fede alvarez

Alien: Romulus (2024)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

One of the oft-vaunted strengths of the original Alien is that, for most of the film, there’s no clear protagonist. The characters were (also infamously) written gender-blind, and for much of the film’s runtime, everyone gets equal attention, until Ripley is the only character left alive. The sequels that followed that center on Ripley permanently solidified her as the franchise’s final girl, but there’s no foreshadowing in the original text that she’s destined to be so. This is not the case with Alien: Romulus, which opens and closes on a singular woman. That’s not a complaint, or a weakness, but when we’re talking about a film that has largely been a subject of discussion because of what it borrows and homages, I figured I would start out by talking about one of its differences. 

Orphaned Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) lives on a Weyland-Yutani mining colony on a planet that experiences no sunlight. She’s been, for all intents and purposes, an indentured servant on this rock for her entire life, but there’s a literal and metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel in the form of Yvaga, an idyllic world that she intends to set out for as soon as she gets her release, which she has accumulated enough hours of labor to qualify for. Weyland-Yutani’s management, however, forcibly extends her contract citing a lack of additional labor forces. Thus, she’s more malleable than expected when her ex, Tyler (Archie Renaux), approaches her to ask for her help in getting aboard a W-Y spaceship that’s adrift in orbit; you see, Rain isn’t completely alone in the world, as she has an android “brother” named Andy (David Jonsson), whom her father dug out of a recycling heap and reprogrammed to be Rain’s companion and protector. Andy is the key to getting aboard, as he can interface with the ship’s systems and allow Tyler and his merry band aboard so that they can abscond with a set of cryobeds that they can then install aboard their own ship and make their way to Yvaga. Of course, they have no idea that the ship up there isn’t a ship at all, but a research station composed of modules Romulus and Remus, and that Romulus has an unexpected guest in the form of the xenomorph that Ripley ejected into space all the way back in 1979, resuscitated and ready to wreak some havoc. An Alien movie ensues. 

Alien is one of our faves around here. We recently covered Planet of the Vampires on the Lagniappe Podcast specifically in preparation for the release of Romulus, we previously covered a documentary about the original Alien, Brandon has rated and ranked all the previous films in this franchise, I took an absurd amount of umbrage (really—3.5 stars isn’t a bad score) at his review of Covenant, and I wrote an impassioned defense of Covenant and a dismissal of Prometheus. We are freaks, is what I’m saying. I was cautiously optimistic about this one, having been a bigger fan of director Fede Álvarez’s Don’t Breathe than Brandon was, although to my recollection neither of us was impressed by his Evil Dead remake. It’s taken eight years for him to direct another feature, but it was well worth the wait, and when we were talking about our mutual interest in Romulus in the weeks leading up to release, Brandon mentioned that he felt Álvarez’s particular talents were well-suited to an entry in this canon. Some friends and I saw the trailer for this one multiple times over the past few months and we were excited; I felt almost as excited for this one as I did for Prometheus lo these many years ago now. And hey, this one even made me appreciate something introduced in Prometheus for the first time, which is no small feat. 

You may have noticed that I only identified three characters in the paragraph outlining the film’s premise, and although they aren’t the only ones here, this is a pretty sparsely populated movie than most of these, with only five major human characters and an android (or two…). Rain and Andy, as our protagonists, are given the most characterization, while the others are barely sketched out. They’re fodder for the alien, which is pretty standard fare for this franchise at this point, but whereas previous films managed to get away with giving the participants minimal dimension because there were more of them, it’s a flaw in a small cast of actors here. Other than Rain, Andy, and Tyler, we also have Kay’s pregnant sister Kay (Isabela Merced, of Madame Web); pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu), and interstellar chav Bjorn (Spike Fearn). Jonsson’s performance as Andy is fantastic and is one of the highlights of the film, and Spaeny is at turns serviceable and pretty good. I’m torn in my feeling about Fearn, whose performance makes him feel like he’s in a season of Skins that I would get so annoyed by that I’d stop watching. There’s an attempt to make his hostility toward Andy a matter of anti-android prejudice based in personal tragedy (a synthetic made a judgment call to save a dozen people in a mining accident, sacrificing three others, including Bjorn’s family), but he’s still obnoxious and shortsighted. It’s his idiocy that costs most of the others their lives; it’s so satisfying to see the alien kill him that I’m led to believe we’re not supposed to like him, so I guess this makes it a “good” performance, but the CW-caliber of his and Merced’s performances is out of place here. Consider Aliens, in which the marines are all similarly thinly written, but there’s more of them and their oversimplified characteristics—the coward, the macho lady, the veteran, the one with ice water in his veins, the cigar-chomping tough—don’t feel as one-dimensional as Bjorn or Navarro. Here, it’s a detracting factor. 

That’s the most glaring flaw for me in Romulus, and it isn’t enough to turn me against the film, which I really rather liked. The plot is very cleverly constructed, with the need for Andy to use a data chip from one of the androids on the station itself in order to access a part of the station that houses the fuel for the cryopods leading to his personality being corrupted into something more clever and devious. In a franchise where synthetic humanoids can be relied upon to be morally upstanding as much as their creators can (which is to say that they have just as much chance to be good or evil), it’s a refreshing change to have a character whose ethics are completely malleable, with that mercuriality being entirely outside of his control. I’m mixed on That Reprisal (I won’t spoil it here), although I am pleased that there was extensive use of puppetry in the portrayal of the character, even if there was a perhaps-inescapable amount of Uncanny Valley happening. Feelings about digital necromancy aside, it’s effective, and is one of many tethers between this film and the franchise at large that make this feel of a piece with what came before, paying reverent homage rather than performing mere lip service to the films it follows. The xenomorph is the scariest it’s been since the last millennia, and there’s a new monster here that’s also very frightening and creepy. I’ll try to talk around it as much as possible to avoid spoiling it as well, but the final monster (which comes about through application of reverse engineered black goo) is nauseating to look at, a perfect synthesis of H.R. Gieger’s designs for the alien and, well, something you’ll know when you see it. 

All in all, this one is pretty solid. The action sequences are fantastic (there’s a particular standout zero gravity sequence) and build logically upon one another, the introduction of a ticking clock in the form of the station’s deteriorating orbit is well-done and ups the stakes at exactly the right time, and the characters who have characters are interesting. Their interactions feel at home in this universe of films in which the night is dark and full of monsters but in which humans (and maybe androids) can find a connection with each other that makes the dual horrors of late-stage space capitalism and acidic organisms that impregnate and kill seem surmountable, if at great cost. A worthy sequel in an uneven franchise. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Don’t Breathe (2016)

/ swampflix / 22 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

Don’t Breathe is quite the experience. It’s being touted as a return to form for the horror genre, and while it’s certainly memorable, tense, and well-acted, there’s a fine line between well-earned praise and overhype, and the promotion of this film may have already crossed that event horizon.

The film follows Rocky (Jane Levy), Alex (Dylan Minnette), and Money (Daniel Zovatto, of the strangely similar It Follows, but more on that in a moment), three Detroit teenagers whose varying levels of desperation to get out of their dying city lead them to theft. Using Alex’s father’s private security company connections to get in and out of homes without setting off any alarms, the trio land on the idea of robbing the home of a blind military veteran (Stephen Lang) who was given a large civil settlement when the daughter of a rich family was found not guilty of vehicular manslaughter of his only child. Once they make their way inside, they find that the Blind Man is more than they bargained for, and is hiding secrets that they could not have imagined.

I went into the film mostly blind, for lack of a better term. I knew very little about the plot from the outset other than that the film was supposed to be the best horror flick of the year, and I was expecting something along the lines of an inverted Wait Until Dark. I was also excited in the very first scene, as it reminded me of Hans Weingartner’s 2004 flick The Edukators, of which I am a big fan. The film quickly shifted tone, however, and although there are elements of Wait Until Dark at play here (most notably in a scene in which a blind individual turns off all of the lights to put themselves on equal footing with the people invading their home), this is a very different film.

We recently discussed in the roundtable for our September MotM outing The Box that it was hard to sympathize with the protagonist family and their need for more income because of their relative place of privilege, and Don’t Breathe is certainly more identifiable on that front, but the characters never quite reach a point where we can fully sympathize with them. The only main character of color, Money (Zovatto is Costa Rican), is the least fleshed out and has the least characterization; his character is the least likable of the three mains, and Zovatto seems to be playing an exaggerated version of the same sleazeball he played in It Follows. Further, Don’t Breathe seems to take place in the same alternate universe Detroit as It Follows, by which I mean both films are nearly devoid of black people. It’s understandable that director Fede Alvarez chose not to cast actors of color for these roles; having black actors play Detroit thieves would have unfortunate implications of their own, but since I only counted two extras of color (one in the overhead flyby at the start of the film and one getting coffee at the station at the end), there’s a lot of missed opportunity here. The film effectively portrays Detroit as a dying city with homes full of broken windows and empty streets, but focusing on the economic problems of (mostly) white teenagers creates an incorrect perception both of the city’s real problems and of the people who are usually victims of economic inequality.

The scene we see of Rocky’s family (including the deadbeat mother’s unsubtly swastika-tattooed boyfriend) attempts to communicate in a very short time frame the reasons why Rocky so dearly desires to leave Detroit behind, but it’s a little clumsy in its overtones and fails in comparison to a later scene where Alex talks about her childhood in a much more effective demonstration. And we learn the least about Alex, except that he seems to have a fairly decent home life, and his investment in the thefts is largely because of his romantic interest in Rocky, which the film never states is either problematic or loving. It’s also not the only problematic thing in the film other than the whitewashed Detroit, as there is a scene near the end that uses the ol’ rape-as- drama cliche, although not in the way you would expect. It’s effectively unsettling, but I’m not sure if the “I’m no rapist” line is meant to show off the blind (sorry) self-deception of the character saying it or an attempt to head off any attempted interpretation of the line (which it obviously has not, based on some of the think pieces emerging in the wake of the film’s release). I’m hesitant to say more than that for the sake of retaining the film’s surprises. It’s enough to sour the experience somewhat but not enough for me to say the film should be skipped, although I definitely recommend a big trigger warning for those viewers sensitive to sexual assault.

Even with all of its flaws, Don’t Breathe is a delightfully wicked and taut horror thriller with great influences from other films in the same genre and outside of it. Beyond the “blind person fends off home invaders” similarities to Wait Until Dark and the superficial similarities to The Edukators, there’s a lot of The People Under the Stairs in Don’t Breathe’s DNA (minus that film’s exploration of the race-related nature of economic disadvantage, which, as noted, is lacking here). There are also minor elements that are reminiscent of this year’s earlier horror film 10 Cloverfield Lane, particularly in one of the fake-out endings and the scene of a woman climbing through an air vent in a desperate escape attempt (this scene is also evocative of my favorite horror film, Alien, from which 10 Cloverfield borrowed some of its imagery). Alvarez’s beautiful cinematography and lingering camera work elevate what could otherwise have been a fairly run-of- the-mill horror movie. There’s an attention to detail that bespeaks a greater knowledge of the language of film, and Alvarez is obviously well on his way to being a master linguist. I can’t remember the last time, other than The VVitch, where I felt so much tension in my spine  while taking in a fright flick, and I was haunted by the movie for hours after walking out of the theatre. If you have a strong stomach and can handle the anxiety, Don’t Breathe gets a“recommended” from me.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond