Nobody’s more surprised than I am to report that Alien: Romulus is actually pretty good. It takes a while to set up, but then it’s tense throughout, with a genuinely scary nail-biter of a final escape sequence.
It’s a shame I can’t describe the ending, because it’s a doozy, but you have to see the movie to find out for yourself how fresh shudders can be added to the very familiar Alien franchise. I’ll simply note that the Alien movies have always centered on the horrifying implications of sex, birth, motherhood, evolutionary development, and nightmarish corporate interference in all of those areas creating ever worse biological nightmares. One of the crew members in Alien: Romulus is pregnant. You can start speculating from there.
Though if you follow the commentary of certain critics and fans, who seem to have total recall of every plot point in all eight previous Alien films in the forty-five-year-old franchise. there’s nothing new under the sun, and it’s all sadly derivative. Reliable old crank Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle takes this jaded position to its logical end point, grousing,
The real mistake here wasn’t in the execution. The foundational mistake came when someone said, “Hey, let’s make another ‘Alien’ movie.” Newsflash: The alien concept is dead. Leave it alone, and leave poor Ian Holm out of it.
That final gripe about Ian Holm refers to the fact that the late actor, who played the android Ash in the superb first Alien in 1979, is incorporated into this new film. He’s made to give a CGI-zombie performance as a new android character, Rook, who’s clearly the same model as Ash, the coldly single-minded corporate shill. It was producer Ridley Scott’s idea to resurrect Holm, and Holm’s family gave writer-director Fede Álvarez (The Evil Dead) permission to digitally recreate the likeness of the actor, who died in 2020. Actor Daniel Betts impersonated Holm’s voice.
As creepy as…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Eileen Jones
