As the summer of 2024 winds down, we made a couple of rare, back to back trips to our Multi-Plex to feast on two of the season's major box office hits......
These films, (along with 'Twisters') were the best Hollywood could come up with to replicate the pop-culture double whammy of last summer's 'Barbenheimer'......
But then again, this year's crowd pleasers were all continuations of familiar franchises or well known, as they say, "I.P.". So unlike last summer, there was nothing original to see here, folks.
We can't deny, though, enjoying them for what they were.....slick, well crafted big studio product, each one determined to show us a good time.
Alien: Romulus (2024) from director-co-screenwriter Fede Alverez, takes place somewhere in between the events of "Alien" and "Aliens", for those of you keeping track of timelines.
What we liked the most about this: before the movie moves into the expected Booga-Booga-Up-Jumps-an-Alien stuff, Alverez quickly introduces the grimmest, most soul-sucking world building we've yet seen presented in an 'Alien' film. (And we mean that in a good way.....no one's going to burst out singing "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life" in this series....)
The Weyland-Utani corporation rules outer space for profit and treats its workers like literally indentured slaves, binding them to brutally long contracts. No wonder a bunch of these oppressed young toilers seize the opportunity to hijack a space freighter to retrieve those sleep chambers for a light-years away escape from the hellhole mining planet that's their workplace prison.
Ah, but the sleep pods are on a massive abandoned and drifting lab where the corporation was foolishly breeding......well, we all know what they were breeding, heh, heh, heh, heh......
Horror upon horror follows and the film goes out of its way to deliver all the goo, gore and agonizing death we've come to expect in an 'Alien' movie. Face huggers, Chest Bursters, Humans cocooned in gobs of black slime......and an all new variation of the traditional creature. Yowza!
Special mention goes to young Cailee Spaeny, who gets to play the Junior Varsity Sigourney Weaver Official Alien Basher. Not so special mention goes to the filmmakers' misguided attempt to resurrect (via CGI and vocal trickery) the duplicitous, treacherous artificial human played by the late Ian Holm in the original film. Sorry guys, but your effects don't look convincing enough to pull that off.
Ridley Scott in one his always sharply candid interviews, admitted that 'Alien''s story was nothing a spiffed up, high tech, outer space version of a Grade C monster-in-a-haunted-house movie. But execution is everything and the H.R.Giger designed Xenomorph became a timeless icon, a permanent cultural nightmare.
Alien: Romulus, to be as blunt as Ridley, is no different,nothing more than a make-you-jump rollercoaster ride buffed to high sheen. And that's just fine with us.....3 & 1/2 stars (***1/2).
Reynolds raises his already high level of meta-snark to stratospheric heights here, deconstructing all the tropes of superhero movies, not missing a single one. He's like a Las Vegas insult comedian fully unleashed, spewing out so many rapid-fire putdowns, we're not sure it's possible to catch them all in one viewing.
And we're pretty sure Disney and Marvel aren't complaining, since they're too busy counting the millions the film generated at the box office......nothing like a hit to calm their nerves after their last few superhero movies were ignored by audiences tiring of them.
But we couldn't help wondering as we laughed at Reynolds gleefully ripping the comic book universes to shreds......where does Marvel go from here? Usually, when a genre devolves into such riotous amounts of self-parody, it signifies the end of it.
Is anyone ever going to take a superhero movie seriously again? Will we ever see critics and audiences rapturous over another one, greeting it with the kind of praise and fervor lavished on "Black Panther"? or "Iron Man"?
Or we will we now forever expect these movies to tickle us with a Celebrity Roast of themselves? You tell us.....
Let's not end this review without mentioning our most favorite sequence.......in which the film eviscerates those dreaded Marvel 'multi-verses' with a horde of alternate reality Deadpools. If there was ever a Marvel trope that needed a well deserved kick in the ass, it's that one. And oh boy does this film deliver it. Priceless.
Kudos too to Hugh Jackman for willing to go along with exhuming Wolverine to allow Reynolds to explode cluster bombs of scorn over the entire Marvel universe. And that goes for the large cast of good sports turning up surprise cameos.
The question remains.....do we really need another Marvel movie after this one? Only moviegoers can decide that but whether 'Deadpool & Wolverine's the end of the line (or the start of a whole new comedy franchise) just sit back, snicker yourself silly and enjoy the ride this one gives you. 4 stars (****).
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