just as in Prometheus, the action is opened out from the claustrophobic confines of the spaceship to the vast prospects of a distant planet, which turns out to be a mix of Pompeii and Easter Island. There is a wonderful long shot of the explorers in the darkness of this planet, the tiny green beams of their torches darting around them.
The vu has never been so dja: its a greatest-hits compilation of the other Alien films freaky moments. The paradox is that though you are intended to recognise these touches, you wont really be impressed unless you happen to be seeing them for the first time. For all this, the film is very capably made, with forceful, potent performances from Waterston and Fassbender. That franchise title is, however, looking increasingly wrong. It is a bit familiar.
This article was amended on 7 May 2017 to correct a reference from the cross of David to the star of David.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us
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