Movie Review

Alien: Romulus brings back the true horror of the original film

Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson in Alien: Romulus.

The Alien franchise has turned out to be one of the most durable and malleable ones in movie history, with 2024 marking the 45th anniversary of the original 1979 film. Over the years it has been taken in different directions by a variety of filmmakers, including two ill-fated Alien vs. Predator spinoffs. With the latest film, Alien: Romulus, the series has returned to its true horror roots.

Taking place between the events depicted in Alien and Aliens, it centers on Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny), who lives on a remote mining colony in deep space. Desperate to get away from a place where the sun literally doesn’t shine, she takes up an offer from her group of friends – Tyler (Archie Renaux), Kay (Isabela Merced), Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Navarro (Aileen Wu) – to go to a decommissioned space station orbiting their planet, where they hope to find cryo chambers that will allow them to travel far away from home.

With the help of Rain’s “brother” – a synthetic being she’s nicknamed Andy (David Jonsson) – the group is able to infiltrate the dual-sided station, but soon discover that certain creatures are also on board. What follows is a dreadful cat-and-mouse game, with the group trying to evade the aliens at all costs, something that proves difficult due to their numbers and ability to quickly evolve.

Directed and co-written by Fede Alvarez, best known for horror films like Evil Dead (2013) and Don’t Breathe, the film is the most effective one in the series, from a pure horror aspect, since Aliens. While all of the non-spinoff films have relied on the terror that the aliens known as Xenomorphs bring, other filmmakers have chosen to either focus on other things or didn’t showcase them effectively.

Not so with Alvarez, who uses the claustrophobic confines of the ship to aid in the classic horror film structure. Having the group consist of 20-somethings gives viewers the familiarity of many earthbound scary films, as does that group featuring different personalities who often make questionable decisions. Additionally, the intensity and scale of the face-huggers and Xenomorphs, not to mention a good amount of gore, ups the fear factor exponentially.

Alvarez uses some clever storytelling devices – a faulty gravity sensor, the corrosiveness of the aliens’ blood – to add in some extra suspense. He also throws in a few references that pay tribute to the original films while still giving Romulus its own flavor, although one decision may prove to be a step too far for longtime fans. With the help of de-aging technology, an original character plays a key part in the film, although there doesn’t seem to be a legitimate reason for shoehorning that person into this particular story.

Spaeny is on a hot streak following her strong performances in Priscilla and Civil War, and she proves once again that her skills are adaptable to multiple genres. Jonsson nearly steals the film despite the fact that Andy speaks in a monotone. He gives the character a ton of nuance, making him into someone who’s alternately pitiable and abhorrent. The rest of the cast is solid, especially Merced, who still looks like Dora but delivers a mature performance.

Alien: Romulus makes the case that the franchise can continue indefinitely as long as it’s paired with filmmakers who know how to bring out the best in their casts and the well-known aliens. The series succeeds the most when horror is the focus, and this film has it in spades.

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Alien: Romulus opens in theaters on August 16.

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Movie Review

Comedy all-stars Jack Black and Paul Rudd can't save Anaconda sequel

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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