another glorious day in the corps (in which the corps is the act of watching alien sequels until we all die)

the writer bill bryson once joked that there are three things you can't do in life: you can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again. for what appears to have been the last four thousand years or so now, ridley scott and his subsidiary team of scruple-free and seemingly illiterate enablers have been loudly and insistently reassessing point number three. can they, every new movie in the alien franchise seems to ask, recapture the magic of the original? can they, by means of small white aliens that look like my cat, large octopus foetus monsters birthed in medi-pods, big violent naked dudes, guy pearce in distracting "old" make up, michael fassbender making out with himself, stupid jerks who don't know how to act, melting acid fingers, bad recalls to perfect lines, morally repugnant ai and shite about god, recapture what it was that made alien and its immediate sequel aliens the defining sci-fi, horror and action movies of the modern age? can we, in fact, go home again?

the answer, in case you were wondering, is no.

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i went to see alien: romulus (2024) with about the level of dread appropriate for what is after all the ninth movie in a franchise, if you choose to include alien vs predator (2004), alien vs predator: requiem (2007) and alien vs larry flynt (one of these is a joke). the fact, then, that i still came out of the cinema in a kind of fugue state of horror and disgust is really a testament to what a dumbfuck nonsense this movie manages to be in a relatively compressed runtime. we have, of course, all seen the jokes whereby fans of the alien franchise whine when the new movie is a baroque high-concept nightmare about god, creation and charlize theron running away from a falling spaceship in a straight line like wile e. coyote, and then whine when it isn't, but i think that what the discourse fails to comprehend here is a much more obvious core issue. fans of the alien franchise do not, in my opinion, whine about prometheus (2012) and then also whine about alien: romulus because they are petty and impossible to please, but rather because THEY DO NOT WANT ANY OF IT AND YET IT REFUSES TO STOP. watching alien: romulus, in an audience full of people increasingly groaning aloud as things continued to happen (and make no mistake, things happen so much), i felt nothing so much as a dull sensation of deep, turgid and existential dread at the fact that this was happening, and would keep happening, and will presumably keep on happening, on and on and over and over, until all of our collective hearts and bodies give out and we die. re george orwell: if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.

i could - and probably should - proceed through this substack in the manner of a traditional review, first detailing the plot and then highlighting all the many mad things wrong with it, but i'm not actually sure the sense of vast, unspooling doom this movie instilled in me would really allow for that. i'm not sure, at all, that writing about it in the manner of a normal narrative blogpost would be useful, when i should instead be going to church, or up a mountain, or somewhere to atone, and grieve, and talk to my god, and maybe satan, and making my peace with all that has happened and is yet to happen, but on the other hand i've started writing now, so i guess let's see where this goes.

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a non-narrative, non-chronological and entirely vibes-based list of things i thought and felt during and subsequent to watching the movie alien: romulus

- i should say off the bat that i not only thought this movie was bad but also felt extremely irritated at it for reasons related to basic scripting, so please bear that in mind over the course of whatever is to follow. suffice it to say, i thought vast swathes of this movie were written poorly, or clunkily, or simply did not make narrative sense, and the fact that it was sent to production in the mess that it was is a very obvious indication of the state of IP-mania in cinema today. it doesn't matter, ultimately, how a thing looks, sounds or scans to an audience, as long as you get them through the door to begin with. the dialogue is routinely expository, poor, or lazy enough to be rendered laughable (at one point it is queried why someone is being so unpleasant to an android, only for another character to portentously intone that "it's because of what happened to his mom"), and at no point does it feel like any love or interest has been involved in the creative process, at scripting stage or beyond. the fact that it takes approximately twenty minutes at the start for various grunting bozos who, in some cases, cannot even make themselves readily understood, to explain to me over and over why we are going to space, and how we are going to space, and when we are going to space, only for us to finally go to space with it still unclear what the plan actually is, feels very symptomatic of many of the problems at play. in any decent alien movie, this lead-in would either take two seconds or be a useful means of introducing us to characters who we will come to love and care about over the next hundred minutes or so. in the case of alien: romulus, not only do we learn nothing and come to care about no one, but it becomes increasingly apparent that the only intention seems to be the desire to show us the neon bar sign from the movie aliens, and then look at us for a long time like "geddit, it's the neon bar sign from the movie aliens". that, to this movie, really does seem to be the entire point.

- relatedly, i should say that the genuinely bludgeoning nature of perceived fanservice in this movie is so endless as to actually become really rather unpleasant. the list of aural and visual references - the neon bar sign, the shot of john hurt, the theme from the movie prometheus for some reason - goes on and on in a manner that does nothing whatsoever except to make some hypothetical nerd happy, and it doesn't work, because it never works, because all it does is make you sad about all the other, better movies you could be watching instead. one character's commitment to delivering his lines completely incoherently is so palpable that i became briefly convinced he was trying to do a riff on harry dean stanton, except that then i realised that harry dean stanton was a genius of subtle character acting, and this guy was just a bit shit. but more on all of this later.

- there are, i should say, several excellent standalone sequences and pleasingly grisly images at play here, not least a moment where a quantity of alien acid drops onto a character from above and he has to watch his own fingers dissolving, and then his own eye, and then his heart. there is some excellent use in particular of the facehuggers, who scuttle about in hitherto unseen numbers slamming up against walls and chasing characters down corridors, and it looks good and sounds good, even if a lateish sequence where two characters have to get through a chamber of facehuggers by matching their body temperature to the temperature of the room and thereby sneaking past undetected is a tension-free mess. the core concept at play here - in as much as this means the central h. r. giger design - is still good, because it's always good, and it takes a lot of effort to render it entirely ineffective. the sequence where the facehuggers are swimming about a semi-flooded chamber getting around everyone's legs is excellent. i liked the initial implantation scene. i'm not a completely hateful person, is what i'm saying here.

- the nature of any alien movie made after 1991 is to absorb into its inner workings a scale of plot hole you could punt an elephant through, so i'm not proposing to take any of this too seriously. suffice it to say, at no point does it make sense that the central characters - who are seemingly trapped in an orwellian terraforming colony - are just allowed to leave it, and nor does it make sense that they manage to get on board a deserted weyland-yutani ship hovering right outside the planet's atmosphere which literally no one else has seen. similarly, a central plot point revolves around the scientists on board the deserted craft having been attempting to use alien blood to "improve mankind" (cue prometheus music) - an experiment they have apparently been conducting entirely via the means of crushing a rat in a panini press, then injecting it with alien blood and watching it get better. as my brother pointed out, on exiting the movie, the problem of being repeatedly flattened is not the key issue mankind appears to be facing in this universe - since characters discuss pollution, smog and cancer rates at length throughout the movie - but apparently all problems are the same when placed inside a panini press and summarily crushed, for science, so who cares.

- speaking of extremely stupid movie logic, it is extremely funny when the lead character decides that it's ok to shoot at a bunch of xenomorphs with acid for blood as long as she does it in zero gravity, only to stare at the mission impossible style floating acid jizz labyrinth she has created for herself like durr what am i like.

- i could not tell you the name of a single character, or tell you what they meant to each other, or what their motivations were, or what they were doing, or why, and i know this makes me sound like a miserable harridan from a time long dead, but i really do think this is a problem. i think, consistently and all the time, about how swiftly one gets to know and understand who every single person in the not-inconsiderable cast of aliens is - a feat which is genuinely effected within about 10 minutes of them all being woken up from cryosleep. it just doesn't have to be this bad, it doesn't have to be this bad.

- i will say that another positive thought i had throughout alien: romulus was that david jonsson was excellent, and a lovely, complex and considered presence, and i hope he becomes extremely famous and never has to do anything like this ever again.

- this may be just me, but did anyone else who saw this movie in the cinema have an experience akin to that scene in the simpsons where dolby audio is so loud it starts causing people's teeth and heads to explode?

- speaking as i previously was about empty and redundant callbacks, at one point one of the anonymous randoms peopling this movie attempts to teach cailee spaeney who is 100% just fine to hold a pulse rifle, in a deadening retread of the wildly sexy moment in aliens when hicks does this for ripley, and it really does make you step back and think wow at how utterly dead and sexless and intentionless all of this is. my friend tess said this best in a substack which is actually about the movie twisters (2024) and not alien: romulus at all, but "we really did arrive to this party on earth at the craggily end when all the drinks are watered down and no one has left the heart even to dance."

- we have yet to discuss the great pulsating elephant in the room that is the ai reconstruction of the late ian holm - an act of grotesque disrespect and futility which i don't actually propose to dwell on, because it makes me sad. suffice it to say, it was both unnecessary and revolting, in the way these things always are, and also looked like ass, and made me profoundly depressed every time i had to look at it. as my friend pointed out, the scene in alien where the dismembered remains of the thing that was once rook explains ripley's chances to her, and expresses a kind of inhuman sympathy, is a moment of sheer enduring cinema, and the fact that alien: romulus decides that a cool thing to do would be to tromp in and do the same thing only worse, with the likeness of a man who is dead, and for no palpable artistic or emotional payoff or reason, is pretty much symptomatic of everything that is going on here, and i don't know what else you really want me to say.

- the ending is dumb and bad and ugly and stupid but also made me howl aloud with laughter, both because some guy on our row in the cinema said "oh jeez" when it happened and also because it made me think back to all those deeply portentous pearl & dean sponsored trailers i'd been forced to watch for months ahead of the movie coming out, where members of the cast looked directly down the lens and promised they were "going back to basics" and that "this wasn't some prometheus-style shit again", only for the movie to have actually been alien resurrection (1997) the whole time.

- oh also.

- i should maybe have mentioned this before

- but

- at one point the android played by david jonsson shoots a xenomorph in the face

- and says

- "get away from her..."

- "you bitch."

- and actually i'm done here, aren't i. i've had enough.