12 Years a Slave (2013)

Harrowing biographical drama directed by Steve McQueen and based on the 1853 memoir of Solomon Northup. 

Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Northup, delivering a remarkably potent and sensitive performance as a man trying to retain his dignity and composure as he is systematically put through hell.

Kidnapped in Washington DC and sold into slavery, Northup is transferred between cruel owners. We see him treated in an especially barbaric manner by sadistic plantation owner Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender).

It’s difficult to endure in places – especially when Northup is forced into acts of cruelty against his fellow slaves – but Ejiofor is so compelling that you keep watching anyway.

Jane Eyre (2011)

Compelling and powerful adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel, directed by Cary Fukunaga. 

Mia Wasikowska stars in the title role, while Rochester is played by Michael Fassbender. Both of them are absolutely at the top of their game, delivering subtle and nuanced performances. 

There’s something highly believable about it – a gritty realism that’s often lost when revered classics are filmed.

Slow West (2015)

Odd western directed by John Maclean.  

Kodi Smit-McPhee plays a young Scotsman searching for the woman he loves in the American West. He is guided by a bounty hunter played by Michael Fassbender. The premise is good and the two leads are intriguing, but something about the film doesn’t quite work. 

The characters could have been better drawn. Also, the situation didn’t ring true. Would there really have been a bounty in America for a crime committed in Europe? 

It’s not emotionally involving and probably not trying to be, either. There are a couple of welcome flashes of humour, and more of that would have been nice.

Haywire (2012)

Dreadful thriller. 

Private intelligence agent Mallory Kane (a fundamentally miscast Gina Carano) is double-crossed by the people who recruited her, and has to go on the run. 

Directed self-consciously by Steven Soderbergh, it has an excessive use of filters and intrusive “funky” music by David Holmes in place of dialogue. Plus, despite all the fighting (Carano was a mixed martial artist), most of the “action” scenes are surprisingly dull. 

It’s remarkable that big names such as Michael Douglas, Ewan McGregor, Antonio Banderas and Michael Fassbender got themselves involved in such a clichéd mess. The script – what there is of one – is extremely poor. The plotting is confused. The complete lack of a character for the main part is conspicuous. Carano simply doesn’t have the screen presence or acting ability to carry off the lead role. She was better as a supporting character in The Mandalorian, except that Lucasfilm sacked her after she made anti-mask, pro-Trump statements.

There’s literally not one good thing about Haywire – that title bears no relation to anything in the story – except that parts of it are unintentionally funny. The worst film I’ve seen for quite a long time.

The Light Between Oceans (2016)

In the aftermath of World War I, Tom (Michael Fassbender) goes to work on a remote lighthouse on Janus Rock, off the coast of Australia. He marries a local woman (Alicia Vikander) but their wish to have children is thwarted when Isabel twice miscarries. Then they find a baby lost at sea and washed up on their beach. The decision to keep it and pretend it’s their own child rather than report the discovery becomes the defining moment of their lives. 

It’s a harrowing drama that’s brilliantly done. Both of the stars are entirely believable. You can feel their love for one another and their pain when things go wrong. Rachel Weisz is also excellent as the child’s actual mother. 

The landscapes look beautiful, with a special kind of light. The music, by Alexandre Desplat, is fitting for a story that’s – at various points – romantic, moving and emotional.

Centurion (2010)

It’s 117 AD and a Roman centurion in Scotland (Michael Fassbender) has enraged the local Picts. When one of his men kills the Pict leader’s son, the Picts – led by a mute warrior savage called Etain (Olga Kurylenko) – vow to hunt down the remaining Romans.

It’s an exciting drama and the script is fine, but there’s an absurd amount of blood and gore to the point that it’s distracting and almost fetishistic. This also makes the film look trashier than it is.

As in Prometheus and Alien Covenant, Fassbender is strong in the main role and is the best thing about the film. I also liked the kindly witch (Imogen Poots) who cares for him.

The superior 2011 film The Eagle is set about 20 years later and could almost have been designed as a sequel.

Alien Covenant (2017)

Ridley Scott’s follow-up to Prometheus (the second in the Alien prequel saga) is an all-out space-action-horror affair. Michael Fassbender returns to the role of the creepy-genius droid David, but this time the same actor also plays a second, superficially similar droid with different programming.

A quick outline of the premise from Wikipedia: “In 2104, ten years after the Prometheus expedition, the colonization ship Covenant is seven years from reaching planet Origae-6, with 2,000 colonists in stasis and 1,140 human embryos in cold storage. The ship is monitored by Walter, an advanced android model that physically resembles David. When a shockwave damages the ship, Walter reanimates his 14 human crewmates, themselves couples/colonists. Ship's captain Jake Branson dies when his stasis pod malfunctions. While repairing the ship, the crew picks up a transmission of a human voice from a nearby planet, which appears eminently more habitable than Origae-6.”

The crew detour to the appealingly Earth-like planet, which, inevitably, is too good to be true. Before long, everything kicks off. As with Prometheus, the characters take stupid risks by walking around alone and with nothing to protect them. You just know someone is doomed when they wander off saying they will be back in a minute...

But the thrills are considerable. There are some remarkable scenes, such as an attempted take-off of the survivors’ rescue ship with the alien and the heroine Janet Daniels (Katherine Waterston) both clinging on to it. It’s like an action set-piece from a James Bond film, but set on another world and with monsters. The chase scenes in the Covenant corridors are also highly effective, but it lacks the haunting suspense and claustrophobia of the original Alien and is far less scary as a result.

The same themes about God, creation and the meaning of life are explored, but it’s tighter all round than Prometheus. It’s also more ambitious and convincing psychologically. Ridley Scott manages to have his cake and eat it, constructing a philosophical puzzler that simultaneously works as a guns ’n’ gore thriller.

Prometheus (2012)


Ridley Scott’s prequel to his Alien series is a philosophical sci-fi/horror hybrid. It looked beautiful at the cinema – the storm rolling in across an alien landscape was terrifying – but far less so on DVD. My favourite effect is when the investigators throw mapping hover-balls into the alien chambers and the laser/sonar-type scanning technology relays an instant 3D-hologram model of the caves back to the computers aboard the spaceship. Impressive. Plus, the hi-tech “self-surgery” scene is pretty harrowing.

There are some slightly baffling plot elements – why did old man Weyland of the Weyland Corporation have to hide on the mission he himself funded? – possibly to be clarified in subsequent instalments of the series. The film asks some Big Questions. Who are we? Why are we here? What is life? Is a creator the same thing as a god? Can we explain ourselves with science or do we still need religion?

Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender are tremendous in the lead roles. It’s a nice touch that the latter’s character models himself on Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, which he watches while acting as caretaker on the long voyage of the Prometheus.

Guy Pearce is much less convincing as a decrepit old man. Why not simply use an elderly actor? The worst aspect is the bit-part characters, crew members Millburn and Fifield, who are so badly drawn and one-dimensional that you know from the very beginning they will have to meet a horrible, untimely death. This is a weakness of so many films that you would have thought Ridley Scott would have been able to avoid such a standard pitfall. Imagine how much more powerful the story would be if those minor characters convinced you they were real enough to make you care.

Another thing that simply doesn’t work is the lack of precaution the scientists take. They remove their helmets while investigating alien lifeforms, gleefully unconcerned that they may be exposing themselves to something very nasty indeed. Maybe that adds drama but it also makes the plot less convincing, and anything that makes you question the credibility of what you are watching erodes some of the magic.

And finally, maybe I missed something, but if the aliens seeded life on Earth in the first place (as the archaeologists’ discovery of cave paintings seemed to suggest), why did they want to return with their sticky black goo as a toxic weapon? Or will that all be explained in Alien Covenant?

Overall, it’s engaging without being satisfying.