Alien: Romulus (2024)

Alien: Romulus: I liked it and it worked, except for the bits that didn’t, three stars. Mark it down to two point five stars for the surprise cast member.

More? Okay strap in. Spoilers ahead. (BTW I did one of these for Prometheus too.)

Facehuggers… why’d it have to be facehuggers?

Right about the middle of the film there’s a set piece that pays off the swarms of facehuggers we saw earlier on. They’re sitting around like scorpions and our heroes need to get through the room. What to do? Lets infer they hunt by heat and sound (sure, they don’t have eyes, why not) and then we just need to make the room body temp (ugh that would suck) and walk real slow and quiet.

And they do. And the facehuggers sit around, tensing up when the characters gasp at a dead body or scrape against furniture. Slowly, slowly through this room… it’s a good tense sequence, a thoroughly engaging moment. Don’t breathe or they get you.

But it’s also, on a deeper level, kind of inert. It takes the nightmare of a spidery alien thing that latches on to your face, and makes it a video game obstacle. It’s tense, but not uncertain: the idea is good so it’s obviously going to work, and it’s obvious they’re not going to keep it going all the way because that wouldn’t be exciting, so you’re just waiting for the moment when they drop the ball and run and just make it, because it’s obviously not time for any of these characters to die. And so it proves. But the development and resolution to this set piece, while absolutely matching expectations, is executed well so you have to respect it anyway.

That’s Alien: Romulus. Make exactly the right moves, the safe moves, match the temperature. Then a mad sprint for the end.

The Stars My Destination

But morgue what did you THINK of it??

I liked the babby.

I liked the ship manoeuvring around the facility to different airlock connection points.

I liked the solves: Rain’s smart ideas in desperate situations.

I liked the cold equations. That was a game that felt new, even though it was using old material, going right back to Alien. (But here’s a trick: in Alien, Ripley was the one who refused to open the door. In this film, Rain was desperate to open it. What the significance!)

I liked the characters. Cailee Spaeny’s Rain was a nervy centre of gravity and David Jonsson’s Andy was superbly layered. The wider ensemble were perhaps thinly drawn, but also engaging and well-performed, even the requisite Annoying One. 

I liked how they were believably smart, and they made good choices. The characters are teenagers but they’re not dumb teenagers. (I also note that the perplexingly widespread view that a proper alien film needs middle-aged protagonists disappeared without trace on the day of release.) They take risks but they’re, mostly, not foolish risks, they’re reactions to a desperate situation.

I loved the mining colony. Perfect.

And there were plenty of grace notes that felt sweet on the screen. Walking in bare feet on the sand in the cargo bay. Seeing the sun for the first time. The moment that quietly revealed the identity of the baby’s father. 

It delivered a solid story with proper stakes and I was on board the whole way. I liked it and it worked,

except for the bits that didn’t.

(It was an Alien film with too much Alien film in it.) 

(We’re not going to disturb anything. We are exactly the same temperature. We’re taking every single step with such great care. Don’t you see this is exactly what you want?)

Three stars.

i contain multitudes (derogatory)

Me: I just want creators to take big swings! To do stuff we haven’t seen before, to try and go to new places, even if it doesn’t work I want to see it!

Me after seeing Prometheus: not like that

Me after seeing the Romulus trailer: squeeeee

Me after seeing Romulus: huh. Hmm. huh.

factor analysis

The setup is this: a bunch of scientists set up a space lab to study the aliens, to try and domesticate them, and of course they end up getting absolutely monstered as the creatures run rampant and kill everyone. The film is actually about the folks on an independent ship crew who get caught up in the mess because they were willing to cut corners and end up buying a lot more trouble than they bargained for. Soon they have to find a way from one side of the infested station to the other, as time ticks down on them. There’s an ambiguously heroic synthetic, alien underwater POV shots, and a major set piece in an elevator shaft, but the final act of the film swerves in a completely different direction with the birth of a human/alien hybrid baby, pale and tall and weird as hell. Then it gets sucked through an acid hole into space, and the survivors get to contemplate an entirely new life together.

I am of course describing Alien Resurrection (yes I know you guessed it at line one shush). Alien Romulus is a remake of Alien Resurrection, and an accidental one, it seems, from some of Fede Alvarez’s comments. Which is fascinating, right? Because it shows that the water flowing downhill from Alien and Aliens leads to a consistent place!

Personal anecdote of relevance: In December 1997 I coordinated a big roleplaying game event set in the Aliens universe TM. A bunch of scientists had set up a space lab to study the aliens, and of course they got absolutely monstered as the creatures run rampant and kill everyone, the folks on an ethically shady independent ship crew had to find their way from one side of the infested station to the other time ticks down major set piece in elevator shaft ambiguously heroic synthetic ALL OF IT WAS THERE (except the babby). A bunch of us who were part of the game went to see Alien Resurrection on its NZ release one month after the game and there was widespread amusement that so much of what we’d created turned up there too. 

But it’s not a surprise, it’s just what follows from Alien and Aliens and Alien 3. It’s what has to follow. The scientists finally get the alien and it kills them and then i guess some nice people need to go across a spaceship. And maybe there’s a babby. 

(Prometheus did not do this. It did not follow from Alien and Aliens and Alien 3. It is best understood as a remix in which the big horseshoe from Alien was in fact an attempt to assassinate Jesus.)

(No, really, that’s actually the plot of Prometheus.)

This film tries to follow the water-downhill path from the Prometheus stuff too, but it couldn’t assassinate Jesus a second time so surprise, it ends up with Babby again. (GIANT BABBY! We’ve made TOO MUCH NOISE and the facehuggers know we’re here RUN RUN RUN FOR THE END!!)

So this feels promising! We have the messy data of Alien being resolved down to distinct variables. We’ve solved it, the true meaning, this is a star map, and it points the way to – no wait wrong film – this is the distilled core of Alien, the special juice, the black goo – no DAMMIT – 

Another day older and deeper in debt

FILMMAKER: I want to explore the nature of humanity itself in the context of a hostile universe and strange alien life inimical to our own, and the ways in which our own societies enact and succumb to structures that treat us with the same indifference,

THE STUDIO, ENTHUSIASTIC: yes and then something burst out of chest?

A few years ago a Kiwi journalist sparked a big round of twitter discourse by wondering if Alien was a horror film. I said it was, but only because of the company sending the workers into danger. Otherwise it was a science fiction film with monsters. This argument was not mounted in entirely serious fashion, but it has something serious at its core: the Alien film series is about work.

It’s about working a shitty job for a big company, it’s about working as a soldier and going where you’re told, it’s about working at a prison with nowhere else to go, it’s about working freelance and taking dubious contracts that eventually bite you in the arse. The alien is just an expression of the bosses failing to take your safety seriously.

(Prometheus, of course, is also about work, presenting the answer to the question “What if everyone was highly paid but extremely bad at their jobs?”)

(Alien Covenant is not about work, that film is about “what if two Michael Fassbenders kissed?”)

Alien Romulus begins on a mining colony that is a grimy, crowded nightmare of industrial labour exploitation. Rain is an indentured worker, trying to earn her way out of the planet. The company can just change the terms of the deal. It’s brutal, and honestly it feels like an excessive caricature until you remember, like, history. 

So this is the Alien film most about work since the first one. But really it isn’t actually that much about work? That’s the context for the desperation of the protagonists but it doesn’t really shape the narrative other than that. Rain doesn’t actually do any work that we see, and it’s not clear what the crew of the Corbelan do either. This mining outpost seems incredibly cut off from anywhere, nine years from resupply, and beset by illness and lack of care that mean workers die easily. More tellingly, there’s a super-strong robot on a hard-labour work site where everyone keeps getting sick, and it is left in a junk heap because *checks notes* it reliably follows simple instructions? These are details, little handwaves that make the plot go, but they feel off. You have the company in the mining colony trying to get the most value from everyone, you have deadlines and quotas and warnings, you have Andy overexploited not derided, you have someone take notice that a hauler is burning a bunch of fuel on an unauthorised mission… that’s how you make it about work. And Romulus doesn’t.

Look who’s talking now

Alien isn’t about WORK you idiot it’s about REPRODUCTION. It’s about hard organs penetrating orifices and vulval openings and something alive kicking the inside of your ribs. It’s a man having a nightmare imagining what if he was pregnant instead of his wife. It’s about the irreducibly gross content of our bodies, all that bone and intestine and teeth, and how that’s what life is, and what if we remixed life so it was just bone and intestine and teeth, what would that look like, oof, pretty freaky, *riiiip* 

There are two babies in this film. Three female characters and two of them give birth. There’s also a weird bit where the annoying guy sticks an instrument into the giant alien vagina and tries to electrocute what’s inside it which is, i’m pretty sure, not actually a political commentary but it felt pretty weird.

The big babies then eat their mums. 

So this is the Alien film most about reproduction since the first one. But really it isn’t actually that much about reproduction? The baby in the lady is a motivation to go see the sunrise/to open the door PLEASE, but the biggest plot clang in the movie is when Kay decides to inject herself with black goop because the weird android who just let her get taken by monsters said it might be useful, when Rain who she trusts was like NO DON’T. The film could have sold this beat, but they didn’t take the time to do so. If Kay is struggling to get to cryo, bleeding out, her body failing her, she’s fading on the floor everything going blurry and she touches her belly because that’s her motivation not to give up and THEN she takes the goop and injects it and with that coursing through her system she rises up and SURGES to the cryo chambers… An easy solve. Its absence is just another of the ways this is all not deeply felt. It doesn’t feel right.

See also Navarro’s experience as a host for an alien creature. She gets grabbed by a facehugger, it gets yanked off her but maybe she’s already got one inside her? She and Bjorn make a break for it then, what, six or seven minutes later there’s something coming out of her chest?

The rapid gestation time of the alien is very different to what was presented in the first three films (although in Alien Resurrection a similarly rapid gestation was seen, there’s that film again). Obviously, this process needs to move at the speed of the plot: Romulus is on a tight countdown, and you can’t do a slow gestation that fits. (A famous deleted scene from Aliens was removed for this exact reason.) And you know what? It doesn’t actually matter that it’s different. Let it be different! Gestation time of an alien creature is the kind of detail that should not be held sacred, it does not need to be slabbed in canonical perspex! Except.

The problem with a rapid gestation time is it undermines the whole sensibility of this kind of body horror. Maybe just at a subconscious level, but still in a way that can be felt. The horror of the facehugger laying an embryo inside you and that bursting out your chest isn’t just that something’s in your throat and then something punches out your ribcage, it’s that you are a host for this thing. It is using you, parasitising you, growing from you, using you as part of its own reproductive cycle. Kane was so hungry, but apart from that he seemed fine to everyone, even to himself. That’s part of it, that’s important.

The incredibly short embryo time is a dramatic necessity to make the thrill ride work, but it takes away the sense of process. Gestating inside the body for less than ten minutes? What can any organism get out of that? Sure, black goo accelerated life cycles accumulating mass from the air itself etc., but it feels wrong. It feels weightless. Navarro should feel hungry. Her baby should use her, not just wreck her. That’s how you make it about reproduction. And Romulus doesn’t.

Okay fine so what is it about then mr clever brain

The company creates a gigantic and incredibly well-resourced space station science analysis centre and conducts elaborate experiments there that could change the nature of human existence

And then it goes wrong and whoops i guess that’s the end, it just floats there and is forgotten, no distress beacon no company ship going to investigate no automated check in noone who knew about it and wanted to go find it nothing, “Well it was a secret project” but even secret projects like EXIST “and then they lost it because it was so far away in space” well yes but why would you set up your secret project nine years or whatever from company oversight that makes no sense you can put a space station anywhere you’d make it more accessible than that just for supplies, “harumph harumph it drifted” ok yes that explains everything except doesn’t the film begin with a mission that manages to find one Nigerian visual artist floating in the vastness of space, even if he is nearly 7 feet tall that signals a bit of commitment to finding things that are drifting,

And the facehugger chestburster timeline, and Andy being ignored, and the crew just being able to fly up there without anyone noticing, and how does any of this square with Aliens, if this whole Romulus thing has happened and the company not only got an alien it managed to breed and cryo store huge numbers of aliens and figured out how to synthesise the black goo out of them, it did the full science and won the prize ring and hit the hammer to ding the gong, if this all happened BUT THEN a bit later on Carter Burke and Ellen Ripley are facing off over whether the same company will get its hands on an alien… doesn’t that make those stakes, the ones in Aliens, the ones Ripley sacrifices herself for in Alien 3, doesn’t it make them feel a bit…silly?

When you start looking at it, all of it, carefully, none of it makes sense, not without a lot of special pleading. That’s the problem with plugging stuff into gaps. When you have a gap, and you stick something into the gap, if you zoom in you have just created a bunch of new gaps all around the thing filling the gap. (I think this is called ZeNo More Gap’s paradox.) (No More Gaps is a popular gap filling product here in New Zealand, this is a very good joke, thank you.) (If you think the joke should be Xeno’s Paradox you have committed a nerd reference and you have to sit in the corner.)

So why plug this story into the gap between Alien and Aliens? Nothing in Romulus needs to be before Aliens. Right? All of it could come later. All of it. But it’s in between. So why do it whyyaa]ggh

we must hold godfather part 2 responsible

FILMMAKER: We begin in deep space, the cold expanse of stars, and a space-travelling ship enters our field of view, its metal curvature and hard corners a mighty achievement of humankind, our ambition reaching so very far yet dwarfed and humbled by the immensity of 

THE AUDIENCE, EAGER: when does burst a chest tho

There have been five* films with gigerian (please pronounce both gs as in GIF) aliens in them since Alien Resurrection, and a new TV show on the way, and every one of them is set in the past.

*no i’m not going to talk about those two**

**they are in fact in a separate continuity***

***hahaha sob no really they are officially in a separate continuity and if you know what “in a separate continuity” means i’m so so sorry we have to sit in the corner with the other nerds

Five films and a telly series gone backwards. Plus the only one of the video games anyone ever cared about. backwards. (some of the other video games do go forward but only by a tiny tiny increment so you can also be colonial marines shooting aliens wheeeee)

So much backward. What makes it so hard to go forward?

Here’s part of the answer: the aesthetic attractions of the original. Setting Romulus between Alien and Aliens gives you unselfconscious access to the design specifics of those films. When you see in a five star review of Romulus the phrase “all the love and care that went into it” it means “they made the console buttons big and chunky and different colours like in Alien and they used the pulse rifle sound effect like in Aliens”.

Here’s another part of the answer: fandom, in the aggregate, doesn’t want to go forward, it wants to plug gaps. It wants to mark out the edges of the Thing Fanned, then fill every tiny inch of it with precise/baroque detail, expunging all ambiguity and uncertainty. Full perfection will be achieved when the Thing Fanned is completely explicated, when no CinemaSins video is possible. In 1977 the clone wars was a phrase that fired the imagination and imbued everything with rich potential, and in 2024 the clone wars is an incredibly dense page on wookiepedia. Of course Full Conceptual Saturation can never be achieved, see ZeNo More Gaps’s paradox above, ah but the journey! Also the very important business of complaining online when it seems like stuff from outside the edges might get in, like yuuzhan vongs or woke.

Here’s the biggest part of the answer though: Alien is a bad IP.

I do not like Alien Day you cannot make me like it

Alien is a phenomenal film. It puts a great character in a vivid environment facing off against an extremely memorable creature. Everyone thought it was brilliant. Let’s do another one. 

Unfortunately, that construction doesn’t allow for an easy sequel. If you want to keep the great character, how do you contrive them back into the same narrative? If you keep the creature, does it just do the same stuff all over again to a new bunch of spaceship dwellers? Sure it’s not easy like Star Wars 2 where you just say Darth Vader builds another death star, but come on it’s not rocket science, look at Jaws 2! Roy Scheider vs A Shark Again! And pretty soon we’ll have Jaws 3 and Jaws 4 and the idea of the eternal Jaws franchise is so obvious and undeniable that it’ll be the premise of a hilarious visual gag in the hugely popular sequel to the hit family film about mummy-son incest vibes! 

So we’re gonna do Alien Twosies and it’s going to be great!

(SIDETRACK: The only good franchise IPs are about JOBS. If it’s a job, you can keep making new stories. If the story is an interruption to a job (Alien) then repeating it is going to be hard work. Good job IPs in films:

  • James Bond (Bond’s job is to stop the new villain with the crazy plan)
  • Mission Impossible (Tom Cruise’s job is to stop the new villain with the crazy plan)
  • Friday the 13th (Jason’s job is to kill all the new people who came to Crystal Lake)
  • Knives Out (Daniel Craig’s accent’s job is to solve a fiendishly deceptive murder mystery)

No doubt you’ve noticed that this is also the recipe for like 90% of scripted television. The format is called the procedural: medical shows where you try and save this week’s patient, detective shows where you solve this week’s mystery, lawyer shows where you try and win this week’s case, navy intelligence shows where you do whatever navy intelligence people do i’ve never watched any of those.

In general understanding: film is not meant to do procedurals. Film is meant to chronicle a transformative journey, an epic experience for a protagonist that leaves them forever changed, we know this because of the three holy books Hero’s Journey, Save the Cat, Story. Procedurals, with fundamentally static characters, are for TV and similar pathetic and weak and disgusting narrative formats. (Mission Impossible was a TV series. James Bond was a series of novels. Knives Out was inspired by series novels.) But if film is to be Intellectual Property That We Can Exploit Forever then that means it needs always sequels. This is the way of the world. Imagine that I build out this idea into a big elaborate joke making a parallel between the film where the Company exploits the aliens and here where the company exploits Aliens and I do such a good job that you laugh and also stroke your chin, why he made me laugh but also he made me think. SIDETRACK OVERRR)

Aliens matches the original because Jim Cameron came up with a whole bunch of fantastic ideas on which to hang a sequel and instead of choosing one he did all of them. He gave the good guys guns, he added a kid, he added a new big monster, he made it about Ripley overcoming the trauma of the first film, he advanced its thematic focus from childbirth to motherhood. (He also did this develop many good ideas use all of them schtick for Terminator 2. Please do note though one of his big ideas for Rambo 2 was “John Travolta as comedy sidekick” so they’re not all winners Jim.)

Anyway that’s how we got an incredible sequel to an incredible original, a brilliant follow-up that demonstrated sequels can go on forever and then we can make merchandise of the IP and every year on a special day that only makes sense as a film reference if you do your calendar the wrong way around like the USA insists on doing, on that special day we’ll release like some art prints and bobble head dolls!

Then there was Alien 3.

Cute kid autopsy scene

Everyone hated Alien 3, including everyone who made Alien 3, except me. Its reputation has been rehabilitated over the decades since and while it remains controversial a lot more people accept that I was right all alo^H^H^H see it as a good film now. The thing that upset people was that it felt like a careless and inconsiderately callous rejection of the hopeful conclusion to Aliens. And it wasn’t that: instead, it was a careful and considerately callous rejection of the hopeful conclusion to Aliens.

Alien Cubed’s bleakness makes Alien and Aliens fall into line with it as a coherent, if confrontational, tryptich. Alien depicts a horrific world where human life is worthless and unwelcome; Aliens depicts the same but still ends on a hopeful note with trauma overcome and a happy family of survivors blasting off to safety; and Alien 3 says nah remember the first one and even the bulk of the second one, the logic of this world is very clear, that hopeful note Jim ended on was too convenient because in fact and properly, everything is fucked, and let’s really lean into it and fulfil the promise made in both earlier films, and whoops it turns out the only thing you really can do is try to die right. So let’s all die.

Note that this trilogy forms an inversion of the story structure to which we are most accustomed from the three sacred texts Journey, Save the Story, and The Hero’s Cat: things are kinda ok, then things get really bad, and then through meeting the challenge things end up settled and good. Here, things are bad, and then through meeting the challenge things end up settled and good, but then they end up really really bad, THE END.

Given the development hell of Alien 3, my favourite factoid being at one point they had spent more than the entire budget of Aliens and they still didn’t have a single page of script they could shoot, given that chaos it’s a miracle it was about anything at all. But it was. My theory is that the emotional logic was so powerful that once the idea was in place there was no getting away from it, and it was just a matter of going there. Which is of course just the same as the film.

Alien 3 is a sequel that gathers up every implication of ‘Intellectual Property’ and chucks it into the molten lead furnace. There Is No Story Universe Here. The Alien films are about humanity encountering what’s out there and dying and it sucks and nothing comes after this. THE END. 

Then came Alien Resurrection, which was the first fanfiction Alien film.

They don’t let the alien wear a tuxedo any more because of woke

GAME MASTER: Tonight we are playing the Alien roleplaying game! We begin in a dive bar on a crowded colony world. The bartender nods, “Evening friends,” he begins,

PLAYERS, ENGAGED: We aim every weapon we have at his chest and get ready for something to burst out of it

In 1997 Dark Horse Comics had the Aliens license and they published a story in Aliens Special #1 by horror author Nancy A Collins that was a very amusing pastiche of Lovecraftiana, pasting the Mythos into an Aliens space colony context and identifying the jijerian creature with Mr Cthulhu and his friends. It was a joke told very well, and of course as any fule kno, also a friendly nod to the long-admitted influence of Lovecraftian ideas on the first Alien film. Very well done.

Alien has a canon now. Did you know that? A carefully maintained canon that says what happened in which year of future history and what planets are where and how the video game things interact with the elements of the unmade William Gibson script, for it incorporates, as well as the movies, all the new novels and video games and comic books and with a stretch it also incorporates all the other comic books and games and unmade William Gibson scripts and random paraphernalia from the past.

There’s a game, Alien The Role Playing Game, and it’s definitively part of the canon, and in one of the game books it catalogues the universe, and the Nancy A Collins planet is there, the Lovecraft joke planet is there, it’s part of the canon, it’s in continuity, officially when you watch Alien officially and canonically somewhere off screen there’s some canonical guys in robes and they are canonically chanting TU LI TU!

This makes me wince.

What does anyone gain from this? What does this give the audience? What is the point of canon?

The Sherlock Holmes canon shenanigans were created as a game, approached in good spirits with a wink and a nudge, and the satisfaction was in playing it cleverly and well. I like also to think of my friend Jon Preddle and his ridiculous/glorious Timelink project in which he assembles a full coherent continuity of Doctor Who, which mission he undertook for the brain-bending fun of it because of course Doctor Who’s approach to continuity is to lovingly point at the past and then immediately contradict it. That stuff is fun.

But an Alien canon, into which everything falls or doesn’t, an official future timeline? 

The point of canon is that fans like how it feels, but when they like that feeling over and over and over, it makes everything *smaller*. And it’s already small because the thing the punters pay to see is the chest being burst open by this one specific alien species. So the canon becomes an entire universe consisting of repeated encounters, over and over, like a wallpaper pattern.

This is how we end up with Amanda Ripley as an active character (IMO the worst idea anyone has ever had in connection with the Alien films and I include the Kenner toys in this). This is how we end up with a whole novel about the Vasquez character from Aliens called Aliens Vasquez. This is how we end up with Alien Romulus with chunky buttons and the pulse rifle sound effect and Andy saying Get away from her you bitch 37 years before Ripley says it. Worst of all, this is how we end up with a bad face swap animation of Ian Holm in his Ash costume saying “perfect organism” over and over. (Deducting half a star, but no shade to Ian Holm’s estate, get that bag why not.)

All of this, the canon, the references, the godforsaken face swap animation, all of it could be cut from this film and none of it would be missed. None of it is load bearing. It’s all extraneous, it’s all there to scratch that itch. It’s there because Alien is a story universe with fans now more than it is a film named Alien (and a film named Aliens and even a film named Alien Cubes). And it takes this film and makes it slow when it should be swift. It hurts this film. And it is all the more frustrating because it’s such an unforced error.

But apart from that I liked it.

(Okay also the black goo/meaning of life stuff is a story element that fights against the format of a “claustrophobic slasher house” horror, as both Prometheus and Covenant discovered, and Ian Holm saying it’s a miracle cure isn’t enough to fix that here.)

(I wanted moments of silence. I wanted the camera to gaze upon the alien creatures, instead of taking them for granted, I wanted to see the characters take a breath.)

(Facehuggers have the ability to acid their way through barriers, which we saw in the literal first seconds in Alien when facehuggers were introduced with the critter melting right through Kane’s faceplate, so when that one scared Rain at the window but just scrabbled there… but Jim Cameron waved that off in Aliens too so, fine.)

(The x-ray torch gets used precisely once and it would be better if it was just in the teenager ship all along it didn’t need an intro scene.)

(Apart from THAT I liked it.)

This book belongs to _____

“The Alien universe is a richly designed and expansive science fiction possibility space where all human endeavour and frailty has stretched out across the galaxies, an imagined future channelled through the deeply grounded and inimitable industrial design work of such luminaries as Ron Cobb and Moebius and imperial-phase Jim Cameron, but with a particular interest in the point of view of the humble ordinary worker as opposed to heroic explorers or leaders who often become the focus of narratives in such imaginative environments; as such it is uniquely positioned to provide a humane and relatable engine for unbounded storytelling. Also in every story a little phallus with teeth gotta burst out of someone’s chest.” – The Official Alien Publications Guide and Story Bible, presumably

I have a children’s storybook about ants, called Cyberantics. It’s about a scientist who creates a clever robot ant and sends it into an ant hill to learn all about ant society. “What a fine little ant,” the scientist says at the end. At the back of the book, there’s a biography of the author, and it’s a bit weird, because it turns out he was born in 2131.

This book is an Alien book from the story universe of Alien. Alien Romulus didn’t have to be this way. 

Romulus isn’t about anything except the Alien films, plus that jarring bit at the end when it’s about the Prometheus films, and it is built to desperately display that aboutness, barreling the camera flop sweat wink to reassure the fans that it can be trusted do you hear this bit of music it is from one of the previous movies, as if that will keep the facehuggers calm.

It’s doing Alien very well but it’s also about Alien, and that means there’s too much Alien in this Alien film, Alien-ness on all sides, crowding everywhere, all that matters is to think about the Alien, so don’t breathe, stay calm, and step in exactly the right places. The room is the same temperature as you. 

and also

the title of the first film 

is an adjective.

Why there are no sequels to The Terminator (1984)

The only Terminator film that could ever exist

I had a lovely time watching The Terminator with the 13yo. (Who is categorically too young for this film, but actually not really, except for the sex scene which is never something you want to watch with your Dad and the skip forward button may have been deployed by them at that point.)

I noted something that hadn’t stood out to me before: the story is entirely and definitionally complete. You know everything that happens by the end of it. (That is: computer nukes the planet and proceeds to try to exterminate humanity, humanity fights back led by brave leader John Connor, machines are defeated, but just as humanity wins the machines send a killer back in time to change history.) The entire future history is defined; the only question mark is whether it can be changed. The film shows that it cannot, and in fact (by way of a bootstrap paradox) it never could have been.

The Terminator‘s narrative is a perfect and complete circle. It leaves no questions unanswered, and no space for any sequel. The war with the machines is done! It’s a brilliant piece of science fiction writing that successfully tells a complete future history mostly through a series of chase scenes in the 1980s.

And that’s why there was no sequel to this cult hit film. How could there be? Creator Jim Cameron did too good a job with the construction of his film, and left no avenues open for further exploration. How foolish!

Breaking: i am advised there somehow HAVE been sequels to the terminator 1984 ?? seems fake ?

So it seems someone released a film called Terminator 2 Judgement Day after The Terminator? A sequel? And apparently one of the most commercially and critically successful sequels in cinema history? Hmm. How?

T2, as it was styled, managed the seeming impossible because director/writer/auteur Jim Cameron is very very VERY good at what he does. To make a decent sequel to The Terminator, you need a very strong new idea, and Cameron understood this. In fact, I would argue he managed to thread the needle with T2 because he didn’t just stop at one good idea: instead, he had no less than five separate strong new ideas, each of which could have been the basis for a decent sequel by itself.

Strong New Idea One: What if we make a sequel to The Terminator but this time Linda Hamilton isn’t playing the resourceful ordinary person, instead she’s a full-on action star, holding space like Arnie and Sly do in their big films?

Strong New Idea Two: What if we make a sequel to The Terminator and we build the concept of the enemy robot around an entirely new form of special effects that no-one on the planet has ever seen before?

Strong New Idea Three: What if we make a sequel to The Terminator and we make the point of view character a kid so it’s kind of a Spielberg/Goonies action adventure? (To be fair this one is not necessarily a good idea but it is the kind of strong new idea that you can build a sequel around so.)

Strong New Idea Four: What if we make a sequel to The Terminator and Arnold plays the robot again but this time he’s a good guy?

Strong New Idea Five: What if we make a sequel to The Terminator and it’s all about whether the foundational concept of the first film, that the future is set and therefore no sequels are possible, can be broken?

Jim Cameron was the right kind of maniac at the right time, and T2 absolutely justifies its existence as a result. But also, it kind of closes off the space for strong new ideas. Where else can you take The Terminator as an idea? A bunch of sequels followed but none of them had enough strong new ideas to stand tall. Some of them didn’t have any strong new ideas at all (I think, I haven’t watched a single one of them all the way through).

Tentative proposal, then: to make a truly great sequel, you can’t get by with just one good idea executed well, you need a whole stack of good ideas executed well. I think if you look at the acknowledged Great Sequels – Godfather 2, Toy Story 2, Aliens, Empire Strikes Back – and compare them to the acknowledged Well I Guess This Also Exists Sequels – [too many to list] – this will be seen to be true.

But I’m not going to write that blog post.

Thanks to Katherine H for the conversation that inspired this post!

Enjoying old stuff

Podcast Where Eagles Dare has returned to their loving, detailed coverage of 1980s British kids adventure comic Eagle with the dramatic moment of its merger with the long-lived Tiger. I remember it well from the first time around. I was 9 years old when this landed in NZ, and listening to the podcast describing these stories (and pulling out the issues from a box in the shed) brings me right back. I remember walking to the local newsagents where I had each issue put aside for me, I remember the shocking panels of death and destruction, and I remember the taste of the muesli bars with the little pieces of dried apricot that I’d eat while I flipped the pages.

I’m closing in on 50 now, so I’m the perfect age for nostalgia; indeed, it sometimes seems that the entire entertainment industry is tilted towards monetizing my generation’s hazy-fond memories of a simpler time. (Mostly I find that trend frustrating. The exceptions are, I think, instructive: Doctor Who never stopped (even when it was off TV) and has always operated on a healthy disrespect for its own past; Twin Peaks The Return delighted in thwarting any nostalgic impulse a viewer might have sought, resolving its past in a more profound way; Slayers operated as an act of redemption and penance for the failings of Buffy The Vampire Slayer; the Dungeons & Dragons movie was an honourable return to the deeper themes of the final episode of Freaks & Geeks.) Mostly, I’m not interesting in reboots and reimaginings and returns, but in the original material itself.

So, returning to the Eagle comic, and also enjoying dipping into old Doctor Who episodes, and The Twilight Zone and The Prisoner and classic Star Trek and more.

I suspect that my renewed interest in old stuff is partly due to the age of cultural overload in which we live. There is simply too much content these days. I long ago stopped trying to keep up. (In fact, I stopped trying to keep up in the 90s, I still haven’t seen Star Trek Deep Space Nine or The Sopranos.) But it’s not just that: there’s also something pleasant in the pace of this old material.

Old TV was created to a different plan, serving a different social need. It’s distant enough from the present, and I’m old enough now that I can disentangle it sufficiently from my own direct experience, so that I find part of the pleasure of old stuff is seeing the implied world created by what’s on screen.

When I watch old TV, it almost feels like I get to sit alongside a family gathered around their giant television at teatime, tuning in for the latest episode of a show they like. The old episodes invoke their own perfect audience. I get to experience the past, reflected on the screen.

There’s just so much there there, packed into the cultural products of the past. You can unfold so much from them (TV show as an unfolding text, one might even say). And when I watch or read things of which I have personal memories, like those comics, that historical moment is overlaid with personal sense memory. It’s a rich sensation. There’s an appeal to it, a kind of seeing-clearly, holding the weight of the past in a different way. It makes me more kindly disposed to the past, and to its denizens. They tried, we all tried, and they all just wanted to be scared by the slimy monsters Under The Mountain and laugh when Billy T James showed up for an incoherent cameo.

The golden age of science fiction is 12, and the golden age of music is 17, and there’s no mystery to me why we keep returning to these things as we age, why I go back to them now: we’re not done with them yet. The worlds and emotions and sensations created by art go deep, unfathomably deep. We’ll never touch bottom. I can return forever to Nirvana’s In Utero and Stephen King’s The Long Walk and Jim Cameron’s The Abyss and I’ll never scrape bottom. Other generations have their own touchstones that go just as deep, and I’ve been enjoying watching them, imagining the way they burrowed into the hearts of their era’s audience, but these are mine, and I’ll treasure them.

In Eagle & Tiger there’s a story about an alien who manufactured a plague to destroy humanity and was defeated but escapes death and sets about murdering everyone he meets. There’s also a story about an alien who comes to earth to ride a BMX because BMXs are cool. And that’s just the way it should be.

Doctor Who: Tennant outcome

In December 2022 I wrote about the surprising return of David Tennant to Doctor Who, and made a prediction about the theme RTD wanted to explore:

It is my expectation that this return to the role of Doctor is explicitly intended as a continuation of this thread: RTD will frame this as the Doctor’s own psyche giving himself a chance to resolve his resentment and frustration, come to terms with the end of his time as Doctor, and to accept his final regeneration with positivity (just as the 13th Doctor managed to do).
So I think we will see the marvellous Bernard Cribbins (RIP) again, as it was his life Tennant’s Doctor died to save beforehand. And I think his Doctor’s final line will be a satisfying rejoinder to the words that ended his previous incumbency:
“I’m ready to go.”

What we got in November 2023 was:

DONNA
Never mind that. Just mend
yourself and come back fighting
fit. Cos the whole world needs
you, more than ever.
THE DOCTOR
It’s time. Here we go again.
(final words)
Allons-y.

Close enough!

(Source: the amazing Whoniverse section of the BBC script repository)

Jurassic Park (USA, 1993)

Introduced the School Beastie to Jurassic Park. (Long overdue because she loves the Dinosaur Island board game which is exactly the same idea. Yes she still mostly beats me when we play.)

When I watched JP on its opening weekend in ‘93 I walked out thinking that it felt like it was a fantastic movie that was missing its final reel. Watching it again for the first time in decades, I still feel the same. The T-Rex taking out the velociraptors is a great resolution to that threat but it’s not a great ending for the movie.

I want some final beat that…

…turns the T-Rex back towards the main characters as a final challenge (the first half of the movie sets it up as the main monster, and you get two great confrontations, but that’s it! The two further appearances where it wanders onscreen and eats another dinosaur don’t satisfy the rule of three!

…gives Ellie a final hero moment – after being an absolute badass the whole film, she becomes kind of invisible once she and Alan are reunited. She’s got nothing more to prove of course, but letting her sit in the background is a bit disrespectful to everything the film’s done with her so far. This could also rhyme with the earlier bit where Ellie and Hammond argue over who should go fix the power, which sets up Hammond –

…sees Hammond taking responsibility in a serious way – i.e. by moving to sacrifice his own life to save the others, showing the effect Ellie’s call-out had on him. His lines of dialogue in the current film just don’t carry much weight and underline the theme which is all about the arrogance of humanity (i.e. specifically his).

…has Malcolm somehow saving Hammond’s life. Malcolm is ridiculously brave in the first T-Rex attack and then does nothing apart from look sexy. What he does can’t be a physical action – he has to save the day through the application of chaos. He takes a big chance, and it works out, the audience will forgive the contrivance – in fact they’ll embrace it because he talked about the butterfly effect at the start of the film. (And he’s gotta save Hammond, can’t traumatise his grandkids any further by letting him actually die!)

…and Grant doesn’t need to do anything, nor do the kids, they’ve finished their arcs. Grant just comes face to face with the final threat, and instinctively reaches out and takes Lex’s hand to reassure her, rhyming with the bit early on where Lex takes his hand and he is uncomfortable about it.

(My own contribution to the theme of the arrogance of humanity is that I think I can give notes to a beloved Steven Spielberg film. 😝)

Great fun nonetheless.

Jumping Sundays (Nick Bollinger, 2022)

I was riveted by this Ockham-nominated history of the counterculture in Aotearoa NZ. It’s a chunky, sweeping account on an era of social and cultural history when the young Boomer generation started unbuttoning the starchy shirt of NZ rugby-and-church conformity to make room for sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Nick Bollinger is a great writer, mustering a huge amount of research, interviews, first-hand recollections and reflective analysis into a very layered story without every losing hold of the narrative. I knew some of the major beats, but there were revelations for me on almost every page. There’s a Goldilocks effect here from the size of this country, large enough to chart its own complex journey through the broadening of culture underway around the world, but also small enough that its path can be mapped in a book like this. The same names recur across multiple chapters, and different kinds of influence can be readily tracked.

It’s also assembled in a crafty way. A notable example is that only as the book goes on does it expand its focus to the collective experiences of women, Māori, and Pasifika, who were all in different ways alienated from the main course of the counterculture’s flow, and ultimately implicating this failure of diversity in the counterculture’s demise and its mixed legacy.

It’s a great read. Don’t miss the discography/playlist tucked away at the end.

West Side Story (1961) with the NZSO

My view from the top!

On Saturday night I was lucky enough to see West Side Story (1961) with all the music performed live by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Tremendous! The NZSO sounded amazing, unsurprisingly, although there were some slight issues with the film sound (the singing was great – quite a technical feat to get it all lined up with the music! – but for some reason the dialogue sound was sometimes a bit hollowed out and occasionally even a beat out of sync. Never mind, it didn’t spoil the fun!)

West Side Story is still as grand and affecting as ever, deservedly iconic. On this viewing I particularly appreciated how the whole plot tumbles out of the setup with such beautiful momentum, building speed as it closes in on the tragic inevitability of the rumble and then the conclusion.

Not sure how much of a hot take this is, but I think this 1961 film’s two big changes from the stage version are both solid improvements. First up, putting Bernardo in the ‘America’ song is fantastic – giving Bernardo some clear focus, foregrounding his relationship with Anita, and rewriting the lyrics to make the satire and critique of attitudes to Latino immigration even more pointed. Second, swapping the positions of the goofy ‘Officer Krupke’ number and the intense ‘Cool’ makes a huge amount of sense. You can kind of get away with ‘Krupke’ where it is on stage because disbelief is suspended just a shade further than screen, but tonally it makes so much more sense early on before shit goes down. Same with ‘Cool’ but in reverse.

There are lots of other minor changes for screen that also work well – beefing up Anybodys so they have more to do, creating a new character Ice (basically as an anchor for the Cool number) who gives Riff the stable support he was missing on stage, and giving the Jet girls a few crucial extra bits.

Unchanged from the stage: the dress shop pretend-marriage song, ‘One Hand One Heart’, remains a low-energy dull point that hurts the show. It’s slow and contemplative when the connection between the lovers should be running hot, and it’s a song without any dramatic mission – there’s no thrill or discovery in it, just a confirmation that, yup, they love each other now. It’s trying to sell the depth of their relationship but there’s not enough going on to do so, even though the song itself is lovely.

As Tony, Richard Beymer is a loveable lunk with a killer smile, but (like pretty much every other performer I’ve ever seen try this role) he doesn’t find a way to really make convincing the crucial turning point when Tony responds to Riff’s death by stabbing Bernardo. On this watch at least I could see some hints at rough edges I hadn’t noticed before, but that murder by our romantic leading man still takes some swallowing, especially as it commits even harder to the heightened reality of choreography fighting rather than breaking tone for a more realist note. (Compare for example the way the Jets abusing Anita underplays the choreographed style for most of that interaction, with much more satisfying results.) Still, you accept it because Shakespeare sold it in Romeo & Juliet.

It’s been cool to be mean about Natalie Wood for longer than I’ve been alive but I thought she was great in this, even though she didn’t sing and even though her accent was all over the place and even though she was playing out of her ethnicity. Crucially, she sells ‘love at first sight’, which is Maria’s narrative duty much more than Tony’s. (Tony mostly just has to turn up at her door smiling that smile.) Wood acts the hell out of the final moments too.

Anyway. Amazing flick. Looks great, wonderful stylised lighting, absolute control over each scene, dancing just delightful. Would watch again, even without a symphony orchestra.

Rita Moreno for queen of the world.

Doctor Who: Tennant Expectations

David Tennant’s encore in the TARDIS, as the opening salvo from returning showrunner Russell T Davies, is going to be entertaining TV for sure, but also interesting as storytelling.

(I’ve been chatting about this with various people for months, thought I might as well chuck it on the blog so my expectations can be tested against reality!)

RTD has always invited viewers to take a perspective on his writing – the wonderful book The Writer’s Tale, about his process in the later seasons of his last Doctor Who run, offer plenty of insight into his style. To put it simply, he’s a vibes guy, assembling story as a means to hit emotional beats and payoffs, and worrying about coherence and structure as very much secondary concerns.

In the years since he left DW he’s developed his craft further, hitting a peak with the simply marvellous It’s A Sin, which was aimed at emotional turning points but also had an extremely well-crafted narrative form, one that did not follow any standard structure but almost built out its plot from the needs of character. A remarkable piece of work by any measure, worthy of the acclaim that has been heaped on it.

So it’s interesting to speculate about what we will see in RTD’s second era of Who: what will be the well-crafted vibes this time out?

It’s known that the seed of the Tennant return, with Catherine Tate along as Donna, came from one of the lockdown Doctor Who rewatches where all three speculated about doing a return.

My guess is that this became a plan when RTD, having cast Ncuti Gatwa as his new Doctor, found he was staring down a full year of waiting before Gatwa could get out of other contracts and start in the role. With time to fill, a return to Tennant & Tate was right there on the table as an option.

But the idea of a fun reunion wouldn’t be enough for an RTD who had just achieved the highest highs of his chosen artform, and whose skill and reputation had never been higher. I think the motivation for RTD, in making this his opening statement back in the head office, is actually to speak back to his first run on the show, and return to certain decisions of the past, which is to say, certain vibes of the past.

One decision in particular is already featured in the trailer: Tate’s character Donna was left in the show with all memory of her adventures wiped away. This was an extremely controversial move, because the journey of her character had been greater than that of any other companion in the history of the show, and reverting her to a comedic bumbler did not honour her.

(Personally I had no problem with her sad ending, sometimes things just end badly, as RTD was pointing out. But I can understand why many viewers felt protective of Donna and were gutted by her final situation.)

It is clear that RTD is going to give Donna a happier ending this time out, where she can be fully herself again, living up to her potential. Not quite saying “I was wrong about that, sorry folks” – but definitely taking an opportunity to add some joy to the grand story of the show by undoing the sorrow he had once added.

I think that’s not all we’ll see along these lines. Tennant’s Doctor was always deeply flawed, and his final scenes saw him frustrated and angry at the circumstances of his demise, which came he thought too soon. Again, this left a bad taste in the mouths of many viewers, although it was very in keeping with the character RTD had steered for several years.

It is my expectation that this return to the role of Doctor is explicitly intended as a continuation of this thread: RTD will frame this as the Doctor’s own psyche giving himself a chance to resolve his resentment and frustration, come to terms with the end of his time as Doctor, and to accept his final regeneration with positivity (just as the 13th Doctor managed to do).

So I think we will see the marvellous Bernard Cribbins (RIP) again, as it was his life Tennant’s Doctor died to save beforehand. And I think his Doctor’s final line will be a satisfying rejoinder to the words that ended his previous incumbency:

“I’m ready to go.”

EDITED TO ADD: a relevant excerpt from Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale by Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook. As noted above, he’s not saying he was wrong about any of this, but he’s taking an opportunity to offer a new emotional experience by revisiting this.

Xmas Family Movie: The Monster’s Christmas (NZ, 1981)

The Girl and The Mountain Monster

Here is my warmest recommendation to you all this December: gather your family and sit down to enjoy classic piece of seasonal Kiwiana, the long-neglected monsterpiece The Monster’s Christmas (1981).

One hour of wildly imaginative hijinks shot through with kindness and humour, suitable for young and old, and free to watch online!

The Monster’s Christmas is a live-action fairy tale, about a thoughtful little girl on a fearsome quest to help a friendly monster. It’s kinda like Labyrinth without all that pubescent horny angst, just Ludo and Sir Dydimus and lots of kid’s theatre earnestness.

There is so much to recommend this crowd-pleasing show! Most memorably it’s a visual feast, with incredible monster costumes co-designed by legendary NZ cartoonist/impish humourist Burton Silver (Bogor).

It’s also a journey film, turning the diverse landscapes of Aotearoa New Zealand into a vivid and extensive fantasy world, two decades before Lord of the Rings pulled the same trick.

And it’s funny! The troublemaking witch gets most of the laughs, with beloved theatre/radio personality Lee Hatherley relishing being almost the only character with dialogue. The aerobics gags are very of their time but still work 40 years on!

And the whole thing is pulled together beautifully by director Yvonne Mackay (who would go on to be the first Kiwi woman to direct a feature film, The Silent One).

If I had my way, The Monster’s Christmas would go out on broadcast TV every Christmas Eve, and up and down the country we would gather in the living room and watch it together. A new tradition. I think we deserve this film that is silly and fun and sweet and so, so so weird.

Until that dream comes true, you’ll have to stage your own watching parties with your families! It’s complete on the NZ On Screen website in three parts:
https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/the-monsters-christmas-1981

YouTube has it too, their copy has brighter colours so might play better with kids: https://youtu.be/Nu8SacTNbV8

Enjoy!!

Aliens: How Burke takes his coffee

Jim Cameron’s Aliens (1986) is a meticulously-assembled thrill ride, absolutely loaded with enriching details. My favourite of all of them is in the coffee scene.

It’s early in the film, and Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) has returned to normal life after her horrific experiences in Alien. In this scene, the smiling corporate functionary Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) comes to ask for her help. With him is Lt. Gorman (William Hope) of the Colonial Marines. They try to persuade Ripley to return to the alien planet.

There is so much going on in this scene. Watch it closely:

As the characters talk, the main physical action of the scene is Ripley making coffee for the two men. She pours out two mugs (which are transparent – a lovely, and useful, piece of prop design) and hands black coffee, unsweetened, to these two intruders.

Then she goes and pours for herself. She stirs her cup, which suggests she has added sweetener, but she hasn’t offered any to these unwelcome guests.

Lt. Gorman stands straight-backed, holding his mug politely and without interest. He rests against a table for a time, but doesn’t really move. At the end of the encounter he thanks Ripley for the coffee, even though he hasn’t touched it.

Burke, meanwhile, sits down, stands up, walks past Ripley, walks back, sits again, talking talking talking the whole time. It wasn’t until I watched Aliens on the big screen that I realised what he was doing. He’s putting milk or cream in his mug! I love it. My favourite detail in the whole film!


This is, first and foremost, just some blocking, something to get the characters moving around the space so the scene doesn’t seem static. But the film really makes it work. Burke taking his coffee white is a great character detail, suggesting he shies away from undiluted intensity, especially compared with Ripley, who is living in an unfiltered world at this stage of the film. Look also at how he does it: Burke stands up, walks past Ripley into her kitchen without asking, helps himself to her kitchen supplies, and then parks himself back where he was. He’s not showing overt dominance here, he’s just acting like someone who is used to being able to do exactly what he wants, when he wants – a much more subtle and dangerous way of manipulating a situation.

There are plenty of other great details in the scene that fire up red flags about Burke: he sits down without asking, and when he sits down, he starts touching something of Ripley’s (an item of clothing I think), playing with it with his fingers until Ripley snatches it away from him. When he’s up again at the end, having pushed Ripley into an outburst of emotion, he tells her “shhhh”, and puts his hand on her arm, and whispers that he hopes, as a favour, she’d think about it. This is why you never really trust Burke; the film is throwing lots of subtle signals, over and over again, that he will not respect your boundaries and he will smile while he takes advantage of you. 

It’s actually an interesting move in terms of filmmaking – surely the obvious thing to do is have Burke be trustworthy from the start, so his heel turn comes as more of a shock? I feel like Cameron’s made the right call here though, letting the only surprise be the sheer scale of Burke’s mendacity rather than trying to force the audience into going against their instincts and trusting a company man. It also means we never have to compromise Ripley’s character by having her trust someone and be betrayed.

Interesting also to compare to the way you are made to feel about the Marines. The stink of untrustworthiness that Burke carries with him doesn’t spread to them; they might be on the same mission, they might have the same goal in this very scene, but the audience comes out of this sequence with a cautious trust in them that Burke is never afforded.

And some of that storytelling work is done with the colour of a mug of coffee.

I love this film.