Alien: Romulus is a nepo movie. Like nepo baby – the original term I’m borrowing and adapting for this new cinematic designation – I’m using nepo movie to describe offspring that coasts into success (of the kind which those without the famous pedigree could only dream) on the sterling reputation of famous progenitors. We’ve had movies like this before, as we had children of the rich and famous using their connections to jump start a career before the invention of the term nepo baby.
What made this oh-so-clever turn of phrase spring into my mind was Romulus mimicking the best, most memorable elements from both mom and dad in its pursuit to build its own legacy. Uruguayan director Fede Álvarez wrote the screenplay for this seventh installment in the iconic sci-fi/horror franchise with his longtime collaborator Rodo Sayagues. His movie plays like a best-hits mashup of both Ridley Scott’s genre defining Alien and James Cameron’s sci-fi/horror-by-way-of-war-movie follow up Aliens, with a splash of Prometheus added in for good measure.
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The main issue I have with Rob Garver’s documentary about Pauline Kael, arguably the most influential film critic ever to write about movies, is that it’s too reverential of its subject. In Garver’s film, What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, we do get the warts, but they’ve been airbrushed, even if only slightly. The film also tries to pack an entire lifetime into its 100 minutes, which often gives the feeling of rushing through the major events of Kael’s life.
Those few reservations aside, What She Said is a consistently entertaining and enlightening look at Kael. Every person – this writer most certainly included – wrestling with their movie obsession, as well as the movies themselves, owes her a great debt.
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A great thing about the early entries in the Alien franchise is that they are exciting and scary good fun. Alien: Covenant is too obsessed with its own mythology to be much of either. Director Ridley Scott had the perfect opportunity to pull a George Miller. That filmmaker revived his Mad Max series with the fresh and inventive Fury Road. Miller wasn’t concerned with what he did in the past. With Fury Road, he gleefully started from scratch, and as a result produced a rip-roaring action film, one of the best of the decade. Alien: Covenant is the first true Alien movie in 20 years. Scott’s 2012 film Prometheus was a sort of spiritual sequel to the franchise, taking place in the same universe, but centered on its distant origins. Covenant is a direct sequel to Prometheus. Instead of surprising us with the possibilities of a clean start, Scott and his writers, John Logan and Dante Harper, give us that sinking feeling with Covenant that this is someplace we’ve already been.
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There’s a lot wrong with Ridley Scott’s Legend. But instead of writing it off as an outright failure, it’s deserving of admiration because Scott and his creative team made a movie completely devoid of cynicism, which is commendable. The filmmakers set out to make pure fable come alive through the magic of the silver screen. There are too many problems with the final product to warrant calling it a success, but the effort of all involved is worthy of respect.
The first sign of trouble comes with the opening text crawl. The most famous example of this device, those floating columns of exposition from the original Star Wars films, set the scene quickly. That’s not the case with Legend. The informational paragraphs here are interminable and artless. So much information is crammed in, it’s like a nervous studio executive worried that audiences would be confused by the lack of explanation in the rest of the film. We’re told Darkness ruled the universe before light came to the world. It was the light, protected by unicorns, which drove him into hiding. To protect the light, only a true innocent can find the unicorns. The rest of the movie makes all this abundantly clear, calling into question why the opening explanation is needed at all.
The movie itself concerns the innocent Lily (Mia Sara) as she unwittingly puts the unicorns in danger when she touches them. She does this in the presence of goblins sent by Darkness (Tim Curry) to catch and kill the sacred protectors of light. Jack (Tom Cruise), a forest dweller, brings Lily to the unicorns because he loves her, not realizing that she will endanger the creatures. The rest of the movie is an uneven mix of boring plotting, awkward comic relief, one performance that is particularly mesmerizing, and incredible make-up and special effects.
Ridley Scott has had a long and varied career as a filmmaker. His latest two releases are great examples of the range possible in his output. Produced within a year of each other, Scott climbed dizzyingly high peaks in The Martian and crawled along depressingly low valleys in Exodus: Gods and Kings. Scott is a visually striking and inventive director, but his talents can’t compensate for a poor screenplay. So, when he gets his hands on a script as strong as Blade Runner or Alien, his masterful visual flair perfectly enhances the story. With a substandard script, like the aforementioned Exodus, the movie turns into a muddled mess.
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It’s a great feeling when a filmmaker capable of cinematic magic comes in from wandering the creative desert. Ridley Scott has had a rough go of it the past five years. In that time, the director helmed the debacle Exodus: Gods and Kings, the critically lambasted The Counselor, the made-for-TV movie The Vatican, and the disappointing Robin Hood. The uneven Prometheus was also released amidst that flurry but, as a return to the world he created in his classic Alien, is entertaining despite suffocating under the weight of its own mythology. The Martian is a return to form for Scott, almost matching his best work. All that’s missing here is the heavy tone that comes out of exploring themes like what it means to be human, as he did in Blade Runner. But that’s like faulting the stars in the sky because of the view from a light-polluted city. Scott did exactly what The Martian’s source material demands. He made a wildly fun, acerbically funny, exciting ride of a movie.
The film is based on the bestselling book of the same name by first time novelist Andy Weir. The author self-published The Martian in serial format for free on his own website before it exploded in popularity via Amazon Kindle. It’s essentially Robinson Crusoe on Mars, albeit far more scientifically accurate. Weir did painstaking research while writing the novel to ensure as much technical exactitude as possible. The Martian tells the story of astronaut Mark Watney, a botanist and mechanical engineer, who becomes stranded on the fourth planet from the sun when his fellow crew members are forced to abort their mission because of a harrowing sandstorm. The crew believes Watney was killed during the escape, and the scientist’s attempts to survive and to figure out how to contact NASA with no working communications equipment make up the crux of the story.
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