Weekend watches:
Álvarez, 2024
What a frustrating watch.
First off, I think Fede Álvarez is a skilled director. He clearly has vision and a deep understanding of cinema, and I think he has been able to examine past works of other directors while understanding what made their films unique and special. He has done this wile simultaneously developing his own style, which i think is apparent in his work on the Evil Dead series and now Alien.
The first 45 minutes or so of
Alien: Romulus showed a creative reverence for both
Alien and
Aliens, with meticulous attention paid to the set and sound design, the score, and the earlier films of the series. While some shots were a bit too on the nose, I took them more as dedicated homage and I was impressed at how seamlessly Alvarez's film felt like a natural extension of those earlier films. If only he could have maintained this restraint for the entire runtime.
I understand his style is that of a measured suspense that gets broken up by intense scenes of violence and action, and this film is no exception, but one of the key aspects of the early
Alien films is that each of those films spent time developing and building an affinity for the entire cast - a world weary group of space truckers in the first film, and a crack team of seasoned space marines in the second. I guess it just goes to show the skill of both Ridley Scott and James Cameron in the handling of character development, as both the cast of
Alien and
Aliens ended up being memorable to the point of being almost iconic. Each and every character in
Alien, and a vast majority of the characters in
Aliens were fully fleshed out characters played by skilled actors who delivered fantastic performances. They also reacted to situations in a very human way, and their actions made sense in the situations into which they were plunged. While Romulus is fully dedicated to capturing the essence of world-building and sound design, and strikes a great balance between the dread of the first film and the ball out action of the second, it falls flat on its face(hugger) as far as characters are concerned.
Alien: Romulus is perhaps the worst in the franchise in this regard -
Alien: Covenant is also weak here, but at least you had characters like David and Tennessee that spring to mind immediately when considering that film.
Prometheus had quite a few memorable characters, even if a majority of them were dumber than a bag of hammers. Romulus really only tries to develop two of the main characters, and I think it succeeds in really only having one good character: David Johnson's Andy. Sadly, Andy's story has been done to death in science fiction - that of the artificial being struggling against conflicting programming - so he is ultimately kind of an also-ran, even if the actor delivers a good performance. I think using such a young cast was a mistake, even though I understand the strategy of the studio here. This film has the weakest cast of all the
Alien films, but I was willing to forgive this if the film managed to deliver a compelling story through to the end. It did not.
Once we get to the second half, which admittedly has some stellar visuals and set pieces, we end up with what felt like a re-telling of the
Alien: Resurrection story. The film falls back on the unwanted pregnancy themes of the first film while sort of mirroring the finale of Resurrection, which itself lifted the final scene of Alien...and on and on. I mean, how many times are they going to do this? Just reshoot the same scenes over and over? I don't want to get too far into spoilers, but the final monster in
Romulus had me shaking my head and wishing for the film to end; the massive space station plummeting down into the rings of the planet was an apt allegory for the trajectory of this film. The icing on the turd cake was a half-hearted delivery of a now infamous line from
Aliens, which it seemed like the actor himself cringed while saying.
Where does this all leave us? With a middling film that looks fantastic, is well-directed, but is poorly written and played out by a weak cast; an overall disappointing experience, with this film landing down in the bottom half of the franchise as far as quality. Not as laughably bad as
Covenant, and maybe not as dumb as
Prometheus, but still pretty bad. I am sure we will get another
Alien film a few years from now, as the studio continues to resurrect the corpse of the Xenomorph.
Craven, 1996
Wes Craven's love letter to horror films still holds up today. The opening is still one of the best in the genre, and the film is entertaining from start to finish, even generating some fun laugh-out-loud comedy as it moves along. It deconstructs the slasher genre while simultaneously creating a memorable and iconic killer in Ghostface. The film has spawned decades of sequels, reboots, parodies, and copycats, with each one attempting to put a new spin on the meta-analysis of horror tropes and cinema overall with some being more successful than others. This will always be the OG, though - it's steeped in its 90s-ness, and always manages to transport me back to those more carefree times.
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