I know they don't exist, but damn do I hate and fear
those creatures
dir: Fede Alvarez
2024
I have to say I am quite surprised by how entertaining this flick is. I say that because I feel like the two films before it, being Alien: Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, I am pretty sure, were made to leach all hope and life from those watching, and to convince us all we’re total fools for expecting anything good to come of any franchise ever again.
That’s a bit harsh. Let me say instead that there were a lot of ideas in those two Ridley Scott directed films that didn’t sit well with me and just annoyed me, more than anything. They felt like an elaboration on themes that felt unnecessary and unwarranted, and I couldn’t imagine the person who cared about any of it who wasn’t Ridley Scott. Whatever it was that made people battling the xenomorphs in the very first two films enjoyable to watch, was entirely absent for me in films that argued that their origins, actually, were because of a bad robot and a race of albinos with a magical evil liquid that kills things or makes them more evil.
This flick perversely situates itself somewhere in what ends up feeling like the past. It’s set some time between Alien and Aliens, I think, with the deliberate aesthetics to match. And as the setting is a space station divided into two halves, one of those halves matches the aesthetics of Alien, so it looks gritty and industrial (with an orange gel / filter to match, in terms of cinematography), and the other half is blueish, and looks a bit shinier (to match some of the look of the James Cameron helmed Aliens.
In a similar manner, bits and pieces across many of the films are picked up and slotted in to areas, kinda like a jumble of Lego plot points, or a Tetris-like melange where the familiar is woven into a newish pattern. Generally, or when done by hacks, this would strike me as lazy filmmaking. But I genuinely think Fede Alvarez and the screenwriter do what they do adeptly, with known / familiar material, in a similarly competent manner like they did with Evil Dead Rise. It’s using established elements well but not slavishly adhering to scenes and shots like too much variance would be blasphemy.
And again, just like in Evil Dead Rise, there is practically no mercy shown to anyone. You think “surely they won’t kill…”, and they’re like “of course we’ll kill them, we’re looking forward to it”.
Since it’s a prequel sequel though, our assumptions should be along the lines of “of course everyone’s going to die, they prefer starting with a clean slate each time”.
Along with the xenomorphs wanting to shred anyone they see, or the acid blood, or those facehuggers that want to impregnate people with their unholy seed (so, body horror – fear of violation on top of regular bloody horror), there are also the elements related to how androids ultimately just want to kill people, to keep everything in line with the previous films. The last two movies had an evil robot and a neutral robot both played by Michael Fassbender, which pointed to humanity’s ultimate doom from these creatures arising because Daddy didn’t love him(?) But this flick works differently, making again an android character central to the narrative, being Andy (David Jonsson), but making him a far more sympathetic character.
I don’t think Andy is the main character, unlike whoever were the main characters in Prometheus/Covenant who weren’t played by Fassbender who nevertheless didn’t do anything meaningful and didn’t survive anyway, but Andy is certainly not a baby to be put in the corner. He plays a crucial role in the film, like artificial humanoids always seem to play a critical role in these films, mostly because they turn evil, but occasionally because they do good and save people (RIP Bishop from Aliens!!!)
At the beginning of the story Andy’s depicted as being like a brother to one of the main characters, albeit a differently abled one. Rain (Cailee Spaeny) was born at this work colony called Jackson’s Star and has never seen this planet’s sun. Her father, before his death, reprogrammed a found defective robot, hence, Andy. Rain treats him like he’s a being she cares about, but everyone else treats him like shit. He stutters and cowers as circumstances require. He was programmed to always do what’s in Rain’s best interests.
Rain had been on some kind of work contract where she had been promised that when she’d completed a certain amount of hours she’d be released and would be able to go somewhere else. However, the star spanning corporation of these films, being Weyland-Yutani, is not known for its caring, sharing organisational culture, or its adherence to workplace health and safety legislation. No, what it’s best known for is cruelly sacrificing employees and humans in general in the pursuit of endless profitability. So Rain is told, sucks to be you, keep working, now go into the mines and die like your parents did.
Rain does not like this idea. She dreams of finally getting off world, going somewhere else, and living some other kind of life, presumably with Andy by her side. Some friends of hers hear about some abandoned space station that’s somehow entered the planet’s orbit, from which they can steal some precious cryostasis supplies, without which they couldn’t survive the journey to elsewhere.
I wonder if absolutely everything will go wrong, monsters will be unleashed, people will ignore reasonable safety measures and doom themselves to a horrible fate?
Unlike the other two stupid recent films, this feels like is has a reason to exist, in that, it has characters just trying to survive in an indifferent and cold universe, independently of the xenomorph menace that wants to either eat them or procreate with them or both. But this screenplay, which is too clever by half, does what it does, as in tells the story as to whether Rain and Andy survive or not, by remixing so many elements from the previous films, all of them. It doesn’t bother to strike out boldly in new and unfamiliar directions, either conceptually or visually. It piles call back atop call back, and lets you decide if it’s doing it elegantly enough or not.
As far as call backs go, the only one that really made me roll my eyes so hard I gave myself a headache was when a certain character says “get away from her, you bitch”, in a situation where perhaps it made sense, but it felt like they looked through the entire film searching for the perfect moment to insert this classic needle drop, and it was always going to feel painfully inorganic. It’s dumb, but it’s not fatal.
I was surprised by how much I cared as to whether Rain and Andy made it through. Also, due to the magic of technology, there’s Before Andy, and After Andy, when he accidentally gets himself a repair upgrade, and a change of directive, once Weyland-Yutani infect his programming.
Let’s just say original Andy and Corporate Andy are very different beings, and the contrast in the performance is sensational. I don’t think I’ve seen this chap in anything before, but from now on, I will keep a close eye on him. His Corporate Andy is chilling, and he doesn’t even change that much, but it’s more than enough for us to worry about Rain’s long term survival prospects.
There is almost too much in the flick, with ticking time bomb scenarios piled on top of other timers raising the risk factors to unbearable levels, but for me it mostly remained compelling throughout, even as I cursed at the screen every time someone did something dumb that made things worse.
But that’s, ultimately, what these flicks are about: We are at the mercy of these malevolent beings (being the corporations), and if we make it out alive it will be both a bloody miracle and because we did slightly less dumb things than the people around us.
I haven’t even mentioned a certain role that took me by complete surprise, and what a shock it is to see a character or a face as represented (admittedly by CGI) of a beloved actor dead these many years. Ian Holm was a lovely man and an interesting actor, whether he was playing Napoleon, an android called Ash in the first Alien film, or a hobbit in the Lord of the Rings films. Seeing his face again… hearing an approximation of his voice again… it’s uncanny, and strange, but not completely unwelcome.
I don’t know where to take a stand on this issue – I assume that they had to get his family’s permission to use his likeness, and I assume they were compensated, but it doesn’t bode well for humanity. If no-one can ever trust what the Weyland-Yutani corporation does in these films, because they always do the worst thing for humanity, how can we trust the contemporary Weyland-Yutanis of Hollywood or Silicon Valley to do the right thing with these digitally immortal likenesses of actors down the track? Where will it end? If we believe the premises of these films, it does not bode well for us…
Cailee Spaeny managed to be in two of the standout flicks of the year (even though it seems like people have already forgotten about Civil War), and I am sure she will keep get great work as the years roll on. I have no doubt she will be in the recently announced sequel, though, given how they treat survivors in these flicks (remember what they did to Hicks and Newt at the beginning of Alien 3? You bastards!) that could be a fate worse than death that awaits her character.
She’s plucky and resourceful, and she’s reminiscent enough of Ripley without being a direct homage, and she and Andy display one of the only decent, healthy relationships that’s been in any of these films.
Alien: Romulus: Surprisingly not utter crap
8 times who knew the third best Alien film would come out 28 years after Aliens out of 10
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“I can't lie about your chances. But you have my sympathies.” – at least we have that - Alien: Romulus
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