"Alien: Romulus" 4K Review

Almost as fraught as the Terminator franchise is the Alien franchise with the good-bad ratio decidedly in the red. After Ridley Scott's seminal Alien and James Cameron's genre-defining Aliens, the series suffered through David Fincher's disowned & meddled-to-death Alien 3, the worse-than-you-remember Alien Resurrection, and a pair of Alien vs. Predator movies no one talks about. Scott returned to the series with 2012's Prometheus which suffered from a disjointed script, but looks slick, and its far worse sequel Alien Covenant which was both stupid and a victim of being an Alien prequel which was stuck trying to meet up with the original's continuity despite a totally different aesthetic like how the garbage Star Trek: Discovery series' ships look like the Kelvin Timeline's Apple Stores when the time frame is just ahead of the original series.

Overall, the scorecard is two good, five bad, and one middle. Into the breach steps Alien: Romulus, co-written and directed by Fede Álvarez (2013's Evil Dead remake; Don't Breathe) and is set in between the first two movies while Ripley was off sleeping lost in space for 57 years.

Opening with a montage of a ship collecting what turns out to be a cocoon holding the xenomorph from the wreckage of the Nostromo (which was supposedly blown to dust by Ripley's overloading the reactors, so huh? Also, how did they know there was any alien to recover when Ripley and her logs are three decades away from being recovered?) we meet our obvious Final Girl, Rain (Cailee Spaeny, Priscilla), and her "brother" Andy (David Jonsson, HBO's Industry), who was a broken android fixed up by Rain's now-deceased father and programmed with plenty of dad jokes.

They live on the Weyland-Yutani (the Alien universe's Big Evil Corporation) colony of Jackson's Star, a miserable place which gets zero hours of sunlight per year. An orphan whose parents both died of diseases on this godforsaken rock, she has been laboring to finish her contract with WY, but when she goes to get her travel permit to emigrate to a free colony called Yvaga she learns that due to staffing shortages her contract has unilaterally extended from 12,000 hours of servitude to 24,000 hours, meaning another 5-6 years, but now in the mines. (How her family got into this contract situation and the reason WY can basically enslave workers isn't explained.)

Facing a bleak non-future, she's receptive to a scheme proposed by her friends - her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux, Netflix's Shadow & Bone), his sister Kay (Isabela Merced, Madam Web), their cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn, say it out loud), and his adopted sister Navarro (Aileen Wu) - to go up and loot a derelict spaceship for hypersleep cryo pods which could allow them to make the nine-year journey to Yvaga, leaving the oppressive control of WY behind. They need Andy, a WY product, to go to open doors and access systems for them.

With Navarro piloting, they head into orbit - so the Big Evil Corporation that literally enslaves its workers to borrow the company cargo ships for heist jobs with no oversight, remote controls, etc.? - and discover its more than a ship, it's a space station in a degrading orbit heading for the planet's ring in a matter of hours. Docking with the station, they quickly find the pods, but they don't have enough fuel to power themselves long enough to make the trip. More cryo fuel will be needed and they figure the station's lab may have some.

Upon reaching the lab they discover a scene of chaos with dead bodies and holes melted in the deck. While retrieving the fuel cells, they trip an alarm which locks down the room Tyler, Bjorn and Andy are in and Andy can't open the door due to lack of clearance. Rain realizes the half-melted android in the main lab could have a chip which would upgrade Andy's privileges and while they're retrieving it, the containers holding many facehuggers begin thawing, opening, and unleashing their peril on the young group, eventually landing on Navarro's face and, well, if you've seen an Alien movie you know what's coming. (Especially if you've seen the trailer which spoils the event.)

After that, it's a race to get off the station before it's accelerated decay crashes it in less than an hour while masses of facehuggers and full-grown xenomorphs lurk everywhere and Andy's upgraded programming causes a shift in allegiance from protecting Rain to protecting WY's interests.

Where Alien: Romulus shines is in nailing the grungy lived-in low-tech aesthetic of the first two movies, especially the original. Displays are CRTs, not flat panels or transparent or holographic; the emphasis is on practical sets and effects; the design language is of a piece with Scott's first trip into space. The colony is dingy & bleak, making the young people's decision to try and escape perfectly rational. Álvarez's staging of things also works for the most part in ratcheting up tension in a 45-year-old franchise where we know the drill a bit too well.

But where it lacks is in the story and some dubious choices in callbacks. It's always tempting to member berry new movies with references to previous entries (e.g. Terminator movies have to say, "I'll be back") and for the most part Alien: Romulus handles things subtly, fun for those who catch the references without being obvious (e.g. the computer is called "Mother" for MU/TH/UR; oooooh, look, Colonial Marine pulse rifles), but it wildly goes overboard quoting Aliens' signature line verbatim then borrowing one of the lamest bits from Alien Resurrection with a similar denouement. But more questionable is the distracting attempt to resurrect a deceased actor's character to play a similar role. It would've been fine to just create a new character, but in trying to chain it directly to the original and doing such an odd job of it backfires.

Spaeny and Jonsson are good in their roles with the latter having more notes to play as he changes levels of sophistication. The others are written too flatly - Navarro's distinguishing traits are being Asian, having a shaved head, being a pilot, and dying first (not really a spoiler if you saw the trailer) and she's more fleshed out than the guys - and the twists aren't really surprising. The whole deal about the absent government allowing WY to abuse its workers for years, the independent colonies, etc. begs for more amplification. The cast also feels too young; despite the actors being 23 to 31 years old, they all seem like teenagers raising questions about why WY had families on such a harsh world as laborers, unlike the families terraforming LV-426 (Hadley's Hope) in Aliens. Merced's Kay draws the shortest straw and is such a non-entity that when she was shown after a while I'd forgotten about her.

 While not an unqualified return to form, Alien: Romulus sits below Prometheus in my rankings by virtue of returning to stylistic terrain of the original and its monster-in-the-house plotting, while missing out on staking its own claims to fresh storytelling or world-building. Cameron took the bare bones of the original's milieu and was off to the races, creating THE defining space marine archtype which everything from Halo to Starship Troopers tapped; making Weyland-Yutani into the Big Evil Corporation that overshadow the galaxy. While he nibbles at some new concepts, Alvarez ultimately falls back into member berry box checking.

 The A/V presentation is good with the dingy environments never crushing to indistinct blacks on my QD-OLED display. There's not a lot of bright highlights as the color palette is mostly grim browns, grays and blacks, so it's the holding of shadow detail that benefits from the HDR grade. Surround audio is clear and active.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.

"It's What's Inside" 4K Review

After plenty of lackluster big budget whiffs with their original features, Netflix has gone indie budget with It's What's Inside which has the distinction of being even worse, but at least not costing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars sucking. So, yay for fiscal restraint?

A pack of college friends gather in a mansion that belonged to one of their mother's before she passed away. The occasion is the host's impending nuptials and they're there to party like it's back in school. The last to arrive is Forbes (David W. Thompson) who shows up with a suitcase with a machine inside that he proposes they play a party game with. The game is simple: Everyone puts a pair of electrodes on their temples and when he presses the button, their consciousnesses are swapped between the bodies. While in other bodies, they have to guess who is in which bodies.

After the original shock passes, they're all in and of course immediately start cheating - both in the rules by lying about who they are and in beginning to hook up with each other as they work out their true desires while using other people's bodies to do it. Things get wildly out of hand when two of the friends die while swapped meaning not only are they gone spiritually, it also means two people no longer have their bodies to return to. And not everyone wants to go back to their original shells.

While the premise has potential, it's squandered by writer-director-editor Greg Jardin's overly self-indulgent visual wankery and all the characters being mostly annoying twits. We never really get a bead on who these people are - there's a reason I didn't bother rattling off the characters and actors - there are eight of them with no time to set them up before they start swapping around and other than the one couple where the guy clearly wants another woman it's all noise. With wacky split screens and exaggerated colored lighting, Jardin comes off as a try hard rather than focusing his expanded Twilight Zone-ish tale.

However, to be fair, he does use a visual shorthand to help us know who is really who and the way backstory elements are portrayed with photos is genuinely cool in the vain of the Michael Pena stories in the first two Ant-Man movies.

With chaotic execution of a okay premise, it turns out that It's What's Inside is a whole lotta nothin'.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

"¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!" Review

 If you saw the 2003 episode of South Park "Casa Bonita" and wondered if Cartman's beloved fantasy land of a Mexican restaurant with cliff divers and treasure caves was based on reality, the answer is surprisingly yes. Opened in 1973, it was a Denver-area mashup of Chi-Chi's and Disneyland. When it closed in the wake of the Fauci Flu scamdemic, it was feared to be gone forever and it went into bankruptcy.

But, to the surprise of no one South Park creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, stepped up to buy Casa Bonita with the intention of renovating it to its former glory for future generations. Flush with net worths in the hundreds of millions between South Park and The Book of Mormon revenues, it would be a pricey endeavor, but not onerous. But decades of corporate disinterest in basic maintenance left it run down with duct tape on the carpet and many areas so sketchy in the safety department it makes one wonder how code enforcers hadn't shut it down ages ago? And the food was notoriously bad.

 But they had no idea just how bad things were and the extremely expensive and lengthy project is documented in ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! by director Arthur Bradford whose excellent 2011 documentary 6 Days to Air: The Making of South Park showed how they managed to crank out episodes on a weekly basis - or used to; their current output is just six episodes per year with a handful of longer specials - starting with a blank whiteboard on a Thursday to shipping a finished, animated show the following Friday. With that past collaboration, he was naturally allowed close access to document the nightmarish process.

 Built within a failed department store in a shopping center, Casa Bonita was cobbled together without a general architectural plan on the fly and those foundational decisions result in nearly everything needing to be gutted for basic safety. The HVAC systems are so filthy due to lack of cleaning and using flex ducts that when shaken, mounds of dirt spill out. A hawk in the bell tower has turned the roof into a pigeon graveyard. (There's even a shot of the hawk pursuing its prey.) The cliff dive pool had high-voltage lighting near the splash zone and the way divers exited is so tight and adjacent to an electrical box it's a miracle no one died. The kitchen needs to be completely gutted. As a result, the budget rockets to multiples of the original planned cost on top of the $3.1 million they spent buying this money pit. 

But they soldier on, hiring an acclaimed local chef/restaurateur to revamp the menu to not be terrible and seeking to modernize the puppet show, animatronics, performers and characters and the overall artistic intent of the venue to retain what people remember fondly while improving the experience. While Parker made his fortune off of cartoons where foul-mouthed children hang out with talking pieces of crap, he has more sense than Disney seems to nowadays about what makes a magical experience for children at Casa Bonita. An early dry run goes badly, but the reactions of the real children customers shows that what may seem hokey to grownups is magical to kids.

Even though ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! is as much an infomercial for the joint as a documentary about its return from the dead, it's still a fascinating portrait of how all one needs to keep dreams alive is the ability to see the shine through the grime. And tens of millions of dollars.

Score: 8/10. Catch it on Paramount+.