ALIEN: ROMULUS--or more appropriately, Kids in Space.
Only six people in the balcony of the Village East Angelika at the 4:45pm screening yesterday (maybe it's streaming somewhere already?). A workman-like entry in the franchise by Uruguayan director Fede Alvarez --very, very good on the action set-pieces, very light on the substantial stuff, the very warp and woof 'o movies (characterization / story-telling prowess)--not to mention the vague acting chops of a bunch of random, more or less interchangeable Gen Z'ers whose smooth, blank facades are reminiscent of the unfinished pod people of Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, and whose line deliveries were about 60% indecipherable (and Caroline and I had primo seats right in front of the giant screen in this former vaudeville palace). Where are the Snows of Yesteryear, the powerful gravitas of a Sigourney Weaver (Bill Moseley had a fling with her at Yale back in the day), the hale-fellow-well-met cheekbones of a John Hurt? G-G-G-Gone!!
A muddled plot about five indentured disadvantaged family-bereft kinder and a slightly autistic robot working the mines in an off-world colony somewhere on a planet Where the Sun Don't Shine, who in a hare-brained scheme hijack a spaceship (those teenagers!) to rifle a disused space outpost (uh oh, guess what's coming) in search of enough jet fuel to power their way during nine light years of cryosleep to Ivanka--sorry, Yvaga--a kind of sunny Paradise no one has ever once visited (kind of like El Rey, or Oz).
Actually there were about 10 actual minutes in the 2 hour running time where I was truly gripped and caught up in one of the endless cliff-hanging chase scenes / battles with the black giant penis-headed Xenomorphs (my late friend H.R.Giger's nightmarish conception, most likely derived from the monstrous figures of Francis Bacon's 1944 triptych "Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion," see photo below).
But once that flurry of engagement subsided, just when you thought the thing was finally over (another padded-out bladder-buster), the creaky plot-machinery cranked up again...and again!...and again!!...(spoiler alert: no sequel footage after the end titles--really? As I needed to vault down from the balcony to the sub-basement to hit the john pronto-and I waited for that??).
Stentorian music/sound design was okay ('cept for the many mumbled and incomprehensible line readings). Score by Benjamin Wallfisch quoted from Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner and other Alien composer alums, and there was an actual needle drop from Wagner's "Das Rheingold" buried deep in the mix when they explained the "Romulus"/"Remus" Reference (triple r alliteration).
Note to Lukas Ligeti--the opening music rolls out with an approximation of yr dad's "Requiem" as famously used in Kubrick's 2001, all shrieking celestial voices from the Choir Invisibule--just like in Jerskin Fendrix's score for Yorgos Lanthimos's Kinds of Kindness. I know, I know (believe me, I know), directors often put music cues they haven't licensed into their rough cuts and so fall in love with them that they often mandate their eventual Designated Composer to come up with soundalikes.
Anyway folks, the late Hans Giger was a strange and lovely man--he was a big fan of The Golem, and invited me to perform my live score with the film during a Retrospective they gave him some years ago at the National Technical Museum in Prague --that's another story. If you want to see what Giger was up to in the shadows of the Swiss Alps, far far away from Hollyweird, you could do worse than check out the H.R. Giger Museum in Gruyères.