Cailee Spaeny in Alien: Romulus
ALIEN: ROMULUS
The seventh entry in the evidently unkillable sci-fi/horror series (or the ninth if you count the v. Predator mash-ups, which you really shouldn't), writer/director Fede Álvarez's Alien: Romulus is set in 2142, two decades after the events of Ridley Scott's Alien, and 37 years before the narrative resumed with James Cameron's Aliens. Álvarez's and co-screenwriter Rodo Sayagues' choice of year is entirely fitting, because the film seems obviously designed to exist in, and effectively be, a middle ground between the suffocating terror of Scott's 1979 classic and the gung-ho action spectacle of Cameron's 1986 blockbuster. As a die-hard fan of both, I can't say that Romulus comes close to matching either, and its frequent, nearly relentless callbacks to the first two Alien movies range from admirable to wildly offensive. Yet Álvarez's franchise extender is a punchy, routinely exciting entertainment nonetheless. Coming after the twinned bores of Scott's Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, it's also a considerable relief.
Stuck in indentured servitude on a distant mining planet, Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) wants nothing more than to escape her sunless, shit-hole surroundings. Accompanied by her fiercely loyal, slightly damaged synthetic guardian Andy (David Jonsson), Rain gets that opportunity when she's approached by her ex-beau Tyler (Archie Renaux) with a plan: to board a derelict spacecraft hovering many miles overhead, and steer the abandoned vessel toward the Utopian paradise of another galaxy. Tyler and his mission partners – his sister Kay (Isabele Merced), his cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Bjorn's girlfriend Navarro (Aileen Wu) – need Rain because they actually need Andy, his android programming essential for accessing the spacecraft's computer system. So up and into outer space they go, soon discovering that their presumed spacecraft is actually a space station hosting two distinct portions: Romulus and Remus. There's also something else it's hosting – or rather, many, many somethings – but you probably guessed that, right?
Before progressing, I should mention that much of that previous information is gleaned rather than distinctly heard, because outside of a Christopher Nolan picture, rarely have I experienced sound design quite this muddy. Part of the problem lies with mixing, as the ambient noise on that mining planet and aboard both space vessels tends to overpower the actors' readings. The larger issue is the readings themselves. Although the native Uruguayan began his career making short films in Spanish, all of Álvarez's features dating back to 2013's Evil Dead remake have been in English, so it can't be a matter of the filmmaker not comprehending the language. Still, didn't he notice that nearly every sentence uttered by British actors Renaux and (particularly) Fearn was indecipherable, even when they weren't speaking through oxygen masks? You understand the intent behind their words but not the words themselves, and with the exception of the first-rate Spaeny, the other performers occasionally demonstrate similar difficulty with enunciation. (Aren't the Brits supposed to be good at that?) Happily, though, Álvarez's latest gives you so much to look at that you can almost forgive it for offering so little worth listening to.
One of the smartest things that Ridley Scott and his original Alien production designers did was to make the interiors of the space cruiser Nostromo look damned near shoddy, with suggestions of rust on the walls and floors and the fluorescent lights only turning on after first flickering a while. The vessel appeared to be 100 years past retirement – remember those hideous creaking sounds as the air-duct entrances slowly spun open? – and viewed today, the decrepitude stands as an absolutely inspired decision. Back in '79, the Nostromo's computer system (all that bright-green typography on the monitors!) looked dazzlingly futuristic. Now, it appears quaintly, charmingly out-of-date, much like the Nostromo itself, which allows Scott's film to still be believably set in 2122. The first Alien's crew was working with hand-me-downs across the board, and wisely, Álvarez has kept that design aesthetic alive.
It is nothing but complimentary to say that, in terms of the décor and machinery, Romulus looks like it could've been filmed in the late-'70s, at least if Ridley Scott was doing the filming. The computers, bless 'em, still display era-appropriate green characters, and the grubby halls of the new ship are freakishly similar to those in the Nostromo – which makes sense, as I think we're meant to infer that both vessels were built by the same capitalized Company that caused so much trouble for Sigourney Weaver and her comrades once upon a time. (Another smart Álvarez touch: As in Alien and Aliens, crew members here still have no compunction about smoking cigarettes on-board their spacecrafts. Maybe, 100 years down the pike, scientists have found a way to make those things healthy?) Best of all, after years and years of underwhelming CGI employed to bring this series' aliens to life, legit humans again don the full-size xenomorph outfits, lending their presence a more tactile sense of reality than we've felt from these creatures at least since David Fincher's 1992 Alien³. Scott's visuals hold up astoundingly well after 45 years, and while I'm sure computer enhancement was involved, Álvarez's face huggers, chest bursters, and xenomorphs deliver juicy, honest scares that beautifully echo the ones from the pre-CGI days of 1979. The effects hook you because they convince you.
Speaking of echoing, though, it never quite stops in Alien: Romulus, and your mileage will certainly vary on how enjoyable/excruciating you find the incessant callbacks. Personally, I smiled at the reference to cornbread and the sight of the drinking-bird tchotchke and Andy's Bishop-like insistence that he be called an “artificial person.” It was kind of cute when Tyler showed Rain how to handle a piece of heavy weaponry in the exact manner that Michael Biehn did with Sigourney, and I quite liked the conceit that allowed Jonnson to play both versions of the first films' androids: the lovable Bishop and the sinister Ash. (Or, if you weirdly prefer the later works, Michael Fassbender's temperamentally opposed David and Walter.) But the direct lifts from previous ticking-clock dangers made the movie feel somewhat redundant. The verbatim recitation of memorable lines – especially the horribly misconceived appropriation of Ripley's all-timer from Aliens – was distracting and pointless. And please don't get me started on the deep-fake resurrection of a particular Alien actor whose family apparently gave their blessing, but whose presence is a jarring, unnecessary, not particularly well-achieved stunt that gets phonier and phonier the longer you stare at it. Much of Romulus made me think “Wow.” This aspect just made me think “Why?!?”
Yet taken overall, I had a quite a lot of fun. Although he biffs the action climax, where the geography is confusing and it's difficult to discern what's going on, Álvarez comes through with a number of outstanding set pieces, principally the hushed walk through a room swarming with face huggers and Rain's attempt, in zero gravity, to traverse a long hallway without touching the floating, acidic alien blood. A late-film scenario that definitively answered a question regarding alien impregnancy led to legitimate visual invention and awe. Even the familiar beats are generally adroitly executed. And all throughout, Spaeny, who was so excellent in Civil War and as the lead of Sofia Coppola's Priscilla, is a fantastically appealing, empathetic presence whose graceful portrayal both lightens the movie's load and gives it sincere rooting interest. With or without Spaeny, more Aliens will certainly be forthcoming. But it's to Romulus' credit that, unlike its heroine, we don't much miss the sunlight – not when we're being treated to such a refreshing Rain.
DIDI
Coming-of-age dramedies, particularly those that have been given the Sundance Film Festival seal of approval, are pretty much a dime a dozen, and if I were paid a dime for each one I've sat through, I'd have … about 20 cents by now. (No, that doesn't sound impressive – but that's still 24 of these things!) So when I heard that this past January's winner of the Audience Award for U.S. features was writer/director Sean Wang's Didi, and that it, too, was a coming-of-age dramedy, I reflexively shuddered. I'd already been burned by the nightmare of 2022's Cha Cha Real Smooth and bummed by the blandness of 2021's eventual Oscar champ CODA, and the thought of enduring one more salty-yet-wistful, eccentric-yet-twee, Audience Award-ed Sundance sensation filled me with ennui at best. Yet here I am eating my umpteenth helping of crow, because Didi is utterly marvelous – as moving as it is hilarious, and easily the strongest example of its genre since Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade from 2018. It's too early to tell if Wang is a comparable talent, but if he, too, releases a genius comedy special amidst our next pandemic, I'll be among the first to devour it.
Set in southern California in the summer of 2008, the film concerns the minor triumphs and major turmoils of 13-year-old Taiwanese-American protagonist Chris Wang (Izaac Wang, no relation to Sean), who's referred to as “Wang-Wang” by his friends and “Didi,” meaning “younger brother,” by his family: long-suffering mother Chungsing (Joan Chen), college-bound sister Vivian (Shirley Chen, no relation to Joan), and endlessly kvetching grandmother Nai Nai (Chang Li Hua, Sean's actual grandma). Coming-of-age entertainments are inherently about the search for identity, and that theme is magnified in Didi by our hero literally being called three separate names over the course of the film; no one, least of all Chris, can agree on who the boy is. The movie's central story is largely irrelevant, primarily because we've all seen variants on its individual plotlines before: Chris leaves his besties for a questionable new crowd; he crushes hard on a fellow student; he demands to be treated as an adult while behaving, to his constant detriment, like a bratty little kid. (Adjust Chris' race and gender and he's essentially Saoirse Ronan's Lady Bird.) What separates Wang's semi-autobiographical feature from other works of its type, beyond its shockingly vulgar, uproarious humor, lies in its bold, painful focus on concealment – hiding who you are in hopes of becoming the person you (think you) want to be.
Scene after scene here finds Chris tragicomically unable to simply be himself. He tells his new crew of skateboarding pals that he's “only half-Asian,” despite both parents being Taiwanese. He quickly hides his nerdy wall art when said friends pop by for an unexpected visit. He stalks his crush's Facebook page to rave about movies she loves (that he hasn't seen) and don T-shirts advertising her favorite musicians (whom Chris has certainly not listened to). But while his ruses are pathetic, you also understand the impetus behind them, because on those rare occasions that Chris does reveal himself – as when telling a story about the exploding of a dead squirrel that proves to be an unsurpassed conversation killer – he's routinely shunned and shamed. Thirteen is an age at which you feel you can't do or say anything right, and Wang delivers that aching, funny-only-in-hindsight experience in full. While I laughed a lot during Didi, I far more frequently winced. I was never a Taiwanese-American and we didn't have Facebook, yet I'm pretty sure Wang stole a number of his scenarios directly from my own childhood.
As Burnham did in Eighth Grade, though, Wang also shows considerable directorial chops to match his elegant writing. He creates exquisite tension during moments that, for a pubescent, can be unbearably intense: desperately waiting for, or praying to never receive, a particular instant message; scanning faces to see if on-the-spot lies are sticking; gauging visceral reactions to determine if changes to the presentational game plan are necessary. There's more energy, and there are higher stakes, in Didi than in most like-minded films, and generally speaking, there are better performances, too. Izaac Wang is a naturalistic wonder, all of his young contemporaries are unerringly believable (some so much so that they're obnoxious as hell), and the only time I stopped grinning at Joan Chen's luminous yet down-to-earth portrayal was when the actor was making me cry. With only a couple of mid-'90s exceptions – and BTW, Jonah Hill's Mid90s is also a great coming-of-age dramedy! – the last time I saw Chen on-screen was when her Twin Peaks character Jodie Packard became trapped forever in the knob of a hotel dresser. (Oh, David Lynch … .) More than 30 years later, Chen is still ravishing, which isn't surprising, but also staggeringly warm and forthright and touching – if Izaac Wang is the heart of the movie, Joan Chen is unquestionably the soul. And for all of the film's many laughs, Didi's heart and soul are as big as the sky.
MY PENGUIN FRIEND
If you didn't know that director David Schurmann's PG-rated family film was, per its description on the Internet Movie Database, “an enchanting adventure about a lost penguin rescued from an oil spill,” you might watch the opening minutes of My Penguin Friend with dread, awaiting either a horrific accident or an unspeakable tragedy. At the start, a sweet-faced little boy who can't be a day past eight is seen running through his Brazilian village. All smiles, the kid laughs and kicks a soccer ball and receives a day-early birthday gift from a girl he likes, and events are just as chipper when the child returns home to his loving parents, where they goof around and dance and make birthday plans. Any seasoned moviegoer will recognize this much merriment as a sign of truly bad times ahead. But then you think, “It's My Penguin Friend, for Pete's sake – how bad could those times be?” The horrific accident and unspeakable tragedy that follow effectively answer that question.
I'm hardly advocating for more renderings of physical injury and death in family movies. Yet I have to admit that the scary, painful-sounding tragic accident of Schurmann's prelude didn't just shake me up; it woke me up – at least from my presumption that the film, as its trailers indicated, would merely be feel-good treacle about an aging man's unexpected kinship with a flightless seabird. While there are certainly elements of that in Kristen Lazarian's and Paulina Lagudi Ulrich's screenplay, there's also a heartbreaking human sadness that cuts through all the adorable shenanigans as our titular penguin, who's eventually named TinTim, waddles down cobblestone streets or rocks a tiny makeshift sweater. The movie has adorableness aplenty. Happily, it also has Jean Reno and Adriana Barraza, and it's their haunted, wounded portrayals that lend true depth to this largely charming work.
Opting for the title card “inspired by a true story,” the word choice giving its authors free rein to bend the facts a little or a lot, My Penguin Friend finds its inspiration in the real-life saga of a Magellanic penguin who, in 2011, drifted onto a Rio de Janeiro beach and was nursed back to health by retiree João Pereira de Souza. What made the story noteworthy was that after the seabird recuperated for several months and (presumably) returned to his Argentinian nest some 5,000 miles away, he swam back to Brazil – purportedly to visit João – the following year, and then the year after that, and then over five additional years. (No one knows what happened to “TinTim” following his final trek to Rio de Janeiro; here's hoping he simply got tied up with husband/father responsibilities.) Regardless of the liberties taken with the tale's veracity, that's a tremendous hook for a kid-friendly nature adventure, and as long as they're not traumatized by the events of the film's first 10 minutes, it's tough to imagine what grade-schooler wouldn't have a ball at Schurmann's entertainment.
Apparently, more than 80 percent of TinTim's screen time finds the penguin played by actual, honest-to-goodness penguins – a full 10 of them – and not created through CGI or puppetry effects. (Whenever TinTim is the product of visual trickery, you can tell, and it's kind of embarrassing.) And cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, the frequent Danny Boyle collaborator who won an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire, clearly knows what a prize he has in having a bunch of genuine birds to follow around. His camera frequently waddling behind TinTim, two feet off the ground, as the penguin navigates his surroundings, Boyle's photography is amusing and playful, particularly when we're given “bird's-eye views” of the world from TinTim's perspective. It should go without saying that the creature also makes the most delightful sounds, and audiences of all ages might find it hard not to giggle at TinTim's squawks and flapping wings and crazy-cute patter as he ambles across the floor. Just about everything involving our titular penguin is a treat. Everything involving Reno and Barraza is even better.
To be sure, I could've done without several plot developments designed to expand the narrative. While it makes sense to include a filmmaking team that wants to cover TinTim's annual return, his heroic journey having become a viral sensation, it makes zero sense to have these folks make the trip to Brazil for a single day in which they expect him to show up, only to leave disappointed. (It's not like the bird kept visiting Rio de Janeiro on the same calendar date every year.) And adding an Argentinian environmental-research team that studies TinTim in his natural habitat would've worked better if (a) one of the researchers wasn't a tiresome stick-in-the-mud convinced that the miraculous penguin was in no way special, and (b) the most sympathetic researcher wasn't also the one who cruelly left TinTim to fend for himself in what appeared to be a desert, fully confident that the bird would find his way back to sea. Why the hell would she assume that?! It didn't look like a hoot for the creature when TinTim was shown slowly waddling along while roasting under the Brazilian sun.
Still, the movie's pleasures handily outweigh its deficiencies. And if you can take your eyes off TinTim, who's probably our human star's cutest screen partner since the 12-year-old Natalie Portman of León: The Professional, you might find yourself unable to take them off Jean Reno. In his richest, warmest English-language performances in ages, and I'm tempted to say ever, the French star is phenomenally expressive without having much in the way of dialogue, or at least dialogue that leads to person-to-person conversation. You sense every year of his fisherman João's tragic life in Reno's gorgeously weathered face and moist bloodhound eyes, and he shares remarkable unspoken rapport with Barraza, who's given less to do as João's wife Maria, but conveys just as much grief, regret, and longing. You want these two to be happy even more than you want TinTim to be safe, and while My Penguin Friend is a routinely winning seabird adventure, it's occasionally an even stronger marital drama. Penguins are famously not the most monogamous of creatures. The few who are probably got a good look at João and Maria and thought, “Oh-h-h-h … so that's how you make it work.”
