ストリームまたはスキップ: ‘エイリアン: ロムルス’ フランチャイズをリブート
My most anticipated film of 2024 was Alien: Romulus (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), because the idea of director Fede Alvarez reprising the franchise was delightful. Alvarez’s notable previous films, Don’t Breathe and the 2013 remake of Evil Dead, should be held in high esteem for their visual acumen, their decidedly creative displays of gore, and their ability to play us like a piano – all of them precious. skills one needs for an Alien film to reach its potential. And Romulus does at least that. At most, though, it’s a wildly entertaining excursion into familiar sci-fi and horror territory, with engaging performances from Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla, Civil War) and David Jonsson (Rye Lane) and Alvarez’s spirited direction. It was enough to gross $350 million in theaters worldwide and generated enough goodwill that I put it in the same room as its classic and genre-defining predecessors, Alien and Aliens – although Romulus might love a little at their feet. a lot sometimes.
The bottom line: The time falls somewhere between Alien and Aliens on the franchise timeline. The place is a miserable, abandoned rocky planet that gets precisely zero hours of sunlight – the kind of hellish place that will make you want to go anywhere else. This is where Rain (Spaeny) lives, and this is also his predicament. She works in the mines. His parents died working in the mines. His closest confidant is Andy the Anxious Android (Jonsson), a nervous and sensitive synthetic human. She consults with the local bureaucrat at the terminal outside the window because Rain has reached her work quota and earned her transfer out of here, except she hasn’t because the company – our old friends from Weyland – Yutani – I just moved the goal posts. Companies always do this in dystopias, right? There is still an alarming lack of oversight and regulation. But she is not without options. His friends Tyler (Archie Renaux), Kay (Isabela Merced, far, far from Dora the Explorer), Navarro (Aileen Wu) and Bjorn (Spike Fearn) have a plan: a decommissioned space station floats empty in orbit. Cryopods are on board. They’ll grab the capsules, climb in, hit the snooze button and head off, to a planet with at least a tiny slice of hope.
Now I had no doubt that everything would go extremely well and as planned. A happily ever after awaits you! They just have to board the station, find the pods, then realize that the pods need pod juice, then find the pod juice, and to find the pod juice they have to go through a bunch of disturbing laboratory scenarios with computers and jars. lots of scary things and what looks like an evil egg incubator. Around this time, we learn that Bjorn is prejudiced against synthetics and would love to push Andy into the airless void, if they didn’t need him to use his droid to help them bypass the computerized keyboards that control doors and such. But does it matter if any of these characters have, you know, character? Since whatever is in the eggs is probably going to GET them, while we laugh with goosebumps in glee? You don’t want to get too attached, that’s what I’m trying to say here.
At least we feel a little something for Rain and Andy’s brotherly relationship. The robot is all she has. But there’s a moment where Andy’s personality changes after a software upgrade is necessary to get through an ultra-secure computerized keypad that controls a door. He gets a little smarter and a little stronger and a little more confident and a little colder and we’re like, is he more Bishop or more David or more Ash or what? To our shock, things go wrong and not at all as planned when Rain and co. meet facehuggers (hey, they’re cuddly, so they’re still cuddly!), classic xenomorphs from the franchise (you know, with the hisses and squeaks and the toothy little slobbering mouth inside the biggest toothy slobbering mouth ) and a very disturbing encounter with the uncanny valley. Oh, and there’s also a countdown to impact with sirens, warning horns, and Lady Computer’s voice reminding everyone of their impending demise. Assuming they can’t cope with this demise in other ways, of course.
What films will this remind you of? : Alvarez takes some of his Don’t Breathe plot structure (a group of young adults wander into a place they shouldn’t wander) and cross-references it with a lot of stuff from Alien and Aliens.
Performances to watch: Jonsson is the easy star here, playing two different versions of the same character – he goes from sweet and pathetic and endearing to disturbingly shrewd, although I’m not sure he’ll ever lose our ally. His performance continues a tradition of remarkable and memorably frightening android characterizations in the Alien films, from Ian Holm to Michael Fassbender and Lance Henrikson.
Memorable dialogues: The last thing you need to hear from a once cuddly “artificial person”: “I’m afraid I have a new directive.” » –Andy
Sex and skin: None. Unless you want to count the facehuggers’ attempts to enter characters’ mouths with their earth-shattering, phallic tentacle organs. Which no one does, even if the images are on the wrong side of suggestive.
Our opinion: Romulus opens inside a spaceship, with lights, screens, buttons and switches waking up with clicks, whirs, buzzes and winks-flink-flinks, setting the tone for a fully tactile cinematic experience. This is Alvarez working with a loving respect for the signatures of the Alien franchise, ranging from the battered, grimy, lived-in look of the sets and locations to the squirting pus, drool and stomach-churning blood that inevitably drips and splatters everywhere once the title is created. oh-so-disgusting emerge from the unholy eggs and the body cavities that gave birth to them. CGI is used relatively minimally and everything looks terrifyingly real. Real enough to keep us in the moment, and grounded to – well, let’s be honest, our vested interest is less in seeing one to three of these characters, modestly developed at best, survive this nightmare scenario. than in the way creatures exercise diabolical evolutionary survival skills in their undeniably disgusting quest for species perpetuation.
This is where Alvarez excels, whether it’s innovating slightly on familiarities – for example, increasing the quantity to dozens of jittery facehuggers instead of just two or three – or concocting a few full doozies of suspense sequences from the third act that capitalize on the series. » predilections for nail-biting action and brain-spinning body horror. Alvarez’s direction is exceptional. The film looks great, is well-paced, and inspires just enough of our investment in the story to keep us immersed and hold us in the moment.
For now, mostly, anyway, since many of the callbacks and Easter egg references to past films in the series are mercilessly installed in the pursuit of fan service. They’re distracting, but also pretty easy to get around; Romulus is a much more enjoyable experience when you succumb to the more gently nostalgic comfort of familiar story beats (ethically questionable androids, tick-tock-to-kablooey suspense arcs, childbirth horror scenarios) than ‘Alvarez innovates. just enough to make you feel like we’re not working on the same things you’ve always loved about these movies. It would be disingenuous to say that the film truly covers new ground, but it’s damn good at generating exhilarating tension and release. Alvarez not only keeps a sibilant franchise alive, but also gives us a reason to feel invested in its continued life.
Our call: THREE BEST ALIEN MOVIES, RANKED: 1, Aliens (less than the length of a small mouth coming out of a larger mouth). 2. Extraterrestrial. 3. Extraterrestrial: Romulus. (Honorable mention: the never-horrible auto-abortion sequence in Prometheus.) Yes, Romulus is that good! And no, your attempts to salvage Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection from the junkyard are unconvincing. Spread it.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.