Alien: Romulus

I have another piece for my collection of Andy's slow-circuit films. You know what they should call the stepbrother Rain? Rain Man. The concept feels schizophrenic, just like an android whose control chip keeps switching back and forth. Set between the first and second installments, Fede Alvarez wanted to cover everything up to Covenant, but at the same time, he didn’t want to suppress his own talent. The result? A generic installment that just tortures the franchise further. Similarly, Benjamin Wallfisch's music, which borrows from Goldsmith and Horner, suddenly slams in something akin to a romantic ballad. Everything clashes horribly, and I don’t just mean the new Vasquez with an endless magazine, but rather the attempt to please everyone, including the corporate producers. This is partly explained by the fact that while the average age of the crew on the Nostromo was 39.7 years, here it’s 24.4. A junior with a PC game face and a body drenched in 33% cream, naturally, doesn’t fit into the statistics. (21/08/2024)

It is necessary to make full use of resources obtained at great cost, even if the result is only some kind of bastardised mutant. This is true for Weyland-Yutani and its real-life equivalent, The Walt Disney Company. The most surprising aspect of Alien: Romulus is its anti-originality. This time around, the Disneyfication of the franchise doesn’t have the feel of a refresh with new characters (as was the case with Star Wars: The Force Awakens), nor does it work as cultish fan-service along the lines of the serial clones from Marvel. Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues wilfully turned out a CGI remix of the Alien franchise’s greatest hits, which lends itself to a game of bingo on the theme of “which cult scene, popular one-liner or iconic shot from the preceding films will be paraphrased in the next scene”. The charm (and uniqueness) of the original Alien tetralogy consists in the fact that it comprises diametrically different and stylishly and supremely distinctive films (I won’t even say anything bad about the fantastically crackpot fourth one. Alien: Romulus is only a derivative, or rather the film equivalent of an Alien-themed ride at Disneyworld – we passively pass by a series of well-known scenes that are impressively yet lifelessly rendered and something occasionally amuses or scares us, but we walk away completely unmoved at the end. Though Prometheus was silly nonsense and elicited exasperation and hatred, it is still better than this precisely crafted definition of the term “content” from the vocabulary of media corporations. (15/08/2024)

Fede Álvarez, director of the best Evil Dead and Don't Breathe, one of the best original modern genre films, delivers for the third time (I’m ignoring the existence of The Girl in the Spider's Web). But flawless perfection it is not this time. He does well what he does best: offering an intense horror ride full of attractions that slowly makes it impossible to breathe. But what I have the biggest problem with regarding the new Alien is time and space. Once it gets going, it feels insanely fast-paced. For one thing, the development of the monsters is absurdly fast, and for another, I would have liked the human characters to have time to pause for a moment and let it sink in how much shit they've got themselves into. And the space, I found the action awkwardly cut at times in terms of orientation. Especially the elevator scene and its ending I didn't get at all, maybe a chunk of the film had to be missing there (?). The much criticised fanservice didn't bother me, or rather I didn't pay much attention to it and it didn't actively distract me – though I have the "advantage" in this that I very rarely watch films repeatedly, so I certainly don't know any of the Alien movies by heart and can't quote from them. I found all but one moment (at the end of the aforementioned elevator scene) unworthy. The criticised digicam is totally fine, I really don’t know what the problem is, it looks completely appropriate given the state "it" is in right now. The final ten minutes are easily the best part of the film; and the main pair of characters realistically have a lot more charisma than anyone who came after Ripley in the franchise. 8/10 (16/08/2024)

A pop horror flick that appeals to Generation Z and won't offend the oldies. On the positive side, I'll take the superb and highly talented Cailee Spaeny and the fantastic last half hour, and on the negative side, the simple fact that the other teens are all interchangeable, I didn't find my way to them at all and didn't care if the monster made a sandwich out of them. Yes, it's nice to look at, it has the hallmark of the 70s technique Ridley Scott established in his masterpiece, the atmosphere is nicely depressing and claustrophobic, but for the first two-thirds the film painfully lacks in any kind of tension, because apart from Cailee I - as I've already written - hadn't built up any rapport with the characters and consequently didn't experience the threat of the facehuggers as such at all. Fortunately, there are enough references and allusions to previous episodes, and as a connoisseur I appreciate how "disjointed" it is in that respect: the first third is slowburn old Alien, the second the warlike Aliens, and the last one is a return to the first one, with Fede Álvarez literally quoting it. So yeah, I actually had a decent time, and since Álvarez unloaded a few scenes I hadn’t seen in this genre before, I give the film four spits of acid. (19/08/2024)

A journey into famous waters that I never really wanted to take. I never believed Fede Alvarez had it in him to take on a legend of these dimensions, I didn't believe in the much-trumpeted genre setting of thoroughbred gore, but when critics, viewers, and box offices scoffed at Ridley Scott's misunderstood Alien: Covenant years ago, there was probably no other path left to go. And yet it works – and the combination of modern editing with dirty and oily technique is aggressive and beautiful from the very first minute. The aggressive creature is given enough space, the human crew makes mistakes that are understandable yet still manage clever and logical decisions at key moments. There is so much winking at the past that I was daydreaming, knowing that with a bit of exaggeration I could imagine I was watching Alien 1.5. Not to mention that finally, after years of waiting, the lines drawn from the classic tetralogy and the mythology of Prometheus have finally been combined, which is a gift that I never expected to receive. Thanks to this enrichment, Alien: Romulus is truly more than just a fun horror film, nor is it merely a side chapter the series could have done without. It's a reward for those who never completely gave up on Alien (and who can see beyond the first twist and don't mind that the script plays a bit subversively with them with iconic lines). I understand the arguments about the polarizing final chapter; without it, I would be happier than I am with it now. On the other hand, I must applaud the courage that even the brave and visually deconstructed genre film Alien: Resurrection was lacking almost thirty years ago. The fact that the result of such an experiment did not meet my expectations is my problem. Everyone who sees the saga as a whole and not just as a space for the eternal (and nowadays really endlessly tiresome) argument about which of the first two installments is better should also give it a try. (16/08/2024)