A great thing about the early entries in the Alien franchise is that they are exciting and scary good fun. Alien: Covenant is too obsessed with its own mythology to be much of either. Director Ridley Scott had the perfect opportunity to pull a George Miller. That filmmaker revived his Mad Max series with the fresh and inventive Fury Road. Miller wasn’t concerned with what he did in the past. With Fury Road, he gleefully started from scratch, and as a result produced a rip-roaring action film, one of the best of the decade. Alien: Covenant is the first true Alien movie in 20 years. Scott’s 2012 film Prometheus was a sort of spiritual sequel to the franchise, taking place in the same universe, but centered on its distant origins. Covenant is a direct sequel to Prometheus. Instead of surprising us with the possibilities of a clean start, Scott and his writers, John Logan and Dante Harper, give us that sinking feeling with Covenant that this is someplace we’ve already been.
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Sausage Party is about as shallow and lazy as comedy scripts come. The cleverest thing about the movie is the restricted red band trailer. It’s quite a shock to see that trailer for the first time. In the first twenty seconds, you’re led to believe the movie is another Pixar-like children’s animated movie. This time it’s food that is being anthropomorphized, and the adventure will begin when the heroes are chosen by humans at the grocery store for a life beyond the walls of the supermarket.
The (admittedly hilarious) shock comes when the woman who bought the groceries starts to peel a potato in front of the rest of the food. Like the humans in this sort of Pixar movie, she’s oblivious to the sentient nature of our heroes, and she can’t hear the horrific cries of the potato as he screams, “Jesus! Fuck!” After that initial shock, you realize this is one of the most sexually explicit, most foul-mouthed animated movie ever made, and that there’s not much else to Sausage Party.
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