Another lifeless tour of intellectual property disguised as a movie, “Alien: Romulus” is this week’s reminder that Hollywood has actually gotten worse at making sequels over the years. Even crass, bottom-basement cash-grabs used to occasionally have a semblance of life: a sense of their own absurdity, perhaps, or some fun FX, or maybe they allowed an actor to cut loose a little. There used to be a sense of casualness even to aspiring blockbusters, but no longer.
Every franchise movie must now be a dutiful link in an endless chain, with schtick that’s staged with the utmost earnestness and solemnity. Give the fans their Easter eggs and stay out of their way. Congratulate them for getting the in-jokes, and let’s not clutter the enterprise with anything too dangerously eccentric or engaging. Think of the banter in James Cameron’s “Aliens,” which has often been criticized; it may be blunt but it’s alive, and those characters remain in one’s memory nearly 40 years later.
By contrast, I saw “Alien: Romulus” 12 hours ago and the characters are already fuzzy. With the exception of Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson, two soulful actors who give this movie more than it earns, the cast is a typical sea of young faces from central casting that is a reminder of how bad Hollywood has gotten at putting convincing working-class people on screen. Cloaked in drab costumes, shadows, and make-up, they all look more or less the same and their characters haven’t even been assigned the horror genre’s customary one trait a piece. Can’t one of them have a witty line? Is Hollywood that terrified of disrupting the I.P. tour?
The notion of “Alien: Romulus” as an I.P. tour is not as figurative as you may assume or hope. After 20 minutes of table-setting, the film is a medley of scenes that have already appeared in the “Alien” series. I won’t rattle them off, but if there’s a scene from a previous “Alien” movie that you remember, it probably resurfaces here, not for fun, but with the deadly self-seriousness that characterizes modern Hollywood cash-ins.
“Romulus” is so constipated in its efforts to belong to the “Alien cinematic universe” that there is a prologue showing the discovery of the monster that was blown out of the ship at the end of Ridley Scott’s original “Alien.” Couldn’t the new recruits have simply stumbled into another ship with monsters? I think filmmakers over-estimate the commitment that audiences have to “lore.” Just give us a movie, for Christ’s sake.
The co-writer and director here, Fede Alvarez, is not unskilled. He remade “Evil Dead” in 2013, which was quite a bit punchier than this film, as well as profoundly gory. He also directed “Don’t Breathe,” which had more bite than anyone expected from a late-summer horror movie. My guess is that Alvarez was hemmed in here by producer Ridley Scott, who gave him an iron-clad assignment: play the hits. It’s the movie equivalent of an old joke: How many times can a band play “Free Bird” without getting bored?
“Romulus” is “Alien” without the psychosexual anxiety. The iconic monster that grows to resemble a giant praying mantis in S&M gear after sprouting out of a human’s chest as a young penis with teeth that was—lest we forget—conceived via oral rape by a crab spider, is treated as just another special effect here. Every other filmmaker before Alvarez, no matter how dodgy the material, has managed to film this monster with a degree of awe that respects the Cronenbergian body horror of its roots. Here, at times, you’ll see it just standing around, seemingly on the verge of grabbing a coffee.
Moments that were played for suspense in other “Alien” movies just happen here. When Spailee’s character is preparing for hyper-sleep, only to find an alien in her midst like Sigourney Weaver did in the first movie, she has about as much urgency as someone remembering that they hadn’t taken their medicine before climbing into bed. One of the film’s big set pieces, with spidery face-huggers in a lab, is marred by the weightlessness of the monsters. These creatures were once terrifyingly strong. Here, they are slapped away like mosquitos.
For those accounting at home, “Romulus” is also “Aliens” without James Cameron’s astonishing sense of momentum—knock Cameron all you want but his sequel is still one of the greatest of all American action films, and few since Cameron have come even close to matching it. “Romulus” is “Alien 3” without the class dread, despite Alvarez’s attempts to utilize Jonsson’s Black android as a symbol of slavery. “Romulus” is “Alien: Resurrection” without the spunk, and, God help me, Alvarez even made me nostalgic for the pompous pseudo-Kubrickean, mytho-poetics of Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant.” At least those films were taking a swing.
In short, “Romulus” is nothing. Just another time-killer designed to placate the addiction that horror film obsessives, myself included, have to revisiting scenarios that once had shock, in the meager hopes of recapturing that old magic. But old magic isn’t magic. For the shock of the new we need to see something new. Forget “Alien” movies, “Romulus” doesn’t even stack up well in the hallowed subgenre of “Alien” rip-offs.
Have you seen “The Outwaters” from a few years ago yet? That’s a startling horror movie. Or try “Infested” from earlier this year, a French film about a spider outbreak that leans on the imagery of the “Alien” series with ingenuity and occasional vitality. If we want the rewards, we have to do the work of looking for the new voices.
“It Came from Aquarius Records” speaks straightforwardly to the suspicion that social media has robbed us of an integral component of community. Everything is online so why do anything in person? Why have stores when you can have warehouses filling orders placed online, increasing the wealth of the wealthiest while eliminating jobs for others? Why answer phones when you can have apps? And, if you’re a corporation, why worry about customer service if every company is united in a refusal to provide it?
I am reactionary and stereotypically Gen X when it comes to the increasing inability of shopkeepers to earn a living wage outside of submitting themselves to a corporation. I am also reactionary when it comes to gentrification that prices artists and proud weirdos and their stores out of once affordable cities, including, yes, Richmond.
If you have similar feelings, you will be susceptible to “It Came from Aquarius Records,” Kenneth Thomas’ shaggy documentary about a storied record store in San Francisco that became a hub of multiple music scenes over a course of 50 years. They sold early copies of Sex Pistols records before almost anyone else on the coast. Blondie and the Talking Heads stopped by, among many others.
Aquarius Records was adventurous and eccentric, a store as an active cultivator of aesthetics. The owners, many of whom are interviewed here, are committed nerds and dweebs and outliers of society who live and breathe art. Sitting in a store of art while looking and listening and feeling and talking about art to others who are art-driven is a communal experience that is now close to extinct. Think of the Video Fan on Strawberry Street, and its nooks and crannies. You can’t get that at Amazon or Target. Video Fan closed in 2017, one year after Aquarius Records.
“It Came From Aquarius Records” offers a contact high of the record, or movie, or whatever store experience. There is quite a bit of archive footage of the store, interspersed with new interviews talking about the bands that were promoted or who stopped by. The narrative is dispiriting, though it is pleasurable simply to behold footage of so much physical media and of people talking about it. This is a sentimental documentary that scratches an itch that younger folks might not even know they have.
Community is also the driving concern of Natalie Rae and Angela Patton’s “Daughters,” a documentary that played at Sundance earlier this year that is now streaming on Netflix. The film is about the Daddy Daughter Dance, a program that Patton initiated in Richmond and which has expanded to Washington, D.C. and other cities, allowing incarcerated men to interact with their daughters for a special four-hour event.
Rae and Patton alternate between the fathers and the children as the event approaches, instilling in everyone involved a mixture of excitement and dread. The men have to complete a class in prison, which appears to bear a resemblance to group therapies concerned particularly with anger management. They discuss their feelings in a setting that discourages vulnerability, while the daughters and their mothers prepare to face fathers that some of the girls haven’t even met.
The personal meets the political in “Daughters,” as primordial issues of parents and children are informed by the fraught legacy of our country’s incarceration complex. “Daughters” would pair well with Jairus McLeary’s visceral and extraordinary 2017 prison documentary “The Work.”
“Alien: Romulus” is in theaters everywhere. “Daughters” is available on Netflix, and “It Came from Aquarius Records” is streaming for free on Tubi.
