Alien: Romulus (2024)

I just saw the new Alien movie today, and it was good. Very much a return to form. Effectively paid homage to the classics, melding elements from the original films, while gently innovating to keep the film feeling relevant and not simply redundant, but without being too jarring to the mythos. I like that they kept the "working class sci-fi" perspective, and it was interesting to explore in a new way the prejudice against synthetics. Andy was a great character, giving the filmmakers an opportunity to convey the grey area involved with making difficult moral choices. At the right times, he managed to be intimidating while still remaining sympathetic.

I lost a little bit of interest in the climax, where the inspiration from Alien: Resurrection was strongest. And since you can't help making comparisons to earlier films, I was distracted by the disparity of wardrobe in the final, post-bedtime arc. It makes you wonder how a movie that relies on body horror, and whose creative vision was guided by an artist who shocked the world by marrying sex with death, can be so gymnophobic. We have to watch the xenomorph crawling out of what, by all accounts, appears to be an alien vagina (actually, that was pretty cool), but we don't get to see the female lead in her skivvies? What kind of dystopian future are we living in?

But, that's a pretty superficial complaint. Overall, I enjoyed the movie very much.

Alien (1979)

I can still remember the first time I saw the movie Alien as a child. It was playing on TV, on one of those perfect summer evenings, where it stays light long after dinner. There's something about the experience of settling in to watch a horror movie while it's still light out, and then having twilight descend, leaving you in the dark of night by the time the credits roll. The movie's sequel, Aliens - the epitome of the rare, successful sequel, raising the stakes while employing clever innovation over the familiarity of thematic repetition - undoubtedly had a larger impact on my childhood, but this is where the nightmare started. And when I say "nightmare", I mean that literally.

From the slow and misdirectingly eerie opening crawl (in all its retro-futuristic glory); the down-to-(ironically)-earth depiction of blue collar life among the stars (a stellar presentation of plausible characters that feel lived-in); the atmosphere of fear and paranoia that develops (second only to John Carpenter's The Thing) when an unfamiliar alien lifeform is discovered on a cold and forbidding wasteland of a planet; to the shock and visceral terror of the xenomorph's startling appearance - a scene unrivaled in cinematic history; and then the inspired biomechanical design of the creature, thanks to the now late visionary artist H.R. Giger, which taps into our fears of sex and technology and our own bodies and - as a young child with arachnophobia - the primal terror of an eldritch predator, sleek and black, that moves uncannily and lurks in dark corners and tunnels, waiting to strike its prey without warning; all building up to the climactic finish, with its flashing lights and hissing shadows, leaving viewers breathless and on the edge of their seats as so many movies promise, but so few can actually deliver.

Directed by Ridley Scott, Alien is so effective that it manages to transcend the label of a slasher film - even though that's exactly what it amounts to on paper - elevating itself to the level of sci-fi/horror legend. And for the fortieth anniversary of its initial release, I'm going to watch it again - in a movie theater for the first time!

The X-Files - S1:E9 "Space"

[ S1:E8 "Ice" <<< Season 1 >>> S1:E10 "Fallen Angel" ]

Mulder and Scully sit in on the launch of a space shuttle, after receiving a tip that somebody may be trying to sabotage the mission. The primary suspect is a former astronaut who is haunted by the face on Mars. The effects are a little hokey, but still fairly creepy, and though I doubt this episode makes anybody's list of top favorites (unless you're an astronaut), it still manages to reach a pretty dramatic crescendo.

Memorable quotes:

Scully: Why would somebody want to sabotage a Space Shuttle?
Mulder: Well, if you're a terrorist, there probably isn't a more potent symbol of American progress and prosperity. And if you're an opponent of big science, NASA itself represents a vast money trench that exists outside the crucible and debate of the democratic process. And of course there are those futurists who believe the Space Shuttle is a rusty old bucket that should be mothballed - a dinosaur spacecraft built in the '70s by scientists setting their sights on space in an ever declining scale.
Scully: And we thought we could rest easy with the fall of the Soviet Union.
Mulder: Not to mention certain fringe elements who accuse our government itself of space sabotage. The failure of the Hubble telescope and the Mars Observer are directly connected to a conspiracy to deny us evidence.
Scully: Evidence of what?
Mulder: Alien civilizations.
Scully: Oh, of course.

Europa Report (2013)

Europa Report is thematically similar to Apollo 18, in that it is about a manned space mission that discovers signs of extraterrestrial life. It is even, technically, a found footage film, although it doesn't really feel like one. It has more of a documentarian spin, with more mounted cameras than handheld ones. As such, it feels more polished, and I think that even those who don't like found footage films should be able to appreciate it. It's really more of a traditional sci-fi space voyage film, and it's a pretty good one - considerably better, I think, than Apollo 18.

In this movie, a six-man crew is en route to Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, in the hope of finding signs of life in the subterranean oceans under thick surface layers of ice. But, as typical in films like these, some things go wrong during the voyage, lives are lost, and what the crew finds on Europa ultimately exceeds all expectations. For better and worse. The revelation of those findings are even less prominent than they were in Apollo 18, but on the other hand, I found them to be more satisfying in this movie. The drama, as well, was much more effective. Europa Report doesn't have the sheer titan force of a movie like the recent Interstellar, but I'd say it's a pretty good example of its genre.

Apollo 18 (2011)

Apollo 18 is the biggest conspiracy theory since the faking of the moon landing. This found footage film documents NASA's "real" last manned voyage to the moon, which had been kept top secret due to what the astronauts found there. It's a brilliant premise, although I don't think it quite lived up to my expectations, and a lot of that may be due to its clever but ultimately less than compelling interpretation of extraterrestrial life. A lot of reviewers mention the copious plot holes, but I was mostly able to overlook them. The movie succeeds in creating a tense atmosphere, and there is some good mystery involved, even if the film doesn't deliver on its potential - this could have been an excellent "Lovecraft in space" story. It's not a really great film, by any standards, but I don't think it's as bad as it's been given credit for, either. Certainly, it's a unique setting for a found footage film, and if you like films like these, it's worth a watch.

Interstellar (2014)

I think it's safe to say that Christopher Nolan is the "it" director of this generation. He's every bit on par with the likes of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and can even surpass arthouse favorites like Stanley Kubrick. Following in the footsteps of Inception and The Dark Knight trilogy - both cinematic tours de force that are emotional, entertaining, and thought-provoking, and totally worth seeing in the theater - comes his latest, the dramatic sci-fi powerhouse Interstellar. You don't need to have a degree in physics to appreciate it, but scientists with imagination will find lots to love.

In a doomed near-future, the Earth is dying, and mankind's last hope for survival is a trip through a mysterious wormhole orbiting Saturn (conveniently placed there by an unknown intelligence). On the other side is a handful of planets in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole, that may or may not be conducive to human life. The big-ticket items on display include the space voyage theatrics (with a good mix of vacuum tension and extraterrestrial geography), and an exploration of such grand physics themes as relativistic dynamics, time dilation, black holes, wormholes, tesseracts, higher dimensions, etc.

However, the heart of this story is the very human tale of a father (Matthew McConaughey) having to leave behind his daughter (a tragically charming Mackenzie Foy/Jessica Chastain as an adult), on the slim hope of saving the human race, which left me weeping crocodile tears. Also starring is Michael Caine and Anne Hathaway as a father-daughter pair working for NASA, and John Lithgow as yet another crotchety old man (recalling, for me, both Kinsey and Rise of the Planet of the Apes). Some of the film's dissertations on love as pertains its scientific validity approach the level of hokey pseudo-science, but mostly it serves to keep the story grounded in human pathos, which is balanced expertly alongside the imaginatively speculative science.

Nolan is obviously a huge fan of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Interstellar plays like a loving ode to that flawed classic, with its long run time, and its segments devoted to 1) activities on Earth leading up to 2) a great space voyage, ultimately culminating in 3) some pretty weird shit involving the universe and higher dimensions (no spoilers beyond that). 2001 succeeds in its idiosyncratic prologue depicting the birth of paleo-human intelligence, and in what would have made a great sci-fi/horror movie on its own: the betrayal of the artificial intelligence HAL 9000.

But where A Space Odyssey faltered - particularly in keeping the audience interested over its almost three hours, and its indecipherable ending - Interstellar shines. I feel like Interstellar is the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey needed to be. It's much more accessible, and ultimately more rewarding, with a more cohesive story. I hope it wins some awards - not that I usually care about that, since it's all a big popularity contest, but Interstellar deserves it. And you should definitely get out there and see it. It's worth it. It's the best new movie I've seen in a while, on par with Snowpiercer, which was fantastic, better even than Prometheus, once you strip away the Alien fan appeal, and able to hold its own when matched against Rise of the Planet of the Apes (and its sequel).