agree in general and definitely in this case which I thought was a major major issue tbh (see Bilge Ebiri’s review) but tbh even as a Villeneuve skeptic the nostalgia stuff in 2049 never bothered me and I thought it worked much better than the consensus opinion holds… what I didn’t like about 2049 was mostly that it was super misogynist and didn’t seem to have any clear point to make about that, it was just misogynist for no reason
I really don’t like how Villeneuve handles women, I guess Sicario is kind of an exception but Emily Blunt also seems like she thrives under (only) those circumstances
re: Romulus, i am probably going to skip this one at least until it shows up on some streaming platform, but i have kind of been enjoying the way it has returned Prometheus/Covenant into the discourse. Prometheus to me remains one of the clearest cases I’ve had of leaving a movie theater just feeling completely elated and high off the power of c i n e m a only to check in online and realize that the movie was… divisive to say the least. Nostalgia for 2012 is simply not something we’re gonna do, but part of me does kind of miss the era where I could go in to a big blockbuster movie without any preconceived ideas about how it would be evaluated by the filmgoing community at large (seems like nowadays everyone’s mind is made up before the fact, and even if you resist the urge to do this, that resistance is still something you’re going to bring with you into the theater–“I’ll make up my own mind about this!” is a different headspace than “I wonder what this will be like?”)
Covenant on the other hand I did not care for in quite the same way. I appreciated it as a return to and deeper indulgence in the meta-premise of the original–a haunted house movie in space–but this time, complete with its very own android Vincent Price daring you to spend 24 hours on his planet of terrors… but to me it didn’t quite nail the balance of slimecore and golden age sci fi that made Prometheus such a revelation to me. But it has been cool to see that even that movie has its stalwart defenders, and witnessing the reappraisal has made me warm up to it a bit too.
I guess the reason why Romulus is such a downer to me is the Alien franchise has never been a “here’s another helping of the same shit you seemed to like before” type of series, and from at least part 3 has always seemed in fact to just like, revel in punishing its audience for getting too comfortable with any character or idea from the past entry. But, I shouldn’t be too hard on it–remember back when “the next alien movie” was just sort of a development hell type of thing, and the most likely outcome was a Neil Blomkamp directed movie that completely ignored series continuity after Aliens in order to give people the heartwarming reunion of Ripley and Hicks that the mean old David Fincher stole from us? It is weird how much that movie anticipated the insipid ‘legacy sequel’ trend of the past few years, but despite Romulus indulging in this sort of thing in its own way it doesn’t seem nearly as bad as that or basically anything else in a similar vein (the ghostbusters movies being the worst case scenario for me, personally).
Anyway, maybe there’s a kind of revisionist take in the making, if defying expectations and giving you something weirder than anything you could possibly have expected is itself a tried and true gimmick of the Alien franchise, perhaps the most punk rock thing an Alien movie can do is give you exactly what you expect… hmm…
Oh right I forgot why I even made this post, which is to note the amusing scenario wherein
I read a series of vague spoilers for Romulus and thought for one brief moment that the movie might feature a digitally resurrected Young Yaphet Kotto and/or Harry Dean Stanton
Another good meta joke would have been to have an android character played by Brian Cox. Any real heads out there picking up what I’m laying down
alien: fantastic. cat is delightful. i love when the cat is like “well that’s none of my business” and watches a guy get snatched
aliens: boring. james cameron invented shoehorning kids into movies. when they started driving the apc around i mentally checked out and started imagining a weyland yutani succession AU where kendall (burke) is like why didn’t dad tell me about the xenomorph research program ooh. i guess charlize theron in prometheus is shiv but i didn’t get that far (edit: lol fassbender is tom)
my memory of prometheus is: cool because it has an autodoc abortion and weird because it’s vaguely creationist
yeah prometheus is easily one of the ~three best movies in the series (not saying that much considering that it is comprised of one masterpiece and seven unnecessary adequate films) but the idea that its hook should be creationism is not interesting
as we watch we’re improvising a reading where noomi rapace and logan marshal green are like the chip and joanna gaines of archaeologists getting ironic comeuppance but just because the abortion sequence whips
old man weyland catches their holoprogram and saddles vickers with a stupid vanity mission to meet god
I like watching prometheus with the understanding that every character we see on screen is a fraud, a phony, a hack, or a deluded maniac
A realistic portrayal of what if future elon musk hired a team of ‘scientists’ to go into space on a quixotic mission in search of ancient aliens. They would indeed be a bunch of idiots who get killed in quick succession as the mission quickly turns into an unmitigated catastrophe
I don’t think it was intentional, since the script was written by damon fuckin lindelof but it absolutely manages to work on that level
that tracks. I’m weirdly positive on the last ~decade of ridley scott’s career although mostly in ways that do not reflect well on ridley scott, eg:
prometheus is one of the best alien movies in terms of vibes/production design even though most of what’s foregrounded in the script doesn’t really work
the theatrical cut of his napoleon is super dry and boring and makes joachim phoenix seem really miscast even though the director’s cut that came out a year later is great and funny and unpleasant and totally works, suggesting he basically did not care about how they wanted to cut it if they wouldn’t do it his way
last duel is an extremely captivating metoo movie even though the dialog seems to oscillate between whether it cares about period accuracy or not at all, and a few parts of it are in fairly bad taste (ben affleck’s character is almost too swishily gay and they show a brutal sexual assault twice rashomon style) — it’s like a weird monsterpiece that looked vaguely like a mainstream film and underperformed anyway
the martian is impeccable competence porn, very manipulative and dishonest but great
I think prometheus is bad and covenant is good, or fine at least, which is good for an alien sequel, and I’m glad they fixed the tom hardy cloning machine that was clearly busted when they made logan marshall green (though putting a beard on him seems to fix him) by the time they made the guy in shogun.
best part of covenant was deciding to cast Amy Seimetz and Danny McBride as a married couple, like people yelled at him enough to emulate his 70s character actors and he wound up doing indie movie shipping
