From the late 1970s through the 80s, three major non-Star Wars sci-fi franchises were all born into existence, all of which concerned some manner of spectacular creature born or willed into existence to eradicate the human race as we know it. The Terminator, the third such of these franchises, demonstrated to audiences the dangers of playing too comfortably in the world of artificial intelligence. The one before, Predator, took place within a new kind of jungle warfare against an extra-terrestrial foe following a wave of films about the ultimate jungle struggle in Vietnam. But the first of these franchises – and one of only two in which director James Cameron played a part – was Alien, which began in 1979 under director Ridley Scott, the first film of which quickly became known as the greatest sci-fi horror film ever made. It wasn’t long before James Cameron, following his success on the original Terminator, would execute the famous pitch for directing the film’s sequel, Aliens, eventually launching the property into the conversation of greatest sci-fi horror franchises ever made. Now, 45 years and eight films later – including two widely-maligned crossover events with the Predator films – we have arrived at Alien: Romulus, which sees Fede Álvarez stepping into the director’s chair to bring things all the way back to basics.
 
With its story set between the events of Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986), Alien: Romulus stars Cailee Spaeny as Rain, an orphan girl working on a mining colony in deep space for the Weyland-Yutani corporation, who hopes to earn enough working hours to secure a travel permit to the planet Yvaga III with her brother Andy (David Jonsson), a Weyland-Yutani synthetic android. Once it becomes clear that the corporation does not plan to offer travel permits of any kind, Rain decides to join a group of other young space colonists in seeking out a decommissioned spaceship floating above their planet, having been convinced that they can all travel to Yvaga III together using the cryo-sleep pods left on board. It becomes quickly apparent, however, that the ship was not decommissioned, but abandoned, and things turn awry quite quickly as the group comes face to face(hug) with most terrifying and perfect organism to ever haunt the stars. This film also stars Isabela Merced, Archie Renaux, Spike Fern, and Aileen Wu.
 
At their heart, the best of the of the Alien movies have typically had rather simple set-ups. There’s a group of space truckers, they end up on a spaceship somewhere with no ability to contact the outside world, and the titular creature wrecks shop, picking them off one-by-one. (The first movie is literally just called “Alien.”) Over time, and especially recently, the franchise has seemed more interested in exploring the sci-fi origins of its plot machinations in films like Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, having drifted further away from the horror that made the series a household name. Whichever approach one prefers, it’s been generally agreed upon that the franchise needed a solid reset (much in the same manner The Force Awakens gave a reset to the Star Wars). And while there are certainly elements of Alien: Romulus that feel too attached to the past, on the whole, it’s about as solid of a return to form for the series as one could have hoped under the new 20th Century (read: Disney) banner.
 
If there’s one thing the Alien films are known for besides perhaps the best creature design ever conceived, it’s the set-pieces, the most iconic of which is the chest-burster scene in the first movie. Luckily, Fede Álvarez knows how to do horror set-pieces better than just about any horror director working today, and Romulus contains around 3 or 4 major ones that immediately jump to mind, two of which are some of the best work the series has offered to date, both reinforcing the imagery of the face-huggers as a disturbing metaphor for sexual violence while also while also relishing in the grosser, more horrifying elements of birth as a xenomorph’s head begins to crown out of a literal birth canal. Both the music in these moments and the beautifully-crafted practical effects underscore just how terrifying the titular alien is in both concept and execution, a monster without equal whose emergence can be comfortably compared to death itself coming to life. But it’s not just the set-pieces involving the aliens that increase the the tension of the film; space itself is as terrifying as any extra-terrestrial monster, and as things continue to escalate, so too do the more basic elements our characters need to survive (i.e. depressurization, lack of oxygen, frozen cryo-fuel, etc.) These sequences  wouldn’t work nearly as well if the sound or production design lacked even an inch of quality, and with Álvarez committing to using as little CGI as possible to achieve the look of the film, only the sound could have afforded a little slack, which the film refused to give it. Of the Alien films I’ve seen to date, this is one of the best-sounding, most intentionally designed, and every bit of effort shows on a theater screen.
 
It's not just the design elements or the musical score in the film’s upper half that make Romulus worthwhile, however; the film also boasts two of the series’ best performances to date in Cailee Spaeny and particularly in David Jonsson. Spaeny’s star continues to rise as the Priscilla and Civil War star takes center stage here, never straying so far into Sigourney Weaver’s territory from the original films that her performance risks impressionism, but always staying just solid enough that the two characters could easily exist side by side without any viewer questioning whether they belonged next to each other. It’s doubtful that Rain becomes as iconic as Ripley, but at their core, the two parts are played similarly. The standout, though, is David Jonsson of Industry fame, whose performance as Andy anchors the film in its deepest humanity despite the fact that the character is not biologically human. Jonsson is able to play both the humanistic and the corporate practically seamlessly, cementing his place in franchise history as one of its finest new additions.
 
There are moments in which Romulus’ fan service feels too derivative of its inspirations, as though the divided responses from previous entries attempting to do something new had scared off the producers from continuing to try new things entirely, though in on case towards the unfortunately overlong ending, it did feel as though that derivativeness wore thin. I also won’t spoil a fairly major plot point here that has major ramifications on how the story of the film plays out, but suffice it to say, while the execution of it doesn’t read as anything especially egregious given its nature, the thought of whatever producers’ meeting gave the green light does make me feel a little queasier than anything involving the xenomorph ever could. There’s nothing wrong with going back to basics as a method for re-adjusting course, but as I’ve said many times, relying on those basics too much, beyond just a few cursory awkward line reads that harken back to what came before, ultimately detracts from the idea that filmmaking itself is a medium for growth and pushing the boundaries of storytelling.
 
Overall, there’s not much to say about Alien: Romulus that would offer any deeper insight into the movie itself or the franchise as a whole from my end of things. It’s just a really solid, well-crafted sci-fi horror film with a few great set-pieces, some great performances, and a good sense of what made those original films work in the first place. I doubt that it’ll end up in my Top 10 by year’s end, but if back to basics was what it took to get the acid blood on this ship pumping again, there’s not a whole lot more a viewer can expect than what was offered here. If anything, it’ll be interesting to see whether or not Fede Álvarez sticks around after this, and whether his apparent dream of a new Alien vs. Predator movie can actually come to fruition.
 
I’m giving “Alien: Romulus” an 8.6/10
 
- The Friendly Film Fan

If ever you’ve wondered why video game movie adaptations have begun migrating to television, or why their theatrical output has such a tarnished overall reputation, I’ll first ask how it’s possible that The Super Mario Bros. Movie has been your only VGM experience (even then, not a great one), but if somehow their notorious reputations have spared your eyes to this point…well…wonder no more. Based on the popular video game franchise of the same name, Borderlands stars Cate Blanchett as Lilith, a bounty hunter who is hired by Atlas (Edgar Ramirez) to find and rescue his daughter Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), who supposedly holds the key to unlocking a secret treasure vault on the chaotic planet of Pandora – Lilith’s home world – and who was released from captivity by former disillusioned soldier Roland (Kevin Hart). In the course of her mission, Lilith meets and forms an alliance with a ragtag team of misfits, including Krieg (Florian Munteanu), a muscle-clad “psycho” who protects Tina, Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), and Claptrap (Jack Black), a scrappy robot companion programmed to help Lilith accomplish her goals upon her return home, as well as Tina and Roland themselves. Together, this scrappy team of six must brave desolate landscapes, alien monsters, and bandit attacks, surviving long enough to figure out where the vault is, what’s inside, and whether the real treasure was each other all along.
 
I’m not what you might call a traditional gamer; I’ve never played the Borderlands games, I don’t really even know what they look like, and I have no special attachments from them that would indicate whether or not I thought this worked as an adaptation. What I would consider myself is a film connoisseur, albeit one still very much in the early stages of that connoisseur-ship, so regardless of the adaptability demonstrated by this version of Borderlands, I can confidently tell you that it doesn’t work as a movie, especially not a movie with little-to-no sense of self and even less teeth for the world it inhabits. If it sounds as though the plot description above is overly chaotic and messy, friend, it is only because whatever plot this film has to begin with is simultaneously over-complicated and drearily under-written.
 
The truth is, Borderlands is as desolate a film in terms of entertainment, inspiration, creativity, or even pure visual flow as its many desert locales and bare-bones sets are in relation to the most basic forms of color theory. In fact, the only set that has anything close to a real identity in terms of its color, or indeed its characters, is a bustling town our ragtag misfits come to about halfway through the film’s 102 energy-draining minutes, which is only used to introduce Jamie Lee Curtis, set up a bland and overly long action set-piece, and tease a plot “twist” anyone who’s seen a movie before could see coming 40 miles away. Visually speaking, it’s an eyesore, so lacking in anything remotely interesting to look at that the copious amounts of poorly-composited green screen backdrops become the only interesting thing to look at simply for being included often enough that one could make a dangerously effective drinking game out of just noticing them. In fact, the film is so devoid of anything tangible or even recognizable from a pure narrative storytelling perspective that any fan service or entertainment it offers doesn’t just go unappreciated but unnoticed by anyone who’s not joined to the games at the hip. Even Deadpool & Wolverine’s cacophony of cameos – which I still contend ultimately don’t mean much to the film itself, to the legacy of the 20th Century Fox canon, or the MCU itself – are at least recognizable enough that there’s a drip of entertainment in just seeing some of those guys show up again. Borderlands doesn’t even have the right level of relevance in the world of gaming anymore for people to have absorbed any recognition of its fan service through pure cultural osmosis (apart from the parts of the movie that are made from that).
 
What really kills any momentum the film builds, however (on the off chance it builds any momentum at all), is that the script itself seems entirely uninterested in the story being told and makes no effort to actually create or sustain any creative sparks that might be resting in the margins of its hollow shell, ditto for its cast, not that most of them seem even remotely aware what kind of movie they’re in, apart from Blanchett; her dead-eyed, practically expressionless pitch is the film’s most clear indicator of just how over this sort of thing everyone is by now. Even amongst that cast, Greenblatt seems to be the only one making a game effort at actually injecting any life into the film at all, and as fun as her performance could be to watch in a film that actually cared about character development at all, whatever efforts she makes here are immediately shot down like a bird out of the sky by Eli Roth’s rush to just get to whatever the next set-piece is without so much as the balls to make that set-piece as fun as Greenblatt’s performance clearly indicates it should be.
 
I won’t wax on and on as to how draining this film’s inclusion into the “cultural canon of cinema” is or whatever, or how it doesn’t actually have anything meaningful to contribute to that canon, because the truth is there are lots of movies way better than this that also don’t contribute a lot of meat to movie history and are just around for the fun of it, and also because as much as I like the ones the ones that do meaningfully contribute, I wouldn’t consider myself pretentious enough to pretend that every good movie has to. But what I will say for Borderlands in regard to whether or not it even could do that is that the movie wouldn’t have anything to offer even if whatever it had was meaningless. In other words, the film is…nothing. It didn’t piss me off, it didn’t make me cringe, it didn’t even bore me to tears so that I begged it to stop or offered my soul in exchange for something interesting to happen. The only thing it did make me feel, for one hour and forty minutes it ran, was the worst thing a movie like it could ever make anyone feel: complete and total apathy. Even then, I struggle to confirm with myself that it made me feel anything at all.
 
I’m giving “Borderlands” a 2.4/10
 
- The Friendly Film Fan

​The Friendly Film Fan Breaks Down the New Film from director Wes Ball.

Franchise storytelling is difficult, to say the least. How many film franchises can moviegoers name off the top of their heads which have not only continued well past their original iterations into entirely new eras of cinema but have continued to evolve, innovate, and offer new and exciting ways of telling the same story? And how many of those have the same longevity of something like the James Bond films without having to reset or alter their continuities every few entries? It’s a rare feat to begin with – X-Men, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, and even Lord of the Rings to some degree have all failed to net a consistent-enough batting average across all of their films to be considered among the great franchises beyond their legacy contributions to cinema itself – but this accomplishment is rarer still when the sci-fi genre is involved. Alien, Terminator, Predator – in the history of sci-fi filmmaking, not one of these has scraped by without multiple true duds embedded in their being…but that story changes with Planet of the Apes.
 
With one notable exception (the failed 2001 Tim Burton remake), the Planet of the Apes franchise has perhaps the most consistent batting average in not only sci-fi filmmaking, but all of franchise filmmaking. Even with entries that work less than its best ones, or don’t work very well at all, there is at least offered some sort of innovative spin on the material these movies choose to tackle. The 1968 original – a sci-fi classic – has its twist ending, the third film switches up the environments, and the most recent trilogy takes viewers all the way back to the beginning of when the apes’ intelligence came into being with the original Caesar. It is that most recent trilogy, in fact, which made me a fan of this franchise, becoming not only some of my personal favorite films, but what I consider to be one of the greatest and most undervalued film trilogies ever made, thanks largely to the talents of those VFX teams and the director of the latter two films, Matt Reeves.
 
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which is directed by former Maze Runner trilogy helmer Wes Ball and sports an entirely new cast of characters, sets its story some generations after the events of Caesar’s time. Noa, a young ape living in a small woodland village and this movie’s primary protagonist, seeks to impress his eagle master father by raising and training his own bird from birth. Right away, the audience is endeared to Noa and his friends on a difficult climb which they all make in order to collect eagle eggs for what is known as Bonding Day. Complications arise, however, when another tribe of apes which Noa does not know attacks his village and kidnaps his clan under the belief that they shelter a human. With no choice left to make, Noa sets out to rescue his clan, encountering two companions – an Orangutan called Raka and a human woman – along the way.
 
What sets Kingdom apart from the preceding Apes trilogy, apart from the large-scale time jump, is the scale at which the filmmaking takes place. It may not boast the specificity of image-making that Matt Reeves’ films did, but it offers grandiosity in return, and that grandiosity is a wonder to look at on a big screen. Large vistas of woods, great mountains, enormous rusted tanker ships…even the runtime is the longest in the entirety of the franchise. That can sometimes lead to pacing issues, or an act three that’s a tad overwrought in its execution, but on the whole, this may be the most spectacle-driven Apes film to date, and it more than earns its place amongst the most beautiful-looking of them all, especially in regard to the visual effects, which stay remain the most impressive thing to see even within some already impressive set-pieces. The apes themselves have rarely looked better than this, and under Wes Ball’s steady direction, the performances aid that look admirably. The film also makes a brilliant choice not to ignore the events of the previous trilogy, but to instead mythologize them, echoing notes of what the original series does with its “law giver” character in making Caesar into a quasi-religious symbol whose words different tribes of apes twist to fit their own meaning, something Raka – the Orangutan – addresses upon first meeting Noa.
 
As characters go, Raka (Peter Macon) is the most fun and Mae (which we learn is the human woman’s name, played by Freya Allen) is a more complicated character than one might give her credit for at first, but the real standouts are Owen Teague as Noa and Kevin Durand as Proximus. The latter of the two unfortunately doesn’t really come into play until the third act of the film, but when he does, Durand is the imposing presence the story needs in order to keep things interesting during what ends up being the most ill-paced part of the whole thing. He commands every room he’s in with a performance practically born for this sort of part and knows just how to carry himself so that he overtakes the film’s scenery without outright chewing it up. In contrast, Owen Teague’s Noa is a more emotionally-driven character, and Teague is well up to the task of carrying a film like this on his capable ape shoulders. It’s from Teague’s performance that the emotional notes of the film – when Wes Ball chooses to employ them – get their power, and it’s from his eyes and facial expressions that the viewer understands his character. There are a lot of close-ups and medium close-ups on him in which he’s made to hold the camera’s gaze, and he plays it all beautifully.
 
The film does struggle – as noted – with pacing in a few spots, which seems to come from the idea that the film follows both of the distinct tones present in the preceding trilogy, rather than committing to one or the other; the first half of this film is closer to Rise in narrative flow, whereas the second half sits closer to what Dawn and War (especially the former) were going for in their earlier moments. This is most prominent in the third act, which feels as though the script had two different third acts in mind and simply smashed them together in lieu of throwing one of them out. The way that Mae’s journey plays out during this third act is also written quite broadly but without the necessary clarity of character that comes with having to paint with such large brush strokes. Freya Allen is executing on this admirably, but there’s only so much she can do with what’s not on the page. Still, these are relatively minor complaints compared to what the film offers on the positive end, and I certainly wouldn’t begrudge a filmmaker having to follow up one of cinema’s great trilogies a few lackluster elements here and there.
 
In the end, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes may not carry the same gravity as its immediate predecessors, but given that very few films ever could, the fact that it’s still this good is a win for movie fans everywhere, and especially for fans of this franchise. It looks great, the performances are all very good, the scale is beautiful, and just being in this world again is sure to be enough to remind viewers why they fell in love with it in the first place. It’s clearly setting up for a further series of adventures with Noa and the rest of these characters, and if they can manage the same miracle as Caesar’s trilogy – a tall ask, but entirely possible – we’re in for something really, truly special.
 
I’m giving “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” a 7.8/10
 
- The Friendly Film Fan

There was a moment, back in the 2000s and towards the middle of the 2010s, that it seemed no animation studio could ever top the sheer ingenuity of Pixar. Films like Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Wall-E, Inside Out, and Coco have become not simply some of the best offerings of the studio’s catalogue, but in the history of animated filmmaking (and let’s not forget the brilliantly tragic prologue to Up). Even more recent efforts like Soul have come close to joining those ranks. And then, of course, there’s the franchise by which Pixar came into being – the Toy Story quadrilogy. Not simply some of the greatest animated films ever made, but some of the most essential in forwarding the medium towards its greatest heights, both in storytelling and in aesthetic glory. One needs only to see the vast leap from the o.g. Pixar debut – the first-ever fully CGI animated film – to its (potentially) final offering in Toy Story 4 to observe just how far forward animation has come since 1995. Its animation is near photoreal, its storytelling much deeper and more philosophical than anything one might expect from a movie largely led by a cowboy doll and a talking spork. So why is it that Lightyear, a Pixar-made sci-fi adventure featuring one of the Toy Story series protagonists on an intergalactic mission through uncharted space and time, feels so…plain?
 
Billed as the movie Andy is watching in the early minutes of the original Toy Story, and the one upon which the Buzz Lightyear toy he receives in that film is based, Lightyear moves along a decent clip with the occasional fun action sequence, some fun side characters, and lots of quippy dialogue for about an hour and a half as its protagonist pushes the limits of space travel, encounters alien robots, and learns that he can’t finish his ultimate mission alone. If the film accomplishes any goal almost perfectly, it’s that it does seem like it would have been a child’s favorite movie in the mid-90s. However, by Pixar standards, the movie finds itself somewhere between “average” and “decent.” That’s not to say it’s bad – though it certainly could be better – but whether audiences have been conditioned to settle for “solid” filmmaking from what used to be the leading studio in animated innovation because of their past output is a question worth asking.
 
There’s no moment in Lightyear where the audience or the characters in it are truly challenged, or even asked to sit with an emotional beat for more than about thirty seconds, tops. In its lowest moments, the film almost immediately skips to whatever the next joke or plot revelation is meant to be, often seeming as if it’s afraid the audience will get bored if it doesn’t keep moving at any cost, including the cost of poignancy or genuine distress. It never slows down or sits with anything whenever things go wrong, apart from maybe twice in the entire runtime. Multiple plot points of the movie almost feels as if they were supposed to be longer, but had to be rushed through in order to keep the film under two hours. It feels as if the runtime mandated the story being told, rather than the other way around.
 
That method of storytelling also extends to the film’s ultimate message, which essentially boils down to “don’t be afraid to ask for help/don’t be stubborn and do your mission alone,” but the movie never really hammers that home until after the climax of the film has come and gone – a climax which raises way more questions than a movie like this has the ability to answer – the actual execution of which seems to be pointing towards an entirely different message about clinging to the past that the film has spent almost no time building toward. Although this other message does give the film’s protagonist a place to go arc-wise, it’s so brief that it never really registers until after the credits have rolled, and even then, it seems as though Disney itself refuses to learn that lesson. There’s something to be learned, but no real challenges to be overcome in learning it that can’t be resolved with a blaster.
 
As Buzz (voiced by Chris Evans in this iteration) moves through his own story, the film never actually challenges him in a meaningful way apart from physical difficulties; at one point, he forgets to inform his ragtag team that [redacted], and it ends up that he has to fix his mistake via another small action sequence. This largely extends to the other characters as well – all true challenges are physical, all emotional battles are clipped by more jokes (most of which don’t land). If anything, the one thing Pixar hasn’t lost is its ability to churn out fun animal side characters like Sox, a robot cat given to Buzz to ease his emotional state after his off-planet escapades rocket him through an extensive time jump. No doubt this will boost toy sales significantly, so the corporate benefits of the character are abundantly clear from the get-go, but nevertheless, when Sox is on screen, he’s always the most watchable part of the movie.
 
Visually, the film looks very good, but there’s not much that it’s doing differently than most other animated films. Compared to recent efforts like DreamWorks’ surprisingly charming adaptation of The Bad Guys, the animation itself feels fairly plain – at least by Pixar standards, and especially after Soul’s breathtaking lighting. That said, what’s there works well enough for most audiences, and you most likely won’t hear many complaints like mine about whether it looks interesting or just pretty good. There’s not as much space action past the first act as one might desire from a film about a space ranger, but what’s there is at least engaging to look at, if only because there’s just so much visual noise squeezed into nearly every frame.
 
In the end, Lightyear gets the job done, but doesn’t put up a lot of effort in getting there. As a sci-fi adventure, it’s solid enough, and kids are unlikely to get bored by it, but for anyone wanting something deeper from Pixar, it’s unlikely they’ll find anything above your run-of-the-mill, average studio animation. There’s little innovation here, but it works on the terms it sets for itself, and it does have a few moments that both kids and adults can latch onto, as well a pretty good lesson for kids to learn (however muddled the teaching of that lesson may be). I suppose the most important question one must ask themselves in the face of something like that coming from Pixar is this: is that enough?
 
I’m giving “Lightyear” a 6.5/10.
 
- The Friendly Film Fan