Romulus and Borderlands
Alien: Romulus
It's been 45 years since director Ridley Scott scared the wits out of movie-goers with the genre-defining Alien. A masterful reworking of the ‘haunted house’ horror trope, Alien successfully took the late 1970s Star Wars inspired fad for space movies and fused it with a grimy, industrial aesthetic populated by cynical ‘space truckers’ in the employ of an amoral corporation. The real star of the show, however, was the eponymous alien itself, designed by Swiss artist H.R. Giger. Giger's nightmarish biomechanical creature seemed plucked directly from the darkest recesses of our primitive hind-brains, the living embodiment of primal terror. It's hard to overstate how shocked audiences were by the now-infamous ‘xenomorph’ in 1979; it's the reason Alien is a timeless masterpiece, and the attempt to recapture that lightning-in-a-bottle is the reason we're still talking about a new Alien movie in 2024.
The poor old xenomorph, however, hasn't exactly had an illustrious career since its phenomenal debut. With the exception of James Cameron's gung-ho action sequel Aliens in 1986 — which succeeded largely due to Cameron's wise decision to make a completely different genre of movie — the alien has found itself cast in a motley and wildly inconsistent clutch of sequels and spin-offs, ranging from the flawed-but-stylish (Alien 3) to the downright embarrassing (Aliens vs Predator: Requiem). The lightning of the 1979 original has remained unbottled — until now, perhaps.
Alien: Romulus — the latest attempt to revisit the visceral terror of the original movie — doesn't quite deliver the same gut-punch, but it's by far the most spirited attempt to date. Set 20 years after the events of Alien, the film opens with a space probe belonging to evil mega-corporation Weyland-Yutani exploring the wreckage of the Nostromo, the ship destroyed by Ellen Ripley in a last-ditch attempt to kill the OG alien… an attempt which failed. The story picks up several months later on the dead-end, backwater mining colony Jackson's Star. Young miner Rain Carradine (Caliee Spaeny) tries desperately to obtain a transfer off-world (to a planet where she can see the sun), and is brutally rebuffed by the company. Rain realizes that her indentured servitude condemns her to a short life of slavery and an early death from industrial disease. She, her malfunctioning android ‘brother’ Andy, and two other young couples resolve to raid an abandoned space station and make a break for another solar system. Once there, it quickly becomes apparent that they are not alone, and that the space station’s ‘crew’ is far from friendly.
Director Fede Álvarez succeeds where others have failed because he clearly understands what made Alien a masterpiece in the first place: the claustrophobic setting, the retro-futuristic 1970s aesthetic, and the shadowy cinematography — all of which are present in abundance. More than this, though, Álvarez has no grandiose pretensions other than to make a movie scary enough to be worthy to be called an Alien sequel, and that lends a focus and momentum sadly lacking from the franchise until now.
Performances from the young cast are uniformly excellent, particularly from Cailee Spaeny as Rain and David Jonsson as the synthetic Andy. It's obvious that Álvarez has set out to deliver a ‘greatest hits’ experience, with almost every scene containing at least one direct reference to a previous movie. The film could legitimately be accused of excessive fan-service, but considering the number of times that Alien fans have been poorly-served over the years, that's no bad thing; it's just a damn good popcorn movie for horror fans. Recommended.
Borderlands
Movie adaptations of video games are notoriously unpredictable creatures, and Hollywood's track record in this mercurial genre is less than stellar. For every success, like last year's triumphant TV adaptation of The Last Of Us, there are a hundred sputtering misfires: Super Mario Bros, Street Fighter, Assassin's Creed, the entire career of director Uwe Boll — the list is endless. This, however, never seems to stop the studios from rolling the dice yet again when another video game franchise achieves a certain level of longevity and cultural penetration. The executives start looking at those multi-million-dollar profits on gaming platforms like Steam and Xbox Live, and make the same flawed assumption they always make: if people will pay millions to play it, they'll pay millions to sit and watch a watered-down copy of it in a movie theater.
It's in this spirit of hope-over-experience that the inevitable movie adaptation of Gearbox Software's comedy-shooter franchise Borderlands crashes into late-summer theaters with more of a splat than a bang. Looking at the original subject matter, it's easy to see why even Randy Pitchford, creator of the original Borderlands video game, has been pushing for a movie since 2014. The games are gloriously irreverent interactive comic books, designed with a quirky hand-drawn aesthetic, fusing R-rated, scatological ‘Mad Max in space’ story-lines with a supporting cast of comedic misfits. Meanwhile, the player gleefully notches up a body-count in the thousands with an endless deluge of bigger and bigger guns.
The movie's setting is the planet Pandora, a blasted desert inhabited exclusively by homicidal wildlife, psychotic biker gangs, and occasional shanty towns best described as ‘wretched hives of scum and villainy’. The plot, such as it is, sees teenager Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) kidnapped by rogue soldier Roland (Kevin Hart). On another planet altogether, Tina's father, corporate CEO Atlas, contacts cynical bounty hunter Lilith (Cate Blanchett), and tasks her with returning to Pandora, the planet of her birth, to rescue Tina and return her to her father. After locating Tina and mounting a rescue, Lilith realizes that Tina is not Atlas' daughter, but a genetically-engineered prisoner bred with alien DNA in an attempt to infuse her with the ability to open a mysterious vault containing the secrets of a long-dead alien race. With the help of Lilith's estranged foster mother Tanis (Jamie Lee Curtis) and goofy robot sidekick Claptrap (Jack Black), they set off to open the vault and thwart Atlas' nefarious plans.
On paper, with a cast like that and a $120 million budget, this movie should be a slam-dunk. Should be, but isn't. Sadly, this is a thoroughly-wretched, 100-minute dumpster fire which captures absolutely none of the games' irreverent energy. Eli Roth's direction is formulaic and listless. The confusing and insipid script waters the games’ ‘hard-R’ comedy down to PG-13. Borderlands turns what should have been a roller-coaster ride into a cringe-inducing slog. There is, perhaps, some small measure of what were they thinking? entertainment to be found in watching the likes of Gina Gershon, Jamie Lee Curtis, and particularly Cate Blanchett being so spectacularly miscast. But otherwise, this is perhaps the most egregious example of a poorly-judged video game adaptation yet committed to film. Truly, jaw-droppingly awful.
Recently arrived in the Tri-Cities, Damian is a former freelancer who previously wrote movie and music reviews for a variety of UK websites.