Greetings! Have you ever wondered if a movie's worth blowing the money on to see at the theater or what to add next to your NetFlix queue? Then you've come to the right place! Enjoy!
Sony has had a pretty bad run managing their sole Marvel character license, Spider-Man, with the high points like the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse and Across the Spiderverse weighed down by the lackluster Amazing Spider-Man pair of movies. It got so dire that they relented to allow Spidey to join the MCU in Captain America: Civil War and basically outsourced production of solo movies to Marvel resulting in Homecoming/Far From Home/No Way Home trilogy which augmented Tom Holland's Peter Parker with Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), and Doctor Strange (Bernadette Cumberbund) and appearances in the last two Avengers movies.
But the license also gave Sony the rights to make movies with Spider-Man adjacent villains and anti-heroes which has led to a trio of absolute disasters - Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter - but also a mysteriously successful run of movies featuring Spidey's symbiote nemesis Venom. Beginning with 2018's Venom, which was OK, and continuing with 2021's noisy & bad Venom: Let There Be Carnage, the trilogy concludes with Venom: The Last Dance which is slightly better than its title and substantially better than the last entry.
After a bewildering cold-open info dump which sets up this movie's Big Bad, Knull (Andy Serkis), and the gobbledygook MacGuffin called the Codex (super original name there) which would free him to destroy the Universe (because no one just wants to rule the Upper East Side), we catch up with Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) who is temporarily hanging out in our Earth-616 universe thanks to Doctor Strange's spell in No Way Home. Tossed back into his correct universe, he finds he is internationally and wrongly wanted for murder related to events in the last movie.
While literally hitching a ride on the outside of a jet airliner, Eddie/Venom attract an attack by a Xenophage sent by Knull to get the Codex which is formed and acts like a homing beacon when they go into full Venom form. When it's just tentacles or a head popping from Eddie's body, fine; but when he's Venom, ruh roh. And the only way to destroy the Codex is for Eddie or Venom to die.
After escaping the plane encounter, they are beset upon by an the forces of Gen. Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor, this character was written as a white guy, wasn't he?) who is trying to eradicate the symbiotes. Only when the Xenophage eats the soldiers are they able to escape again, which makes them even less popular with Strickland.
Trekking though the Nevada wilderness they encounter a hippie family traveling in a VW van (what else?) headed by Martin Moon (Rhys Ifans) who are heading to Area 51 to see it before it gets decommissioned and offers to drop Eddie off in Las Vegas where the conveniently encounter Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu), the convenience store owner from the first two movies, who is such a high roller they've comped her a suite where they can go and dance to ABBA's "Dancing Queen" while Venom attracts the Xenophage and Strickland's forces to capture them and wait, what the heck is going on here?!? Why did they go full metal Venom when they know it attracts bad monsters with bad goals?
It all ends up in your typical third act VFX overload with lots of monsters and mayhem and a very predictable ending which was foreshadowed from the first moments at Area 51. Writer Kelly Marcel, who came up with the story with Hardy and also steps into the director's chair after co-writing the first and solo writing the second movies, has come up with a lumpy, disjointed string of scenes and events which never really gels into a coherent story. Details are focused on which either set up obvious payoffs or never amount to anything, feeling like there's a lot of footage that got cut to bring it down to a manageable 109 minutes. And Knull is a terrible Big Bad because he comes from nowhere in the series mythology & is just Serkis doing his Snoke voice again.
Hardy is his usual twitchy self as Eddie who never really seems at peace with his co-pilot, but it's his gonzo vocal performance as Venom (he actually does the voice with audio processing to make it sound more alien) and the only thing that kept me engaged with the story was Venom's running commentary as when Martin hands Eddie a tray of vegan food, saying that "nothing died on this plate," and Eddie hurls it away while Venom barks (internally), "HARD PASS!" - the only thing that spares the movie from getting a similar review.
On the audio-visual front, the 4K HDR grade is above average with bright, punchy colors and good detail. The audio track is also good with the rumbling symbiote and Knull voices having a meaty low-end.
The Venom series has always been lower second tier comic book fare, but compared to the mess of most of Sony's Spiderverse efforts have been, it's the tallest pygmy in Borneo.
In conjunction with the 20th Anniversary of the release of the legendary game Half-Life 2 in November 2024 comes the....ummmmm.....documentary Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Documentary on develiper Valve's YouTube which in the words of the description, "To celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2, we've gotten members of the HL2 team back to talk about the game's development, how we almost ran out of money, what it was like when we were hacked, what happened when we were sued by our publisher, the birthplace of Steam, and much more."
That sums everything up tidily as well as redundantly. As the description says, it's a lot of white dudes (and ONE white chick) talking about how they developed the game, iterating and playtesting to refine the game. Plenty of in-progress developmental test footage illustrates things and they show the local residents of their Washington town who were photographed to populate the game as NPCs. Fun Fact: The face of Dr. Eli Vance was a homeless fellow who some of the devs would pass by on their commute and thought he had a good look. So they brought him in and paid him $200 (the rate everyone got) to immortalize him across three games.
The lawfare they were subjected to by the publisher of the first Half-Life was brutal and intended to bankrupt both the company and co-founder Gabe Newell personally as he tapped his savings and even put his house up to keep the lights on. The irony is that a maneuver by the publisher to bog them down with a mountain of documents in Korean backfired as a Korean-speaking intern a Valve discovered a smoking gun email which blew the case up.
But what is sorely lacking is any candor about how Newell is a fat f*cking liar who lied about the condition of the game in the months ahead of it's originally scheduled Sept. 30, 2003 release date. Newell - "Lord GabeN" to his herds of retarded admirers - announced the release date in an exclusive cover reveal in PC Gamer six months prior, firmly stating that the game was being announced then because they were in final stages of making it and it'd be ready to go on schedule. But then a hack - covered in the doc - stole the game code and put it on the Internet and what it showed that it was nowhere close to being ready. (This is fleetingly referenced in the doc.)
Newell's deceit extended to holding a splashy launch event on Alcatraz in conjunction with terminal videocard also-rans ATI (now AMD) which as this report from the Planet Half-Life site detailed lacked the actual game. Because I loved the first game and was naive enough to believe Valve when they said the game would ship when promised, I built a new computer in August 2003 just to be ready for Half-Life 2 the next month. By the time it arrived 14 months later, I'd already upgraded the videocard.
Add on the failure to complete the promised trilogy of Episodes and the fact there are legions of drooling gamers slurping GabeN's grease-and-Cheeto-dust encrusted junk is even more appalling. The loyalty this charlatan inspires is ugh. The Orange Box, which shipped on Oct. 9, 2007, included Half-Life 2: Episode Two which ended on a cliffhanger. As of this writing it has been 6304 days since The Orange Box came out - 17 years, 3 months, 2 days, but who's counting? - and Episode Three never happened. In fact, they never officially cancelled it, preferring to just pretend it was never promised.
If they had simply announced that they didn't feel they could make a concluding episode that was up to their standards, it would've been disappointing, but would've been better than just going radio silent. Concept sketches from the scrapped Episode are shown and work had been done, but they diverted the team to work on Left 4 Dead and by the time they got done with that, it was too late. So they did nothing.
Yes, I am still mad about it.
But even allowing for my antipathy for the fat f*cking liar, Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Documentary suffers from being too broad and general while papering over the inconvenient aspects of their operation. Even speed-watching at 2X speed (a feature I wish every streaming service offered on my home theater's apps like they do on web or mobile like Netflix's 1.5X speed), it's a lot of stuff only of interest to the most completionist fans of the game. Even as a big behind-the-scenes making-of, there's too much filler larding out the killer. It could've been half the length.
And Gabe Newell is a still slightly-less-fat f*cking liar.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on YouTube if you're a fan; otherwise Skip it.
If ever a movie title didn't hide the ball as to what it is, it would be Norman's Rare Guitars Documentary, the docume....well, obviously. A fixture of the LA music scene for over 50 years, founder Norman Harris and his mecca of vintage instruments has been (guitar) dealer to stars, both rock and movie, as evidenced by the rapid parade of snapshots and video clips showcasing the Who's Who of Music who have patronized his establishment.
After tracing his early days as a musician and finder of cool instruments in Miami, he relocated to LA and rapidly became the go-to source for cool instruments. As word of mouth spread, he finally moved his operation out of his crammed apartment to a series of ever-larger stores. But even his current location isn't enough as he has a warehouse worthy of the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark filled with crates filled with cases full of guitars.
Even though I'm a guitarist with a nice assortment of axes, I've never been particularly interested in the whole vintage guitar thing, mostly because they easily run in price to about what a NEW car used to cost. If I ever ended up in LA, I doubt I'd go to Norm's because there's no way I could afford or justify what he's peddling. It's like going to a Victoria's Secret show and not being able to buy the models.
But Norman's Rare Guitars Documentary also does a mediocre job of even explaining what the big deal is. There's a saying that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but no one really explains what it is about these guitars or the need to amass great collections that keeps them coming back. Executive Keifer Sutherland talks about how he had 100 guitars and realized he'd never play them all - it's true, every guitarist has a fave or two and the rest are just inventory - so he sold off nearly 3/4 of his stash and if he buys a new one, he sells an old one. Cool, but why 100 guitars in the first place or 400+ like Joe Bonamasa cops to?
The doc also drags on with segments about how they showcase new artists on their social media and YouTube channel and his charitable works. While expanding Norm's reputation as a mensch, it also bloats the runtime about a half-hour longer than necessary.
Playing mostly as a feature-length commercial for a music store whose clientele would already know of its existence, Norman's Rare Guitars Documentary doesn't really succeed at much more than raising the question of what will happen to this institution when Norm finally retires or passes on as evidenced when he had major health issues in 2022. Lacking in guitar pr0n for guitarists or really much insights from celebrity interviewees, it's probably too specific AND general for most viewers.
Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Netflix.)
One of the more frustrating experiences in movie viewing is when a story has an intriguing setup, but when it comes time to pay it off, it's at best anticlimatic and more likely annoying to infuriating. Such as it is with Heretic, art house darling studio A24's latest horror film which has disappointment in common with releases like Y2K (just viewed a few nights ago) and MaXXXine from last summer.
Heretic follows Mormon missionaries Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher, Yellowjackets) and Sister Barnes (Chloe East, The Fabelmans) as they struggle to make converts. When not being rebuffed by people walking by, they're being pranked by cruel teenagers. As they approach their last lead, it begins to rain. Answering the door is Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), who invites them in. They initially demur because it's required for a female to be present, but he assures them his wife is home baking blueberry pie. He also asks if they have a problem with there being metal in the walls and ceiling. Ruh-roh.
Initially, Reed seems like a very interested customer as he already has a heavily annotated copy of the Book of Mormon (the Mormon Bible, not the Broadway musical), but as the referenced Mrs. Reed never appears, the girls begin to get more concerned. This concern rises to mild panic as they realize the front door is locked and they have no cell signal due to the Faraday cage construction he mentioned. And the smell of blueberry pie? It was a scented candle. (Not a spoiler; it's in the trailer.)
Venturing further into the house, they find Reed waiting in a large room with a vaguely churchish vibe. Here's where things kick into gear as he challenges the claims of religions to be the "One True Faith" by analogizing various editions of Monopoly & the similarity between The Hollies' "The Air That I Breathe" with Radiohead's "Creep" and Lana Del Rey's "Get Free" with the point being all religions are just ripping off each other. He then tells them they are free to go, but must choose between doors labeled "Belief" and "Disbelief."
What happens when they make their choice comprises the back half of Heretic and it's where things begin to fall apart storywise as co-writers/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (whose last film was the forgettable Adam Driver vs. dinosaurs sci-fi flick 65) find themselves unable to deliver on the heady premise and it spirals into more far-fetched situations which raise more questions as to what is the One True Religion. (Which everyone who watches The Simpsons knows is a mix of voodoo and Presbyterian.)
The more I thought about the last act, the madder I got to the point where I'd docked a point from its initial 7/10 score before going to bed then knocking off another while eating breakfast. Many movies require some suspension of disbelief, but Heretic requires leaps of faith that Evel Knievel couldn't clear beginning with the entire premise resting on Reed constructing this test of faith & rigged house with timed locks and signal-blocking construction seemingly in preparation for these two girls to arrive. What would've happened if two male Elders knocked on his door? How did he get elements for his scheme without anyone noticing?
That a movie about faith literally ends with a deus ex machina is stock horror movie stuff, but divorced from the premise that drew us in. The final shot is also another one of those "What does it really mean? things which bugged me the other night with Juror #2.
It's too bad because the thesis is interesting and the performances are uniformly solid beginning with Grant's calibrated descent from charming to threatening, but he's undercut by the screenplay's tropes. Anyone really surprised by Grant's later career moves must not have seen him in 2012's Cloud Atlas where he played a half-dozen wildly different characters.
Even while the overall story falters on horror tropes and contrivances, it's too its credit that it doesn't play the Sisters as total naifs as they both call BS on Reed's arguments and never succumb to helpless damseling. However, a detail about Barne's again raises questions about what she's doing in her free time.
In my 65 review linked above, I called into question Beck and Woods' writing skills as their script seemed vastly inferior to their A Quiet Place script which must have been vastly rewritten by director and star John Krasinski and my doubts continue here. While they stage their tale with good visual style, aided by Chung Chung-hoon's shadowy cinematography, the writing lets things down.
While Heretic avoids the Skip It judgement of Y2K and MaXXXine, it's still a letdown which doesn't live up to its premise.
There are few things pretty much all movie fans will agree on, but this is one of them: John Williams is the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) of movie score composers. Sure, there may be a few who disagree, but they're morons & probably Commie alien robots.
With 54 Oscar nominations (only Walt Disney has more) and five wins (ONLY FIVE?!?) and a legacy including nine Star Wars, five Indiana Jones, three Harry Potter and so many more memorable scores - Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jurassic Park, Superman (admit it, you were humming the themes from everything I've listed) - there is no one who has cast such a transformative shadow across music for films. He is a rock star in what was a staid and underappreciated field. Film maven Robert Meyer Burnett said that if you only looked at the 29(!) scores he's composed for Steven Spielberg alone he would be the GOAT.
So is the premise of Music by John Williams, a fascinating and informative documentary which is unfortunately on the godforsaken Mouse+ hellhole service. (There are ways around this, ahem.) Director Laurent Bouzereau - who if you've even watched the making-of behind-the-scenes supplements on a major film's DVD/Blu-ray probably directed it - pays loving tribute to the long and surprisingly varied career of Williams.
Beginning life as the son of a jazz drummer who played with Benny Goodman and others before moving the family to Hollywood where he played in studio orchestras on films you've heard of, Williams was destined for a life in music, but he thought he'd just be a pianist. Beginning in high school through his service in the Air Force, he stumbled into opportunities to learn skills in arranging and composing which led to his own career playing on scores, ultimately beginning to score countless television shows of many genres, further expanding his versatility.
Spielberg had become smitten with Williams work after hearing his score for The Reivers, swearing that if he would ever get to make a feature he'd have Williams do the music. Soon he was meeting with Williams to discuss scoring 1974's The Sugarland Express and their collaboration has continued through current times when Williams became the oldest Oscar nominee ever in 2022 at age 91 for his score to The Fabelmans. It was Spielberg who pitched George Lucas on using Williams after Jaws, when Lucas just knew him as a jazz artist.
Which is where Music by John Williams really steps up to touch upon his career before becoming Mr. Blockbuster Movie Score Guy to Gen X as a musician on scores to movies you've heard of to his personal classical compositions for various instruments which attracted some of the greatest players in the field.
Interestingly, he has never adopted technology in his process, still scoring by hand with pencil and paper vs. computerized methods where what you play gets automatically converted into notation. He also remains steadfast in using full orchestras to record his scores rather than using synthesizers/samplers like many do as a cost saving or speed method. (Looking at you, Hans Zimmer.) While he has brought in synths as augments (e.g. Munich) and I remember when I realized there was electric guitar during the assassin droid chase scene from Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones, he has remained a Luddite in those regards, though he admits auto-transcription would be useful for faster complicated passages.
One of the wildest factoids was delivered by his daughter who mentioned her brother was the singer of Toto (in their post Toto IV phase in the 1980s for a few years). Oddly, his sons don't appear.
I've seen some grousing that this is more of a tribute than a documentary because it doesn't compare him to other contemporary composers, but so what? This is picky nattering like a theologian whining that a documentary about God doesn't talk about Apollo, Zeus & Vishnu half the time. It's not about the others, it's about John Williams. While Coldplay's Chris Martin speaks on how Williams' scores evoke emotions and Branford Marsalis notes how the cantina band number in Star Wars and the score to Catch Me If You Can prove Williams' jazz legitimacy, no other film composers are featured, just his film & classical collaborators.
Williams will be turning 93 in a month and sadly no one lives forever, so there will eventually be a time when we won't be blessed with the new music of John Williams. But we will always have the millions of notes he has composed to not only be the soundtrack of the movies, but the soundtrack of our lives. Anyone interested in music or movies (which is why you're here, right?) should make a point of watching Music by John Williams.
Score: 8.5/10. Catch it on Disney+ (or your favorite black flag high seas method).
It's a new year, but tonight's first movie of the new year is a throwback to a time when mature filmmakers made well-acted, small-scale tales which didn't involve the fate of the Universe as much as the fate of a few people's souls and moral compasses. Such as it is with Juror #2, a film unfairly burdened with historical importance due to it possibly being the last film by 94-year-old Clint Eastwood.
The titular juror is Justin (Nicholas Hoult), a writer in Georgia who has been called for jury duty in late-October 2022. He tries to beg off because his wife, Allison (Zoey Deutch), is nearly due with a high-risk pregnancy, but is denied and made to sit for the trial of James Sythe (Gabriel Basso, who played incoming Vice President JD Vance in the film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy) who is accused of murdering his girlfriend, Kendall (Francesca Eastwood, one guess as to who dad is), and throwing her body into a creek.
Immediately as the trial begins, Justin realizes that the night of alleged murder and location of her body coincided with the night he thought he had hit a deer on that dark and stormy night. He realizes he was at the bar the couple were at where they'd publicly spatted. Did he hit Kendall?
Justin goes to his AA sponsor, Larry (Kiefer Sutherland), and pays him a dollar (for attorney-client confidentiality) for advice for what to do about his situation and possible involvement. Larry points out that with his record of drunk driving and presence in a bar before the accident, no one will believe he wasn't drunk even though Justin swears he didn't drink the drink he'd ordered. To come forward to save an innocent man with a troubled past would likely destroy his family.
When the trial goes into deliberations, Justin is horrified that everyone just wants to convict James and get back to their lives. They aren't happy with this holdout and his vague comments about needing to look at the evidence, but soon he has an ally in former homicide detective, Harold (J.K. Simmons), who initially believes James should've taken the plea, but begins to agree that something seems off about the case and James doesn't seem like the killer type.
When Harold's attempt to investigate things puts him afoul of the rules, he is dismissed from the jury, but approaches the assistant DA conducting the trial, Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette), and puts the bug in her ear that perhaps the case wasn't properly investigated by the police who had immediately set their sights on the victim's boyfriend and built the case around nailing him to the exclusion of other possibilities.
Where Juror #2 steps up is in the above-average script by first-time screenwriter Jonathan A. Abrams which takes the time to set up the characters to give them understandable, if sometimes unreasonable, motivations. Eastwood's spare direction also relies on viewers to notice crucial details with minimal reiteration like what the date in question meant which would trigger Justin to have a crisis of sobriety.
Abrams script also avoid the lazy tropes of too many movies. Killebrew is running for District Attorney and to win a conviction in this notorious trial would definitely help her, but she's not railroading a man who knows she's innocent. After Harold suggests the investigation may've been myopic, she actually does the work of running down the angle Harold dug up.
The 12 Annoyed Diverse Jurors are eventually willing to consider the thinness of the circumstantial evidence though one juror (Cedric Yarbrough) has an axe to grind against past behavior of the defendant that he'll never change his vote. Another (Chikako Fukuyama) notices a detail that really should've been caught by both the medical examiner and the public defender, Resnick (Chris Messina), so when the verdict is abruptly rendered, we're left wondering what had changed.
Which leads to the least satisfying and sketchiest part, the film's coda where Justin and Killebrew have an oblique conversation where they convey they know what actually happened, but he tells her to deliver actual justice would be too devastating to them. This seems out of character with what he'd tried to do during deliberations, though the final moment may imply both are about to reverse course. It feels like Abrams didn't quite know how to explicate things better and just called it close enough for government work.
Eastwood, for all his notable films in a directorial career spanning over 50 years back to 1971's Play Misty For Me, has never really been a flashy director, focusing more on straightforward storytelling without visual flourishes, and he doesn't start cribbing from Michael Bay here. But across the board the performances are solid, even with tertiary roles. (As an actor, he knows how to direct actors and famously doesn't like to shoot a lot of takes, unlike those like David Fincher who will shoot 100 takes as if anyone would know the difference if he stopped after 50.)
The controversy over Juror #2 is whether a legendary director like Eastwood's potential final film should've been dumped to streaming and denied a theatrical release, but it was always intended to be a Max Original. Frankly, how much of an audience for a quiet legal drama is going to want to schlep to the theater to see a movie like this regardless of quality? Maybe in 1998 we would've, but now any movies that don't beg for BIG SCREEN VIEWING beyond what our nice home theater delivers get caught when they're streaming. We would never have gone out now to see Juror #2, but definitely would've watched it later. So should you.
Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on MAX.)
It's New Year's Eve, so why not watch the new sci-fi/horror/comedy by former SNL alum Kyle Mooney, Y2K, which he directed and co-wrote (with Evan Winter)?
Jaeden Martell (IT) stars as Eli, an awkward high schooler whose only friend is Danny (Julian Dennison, not slimmed down in the least since Deadpool 2). He has a crush on Laura (Rachel Zegler, West Side Story), a beautiful classmate and secret tech nerd, but of course can't tell her how he feels about her and her cool kids clique are disgusted by the "Sticky Boys" (as they call themselves) because of course, this being a teen movie.
They decide to crash a New Year's Eve party being held at Laura's ex-boyfriend Soccer Chris's (Aussie rapper The Kid Laroi) house and it's your usual movie rager party until the clock strikes midnight, ushering in 2000 and the lights flicker out. After a few seconds, they come back on and it appears Y2K was a dud (as it was in reality), but then a toy jeep with other toys combined with it burns a kid's face to death with a makeshift flamethrower and other devices begin attacking and killing the partygoers including Danny.
Eli, Laura and a pair of local rap crew members who bullied Eli and Danny - CJ (Daniel Zolghadri, Eighth Grade) and Ash (Lachlan Watson, Glen/Glenda in the Chucky TV series) - then trek to find Laura's previous ex-boyfriend, an electrical engineering major named Jonas (Mason Gooding, Cuba Jr's son, Love, Victor) to see if he can help with these conglomerations of household electronics. Also in the mix is a stoner video store clerk, Garret, played by Mooney.
The problem with Y2K is that the script is a half-baked mishmash of other familiar movies. The Eli-Danny dynamic is so cribbed from Superbad that I wasn't surprised to see Jonah Hill has a producer here. The swing from teen buddy comedy to full splatter comedy a la Evil Dead II could've worked in the hands of a better director, but Mooney isn't up to the task.
The script feels like a barely hanging together first draft that needed more trips through development with the most cardboard of characters. How did the killer robots assemble themselves so quickly? Don't know. How did the virus spread when hardly anything was connected to the Internet and broadband was a novelty? Don't know. Why does there seem to be nobody else in the world than the immediate characters in the movie and why is everyone's favorite art house movie brand A24 watering down their reputation with such lackluster stuff? /shrug emoji
While the use of clever puppets and robot suits fabricated by Weta Workshop give a tactile lo-fi vibe, the cinematography by Bill Pope (three Edgar Wright, four Sam Raimi, and four Wachowskis movies including The Matrix trilogy) is too good for this project.
Frankly, if it looked worse and starred nobodies (think: Clerks) it's B-movie story would've worked better. When the best thing about your movie is the surprise cameo of a certain red-hatted nu-metal rocker who was huge in 1999 and is willing to take the piss out of himself for the last act of the movie, that's not a ringing endorsement of Mooney's effort. (FWIW, the missus liked it much more.)
Even if you're not a tech nerd like me, you probably recognize names like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak as founders of Microsoft and Apple. But how about Rod Canion, Jim Harris, or Bill Murto? Those names ring any bells? Me neither despite being a older Gen Xer nerd who remembers the wild early days of computers in the late-70s/early-80s and whose first computer bought in 1997 was made by the company they founded: Compaq. And I had no idea how revolutionary Compaq was until watching Silicon Cowboys, a fascinating documentary about the early years of the firm.
Founded in late-1981 by the trio, all Texas Instruments employees in Houston who wanted to do something on their own, their Big Idea was to make a portable ("luggable" was the term for this 27 lb box) computer that would have the display and disc drives in a housing with a removable keyboard that would be fully compatible with software written for the IBM PC. IBM was the 800 megaton gorilla (to mix metaphors) in the market owing to their long history in mainframe computers. The idea that some guys from Texas could challenge Big Blue was like if someone decided to form a startup to challenge Google now.
The key to compatibility was the microcode in the BIOS (basic input/output system) embedded in chips in the PC. While everything that comprised IBM's PCs was off the shelf parts anyone could buy, to run the software required this code and that was copyrighted. IBM was able to shut down "PC clone" makers for infringing on their code.
So Compaq would need to write a BIOS by trial and error without referencing IBMs code. When the head engineer bought and IBM tech manual and found out all the calls were documented, he was off the project because he'd seen the code. Anyone who got these manuals had to have those pages removed and destroyed before they could have them. They just ran software until it failed then figured out why it failed until they had their own compatible BIOS that had no IBM code on it. They couldn't be shut down.
The Compaq portable was a smashing success and the company took off like a rocket becoming the fastest to enter the Fortune 500 and to reach one billion dollars in sales. IBM remained cocky and arrogant and Compaq ate their lunch, reaping massive sales and market share. Finally the Empire struck back, threatening them with patent infringement suits unless they paid up. While the critical microcode wasn't at issue, IBM had skads of patents on everything and to fight the cases to prove unique development would've been too costly, so Compaq paid the greenmail.
Then IBM tried to wipe out the clone market with their PS/2 series which implemented a new architecture called Micro Channel which added some sorely needed features, but would also require everyone to buy only Micro Channel compatible peripherals. Considering some firms had massive investments in PCs and supporting equipment, this was too big an ask. Then Compaq led a consortium of other clone-makers to announce an standard called EISA which added the advances of Micro Channel while maintaining the compatibility with existing peripherals. IBM was trapped by their greed and need for control.
But it wasn't all smooth sailing for Compaq as eventually hungry upstarts like Dell (founded by Michael Dell in his UT-Austin dorm room in 1984) pressuring them on price which led to the their first quarterly loss ever, layoffs, and the dismissal of their co-founder/CEO Canion less than a decade after launching this rocket. (Some gratitude, huh?)
20 years after its founding, Compaq merged with HP to form the largest PC company in the world, but the documentary downplays how it was generally considered to be a bad deal for both sides, leading to turmoil in stock prices, layoffs, and general drama. The Compaq name pretty much is extinct by now. As for IBM, they exited the PC market a few years later, selling the operation to Lenovo.
At a tight 77-minutes long, Silicon Cowboys is a very illuminating look at what is a semi-forgotten, yet seminal period in the computer revolution. When I spotted it perusing the virtual shelves of Prime Video, I thought it sounded like the first season of the AMC series Halt and Catch Fire and I was correct as the shows co-creator, Christopher Cantwell, appears and clips of the show are used to illustrate events in the development of the first Compaq. (It was a good show, but sadly got pulled off Netflix and put behind the AMC+ paywall.)
Director Jason Cohen makes it easy to follow which of the old white guys telling the story we're watching by flashing their names & old ID photos on screen even after they've been on several times and spices things up with tons of archive footage including the cringiest "rap" video promo called "PacRap" that's even more horrible than you can imagine. Since all the key players were still alive to participate for this 2016 doc along with journalists, historians, and IBM execs to present their perspective, we're given a pretty balanced narrative that doesn't whitewash too much that I could tell.
While this may be a bit dry for non-nerds, anyone interested in the history of the tech we take for granted and how Compaq proved that portability would be the killer app should give Silicon Cowboys a watch.
Previously reviewed here two years ago and my general thoughts still stand, but I've lowered the score from the above-average 8/10, to the slightly below average 6/10 because the pace is slower than I'd noticed with the mayhem last time. It's not bad and perhaps for first-time viewers it will have the same initial kick, but second time around the issues are more noticeable.
Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently only on Starz.)
Less a movie then a massive business deal amongst long-running associates, Red One came out briefly in theaters where it disappointed commercially, except were were told that it didn't really matter because it was always heading for Amazon Prime so who cares how much it made? This was after a surprising amount of negative publicity concerning The Rock's Dwayne Johnson's prima donna behavior on set which allegedly added tens of millions to the production costs. This was especially ironic because of the beef that erupted between Rock & Furry Fastness kingpin Vin Diesel where Rock (it's less typing) called out lazy "candy-ass" behavior of Diesel on the production of 2017's The Fate of the Furious.
Then there's the stars and filmmakers involved: Director Jake Kasdan directed both of the Jumanji reboots starring the Rock. Writer Chris Morgan wrote every Furry Fastness movie from 3 (Tokyo Drift) through 8 (Fate of...) and the mediocre Hobbs & Shaw spinoff as well as Shazam! Fury of the Gods which co-starred Lucy Liu and whose first produced credit was 2004's Cellular which starred a pre-superhero Chris Evans. The story was by Hiram Garcia, producer of at least 16 previous Rock movies and TV shows.
It's a tight group of creatives who have made a ton of money making mainstream popcorn entertainment, not that there's anything wrong with that. So why is Red One just another flat-feeling, made-for-streaming, forgotten-immediately-after-viewing piece of content like too much of what the Rock is putting out like the equally forgettable Red Notice for Netflix? (Quick: Who were the co-stars of that one? I'm not even asking what the plot was, just who the co-stars were when they've starred in their own vehicles which have made hundreds of millions of dollars. Give up? Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool) and Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman). See what I mean?)
After a redundant prologue to set up that Jack O'Malley (Evans) was destined for the Naughty List as a kid, we meet him as he weasels his way into a university's seismology laboratory to attach a tap to the data lines. From stealing someone's coffee to a child's lollipop, he's all about himself. He's also a deadbeat non-parenting sperm donor to Dylan (Wesley Kimmel, nepo baby of unfunny crybaby Jimmy), whose mother, Olivia (Mary Elizabeth Ellis, It's Always Sunny), is a doctor who married some great guy who we never see and is unavailable, so Jack needs to pick him up from school. Apparently, this was some quick fling, but she's guilting him about not wanting to attend Dylan's school performances.
Meanwhile, we meet Rock's Callum Drift (what kind of name is that?), the head of Santa's (J.K. Simmons, being money as always) security detail. He's losing his faith in people being good and submits his resignation to Nick on Christmas Eve. But then Nick is kidnapped from the North Pole, so the race is on to find him in time to save Christmas.
The Director of MORA (Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority), the secret agency that enforces the peace treaty between mythological creatures and humans and isn't at all ripped-off from Hellboy's s Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (B.P.R.D.), Zoe Harlow (Liu), rightly figures that Jack supplied the data to find the North Pole's shield barrier (which is totally not ripped-off from the camouflage hiding Wakanda from the world in Black Panther), but realizes he didn't know what the data was for. Appealing to his mercenary sensibilities, she offers to double his money to help trace the path back to who initiated the caper leading to world-spanning hijinks.
The mastermind of the plot is Gryla (Kiernan Shipka, Mad Men), an Icelandic winter witch who was a former lover of Krampus (Kristopher Hivju, Game of Thrones, The Fate of the...oh look, another connection), who happens to be Nick's estranged brother which raises some unsettling questions considering Nick is a jacked human - no jolly round elf he - and Krampus is a 12-foot-tall goat-man, and whether he was involved. At first I thought Gryla was going to be some angry girl who didn't get the Barbie she wanted due to Shipka's youth and demeanor, but her actual plan is totally not ripped-off from Thanos to a degree.
Will they rescue Nick in time to save Christmas because it's totally not a holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ unrelated to the secular commercial season that glommed onto it. Will Jack & Cal rediscover the Spirit of Christmas and will Jack begin to be a father to the teenager who another man has been raising as his own for years? Duh.
Even when the destination is a foregone conclusion, it's possible to make the trip entertaining and Red One simply doesn't deliver the presents. It feels rote and tired, beginning with Rock's performance. I don't know if the drama preceding it adversely colored my perception, but Rock has always excelled at knowing just what kind of movie he's in and delivering the performance that's needed. But not here. This is a phoned-in candy ass performance where it feels like he felt showing up was all that was needed without turning on the charm. And his "power" is the ability to shrink himself down to a 30-inch version of himself in a manner totally not ripped-off poorly from Ant-Man during fights.
Evans is equally lackluster as he recycles his same persona that he's used since ending his decade as Captain America, the fast-talking-saying-nothing chatterbox he's been in Knives Out, The Gray Man, Ghosted and Pain Hustlers. The range he used to have a decade ago in roles as varied as Snowpiercer, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Sunshine and Push as well as seven Captain America and Avengers films is still missing and he needs to find it again.
Kasdan's direction is adequate. He has experience with VFX-heavy genre movies fromthe Jumanjis (I saw the first one and like it; didn't see the second) and the VFX are top-notch and seamless, but the overall tone is dark, both visually and tonally. Why is the North Pole a dark Blade Runner-feeling world. OK, it's dark up there in the winter, but a magical kingdom run by a guy who can deliver presents to billions of people in one night can't light it up like Times Square?
But the story, especially with Jack's son is muddled by him not really being his father. It all feels like plot contrivance to get a treacly ending. Estranged parents are a common trope of Christmas movies, so why introduce this stepfather figure only to sideline him? It would've been better if he had no idea he had a kid or to have him be divorced from Olivia. (Why do I need to even be thinking about this?)
While Red One isn't a particularly bad movie, it's not a good movie. If feels like a project generated by ChatGPT to fill the schedules (and pockets) of a cozy group of makers and cast members who wanted something to do without really needing to tell this story out of passion. When even the disposable entertainment feels cheap, that's not good.
Since Amazon hides the Dolby Vision and Atmos audio behind their additional ad-free tier, the presentation was just HDR10 with 5.1 audio. It's nothing spectacular to show off your home theater setup with, so if you're just watching in HD, you're not missing much except more detail in the gloomy scenes.
Casino Royale (with cheese!) director Martin Campbell - who also has GoldenEye, The Mask of Zorro, and Vertical Limit on the plus side, but also Green Lantern and The Legend of Zorro on the debit side of his IMDB ledger - reteams with his Casino Royale Bond girl Eva Green for the messy, underdone Dirty Angels.
Opening in 2021, we meet Green's Jake (no explanation for the male name) as she's being held captive by the forces of Malik (Reza Brojerdi) as she's being hauled out of a cage to be stoned by a crowd. (As in having rocks thrown at her, not hippies blowing bong hits in her face.) Right as the sentence is to be carried out, Army helicopters swoop in and rescue her, but over her protestations several men are left behind and executed. Who were they? We never know. Jake tries to have the pilot who took off court martialed, but it goes nowhere and allusions to her past are made.
Jumping to present day, Aghan jihadis attack a Pakistani all-girls school and kidnap those who they didn't toss off the roof back to Afghanistan. Due to their parents being important ambassadors or ministers, a handful are held for ransom with Malik demanding the return of an imam as a condition for their return.
To attempt a rescue, Jake is tasked with leading a squad of female soldiers who will be posing as aid workers. Because Jake is all business (and the committee of four writers, including Campbell, aren't interested in character details even as minor as names), she calls them by their roles in the mission like Medic (Ruby Rose, John Wick 2, playing horny & heterosexual for a change), The Bomb (Maria Bakalova, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm), Mechanic (Rona-Lee Shimon, lots of Israeli television), Geek (Jojo T. Gibbs, Past Lives), Shooter (Emily Bruni, lots of UK TV), and I put more work in looking up their credits than the screenwriters did creating their characters other than one being shown wrapping her chest in bandages for presumably gender reasons.
The only real surprise about Dirty Angels beyond how utterly unmemorable it is is how high the body count goes as very few members of the mission have plot armor sufficient to stay alive. (Though you can guess who's most likely to make it to the end credits by how familiar you are with the actress. Ahem.) More detail is spent on a pair of brothers and a running gag about how bad a driver he his versus his other skills than the squad combined, so when they start getting knocked off it carries no emotional weight.
Green is a plausible action heroine, but is also let down by the sparse script and generally apathetic action helmed by Campbell. Why she's unpopular with the Army is explained, but also rings false. With Angelina Jolie barely acting these days and her action queen heydey long in the rearview, there aren't many woman who can turn the hat trick of beauty, action skills, and acting chops. Other than AJ, you've got Charlize Theron, Halle Berry, Milla Jovovich (though she barely gets to show acting anymore), Zoe Saldana - Sigourney Weaver is 75 now! - so if Green wants to do more in this space, I'm here for it. But she deserves far better than Dirty Angels.
While Netflix's prestige Oscar-bait film Maria dropped last Wednesday, Friday is reserved for their passable popcorn fluff titles and this week's entry is the high-concept thriller Carry-On. Does it make its flight or end up in lost luggage? Let's find out.
Taron Egerton (Kingsman series) stars as Ethan, a TSA agent at LAX whose girlfriend, Nora (Sofia Carson, the Disney Descendants series), is newly pregnant. Their relationship is under some strain because he's kind of a listless vessel, underachieving in work and life. He shows up late for work on Christmas Eve and still asks his boss, Sarkowski (Dean Norris, Breaking Bad), for a promotion and is nearly laughed out of the room due to his lack of initiative.
However, a co-worker, Jason (Sinqua Walls, Friday Night Lights), suggests he take his place on the X-ray machine so he can work crowd management and Sarkowski reluctantly agrees. Jason feels bad for Ethan because he's only been there a few months and already gotten promoted twice while Ethan has been there three years and gone nowhere career-wise.
Unfortunately for Ethan, this means that when a bin comes through his machine with an earpiece in it and a note to stick it in his ear, he is now trapped in a scheme where the man on the other end, the nameless Traveler (Jason Bateman!), calmly informs him that unless he lets a specific bag pass through his scanner, someone will die, specifically Nora. With an accomplice, the Watcher (Theo Rossi, the kinky shrink in The Penguin), monitoring the security cameras, and a third, never seen, accomplice breaking into houses to gather intel - and initially intended to grab Jason's wife and kids as he was supposed to be on the machine - the Traveler is always ahead of Ethan frantic attempts to save Nora and the airport from the deadly carry-on.
Simultaneously, a LAPD detective, Cole (Danielle Deadwyler), investigating the murders of two Russians whacked by the Traveler earlier, is closing in on the airport as a possible destination for a suspected nerve gas weapon. When Ethan's failed attempt to call 911 is correlated to her case, she's on the move.
Carry-On is a decent, albeit predictable, potboiler that mostly succeeds due to Jaume Collet-Serra (Black Adam, The Shallows, four 2nd-tier Liam Neeson movies) taut direction because the screenplay by videogame writer T.J. Fixman, with additional uncredited input by Michael Green (Blade Runner 2049, Logan), is trope-heavy to the point you can spot which tertiary characters are going to be killed off the moment they're introduced. We also have to suspend disbelief that the Watcher has magical hacking powers to access information instantly and that he is able to find a convenient sniper vantage point in a parking structure where he can see Nora in the terminal. (To paraphrase Cinema Sins, convenient vantage point is convenient.)
Egerton is appropriately frantic as the man who finally finds something worth putting in the effort for and Bateman is surprisingly chilling as the low-key mastermind orchestrating this far-fetched scheme.
As far as passable yet forgettable Netflix Original movies go, Carry-On delivers what it says on the tin. You're paying for Netflix, so may as well watch it. It's not a waste of time.
Here's how Dominique opens: We see a Jeep with three Colombian men driving through the jungle, arriving at a crashed small airplane. They open the hatch and spy a large crate bound with chains, so lug it outside. One of them goes to investigate the pilot and finds a blonde woman inert at the controls, unconscious or dead. He notices her cleavage in a gratuitous closeup and begins to fondle her because oink. He then notices hundred dollar bills tucked under her clothing and pulls out a knife to cut her seatbelt off when to the surprise of no one, she awakes, snatches the knife from him and stabs him repeatedly, spraying blood all over the cockpit window and her. She then goes outside and whacks the other two men, taking their truck, burying the crate and heading into town. Alrightee then!
That's our introduction to the titular character played by Ukrainian-Scandanavian actress Oksana Orlan (more about how you haven't heard of her either later), so we're clearly in for some grindhouse antics. She goes to a bar where a middle-aged Amazonian blonde (she's 5'11") chugging tequila doesn't really blend in. A local, Julio (Sebastián Carvajal), introduces himself and she clearly takes a liking to him because she's immediately back at his place, having her way with him. (Grrrl Powah! Girls on top!)
The morning after, she discovers he's a local policeman when he puts on his uniform, but he leaves this woman whom he'd just met and boinked home to hang out with his very pregnant sister, her two kids, and his elderly wheelchair-bound father, while he goes to work for the exceedingly corrupt police Chief Santiago (Maurice Compte, Narcos), who uses the police as an army for the local cartel boss. But Julio is the One Good Cop and meets with an Internal Affairs officer to provide video evidence of the atrocities being committed only to learn the hard way the the cop cops are also corrupt and it ends very badly for him.
Santiago sends a half-dozen cops to get the laptop with the original files from the home, but Dominique kills them all. He them parlays with her, telling her that if she gives him the laptop that night, he'll spare Julio's family. Knowing that's a lie, she fortifies the home and lots of killy hijinks ensue.
Now I'm a fan of revenge flicks and hot kickass women kicking ass, so why am I giving Dominique a Skip It? To explain requires massive spoilers, so let me run down what sorta works first.
When the trailer for this arrived, looking like "female John Wick meets Desperado" I looked it up on IMDB and was puzzled why this movie even existed considering it has zero stars - the closest to a recognizable face is Compte who has a bunch of TV series credits - and Orlan's IMDB page's most recognizable past projects were 2005's xXx: State of the Union (the one with Ice Cube instead of Vin Diesel) where she played the uncredited Trophy Wife and Michael Bay's The Island where she was the uncredited Rich Woman. And also she's now 51-years-old.
Alright, so you have a middle-aged former model with almost no prior roles of note who looks a lot like Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon and an exhibited acting range similar to Keanu Reeves (not that these roles require a ton of emoting). Perhaps the director/writer/editor Michael S. Ojeda is someone? Scanning his IMDB......annnnnd nope, nothing much except 20 episodes as a "recreations director" for a show called Deadliest Warrior which took the question of "Who would win a fight between Jesse James and Al Capone or Vlad the Impaler versus Sun Tzu?" and made a show of it.
However, he does have two relevant listings: First a direct-to-video thing called The Russian Bride which starred Orlan as, well, duh, mail-ordered by evil billionaire Corbin Bernsen and a short film called Rise of the Phoenix where Orlan starred as a woman named...wait for it...Dominique. This was made in 2015 and clearly was the demo reel to get the feature funded. Orlan is co-credited with coming up with the story so it's like Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman's collaboration creating The Bride for the Kill Bill films if you ordered from Temu.
So, is Ojeda a pulp grindhouse visionary or something? Not that Dominique indicates. He has a jittery handheld aesthetic that reminded me of Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi in its rawness and the story and execution of the action scenes is adequate for the caliber of the production this is.
But where it all goes wrong requires spoiling the ending, so if you're still down for a lean and mean low budget revenge action flick that will leave you angry at the end, go for it. It was riding a 5/10, Catch It On Streaming review until the end so perhaps you can overcome it.
But for the rest of you, SPOILERS BEGIN NOW:
After surviving the massive attack with the grandfather and oldest daughter's boyfriend catching some death, Dominque takes the sister, her newborn baby (who arrived during the battle after about 10 minutes of labor), and the other two children into the countryside to meet up with a kindly doctor who is waiting for them with an ambulance to transport them to safety far from this town. Everything looks hunky dory until the doctor is killed by a sniper and it's revealed the cartel had the rendezvous staked out. In the ensuing mayhem, everyone in the family is killed, even the newborn.
What. The. F*CK?!?!?
Earlier in the movie, Dominique explains that the only reason she's staying to defend the family of her one-night stand was, "I don't like when people die for no good reason." Um, HELLO?!?!? What would you call that ending, Mr. Ojeda?!?!? No, the fact you show the aftermath of her killing all the cartel members during the end credits doesn't make it better and if you thought you were launching a series off this movie, hooooo boy, no no no no NOOOOOOO!!!!
For all his evil-doing, you have to credit Harvey Weinstein for making a condition of releasing Clerks be that the original ending where Dante is murdered by a robber be cut. He understood that after all the wacky fun of this comedy, killing the poor guy who wasn't even supposed to be working that day would be commercial suicide, thus saving Kevin Smith from his own post-ironic stupidity. Too bad no one told Ojeda that killing children wasn't a winning move.
That's not to say that downbeat endings can't work. Leon doesn't make it out alive at the end of Leon: The Professional, but his death has meaning. This is just senseless shock.
END SPOILERS.
As for the 4K HDR presentation, it's not very effective as the low-budget cinematography is frequently blown out and generally flat. Looks more like Blu-ray quality which is fine for the material.
Dominique could've been a low-rent cheap thrill on top of a puzzlement as to why it was even made, but the unbelievably bad choice at the end just blows it.
The latest in Bitcoin-themed documentaries comes courtesy of Netflix and director Chris Smith (Wham!, Hollywood Con Queen) in the form of Biggest Heist Ever, the tale of the 2016 theft of $70 million in Bitcoin from a Hong Kong-based crypto currency exchange called Bitfinex by hackers. With the crypto boom several years later, the haul was then worth $4.5 billion - at the time of this writing, it'd be worth $12 billion & yes, I regret not buying Bitcoin in 2010 - an amount that prompted Internal Revenue Service money laundering investigator Chris Janczewski to begin trying to track down where the money may've gone.
Because every crypto transaction is logged on the blockchain (the makers explain the tech of crypto clearly), Janczewski was able to analyze where the coins had passed from wallet to wallet, but couldn't determine who had control of them. He suspected that the hackers were stuck trying to get the cyber coins translated into spendable currency because to do so means presenting your real identities to set up accounts.
His prime suspects are the least likely pair of cyber Bonnie & Clydes - Silicon Valley tech bro Ilya Lichtenstein and his girlfriend Heather Morgan who worked as a consultant and contributor to Forbes online. Adding a bizarre spin to things is Morgan's rapper/social media influencer wannabe persona as "Razzlekhan" with thousands of videos including some of the most cringe-inducing stuff you'll ever see. No way could these two have pulled off the heist of the 21st Century, right?
Spoiler: They did, or to be more specific, they plead guilty to the charges, though Smith definitely implies they may not have conducted the actual hack. (The way they ultimately trip themselves up is so stupid it beggars belief.) This leads to the fundamental flaw with Biggest Heist Ever in that it doesn't quite resolve itself satisfactorily, though it offers more of a conclusion than the long walk to nowhere which was Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan & Sara.
With no participation from either perp, we're left with lots of talk from former friends, colleagues, collaborators, and investigators along with the massive amounts of videos from the weirdos. It's entertaining, but superficial and vaguely incomplete feeling.
To quote Morrissey, stop me if you've heard this one before: Monsters have wiped out virtually the entirety of the human race leaving a remnant clinging to life while coping with the specific rules of the threat. Sure sounds like A Quiet Place, right? While that sleeper hit has already spawned a sequel and prequel installment, Elevation is the first outright knockoff that I can think of.
This time the gimmick is literally unstoppable killing machine monsters called Reapers (super original name there!) have burst from below ground and killed everyone. Their one weakness is they can't go any higher than 8000 feet, so after a few years handy white rock lines and fence posts have been placed to tell survivors when they're crossing the line of death or safety, depending on which way you're headed.
In the Rocky Mountains lives Will (Anthony Mackie), a widower whose wife was killed by the beasts and lives with his young son, Hunter (Danny Boyd Jr.). Next door lives Nina (Morena Baccarin), a hard-drinking misanthrope of a scientist constantly trying to discover a way to kill the Reapers.
Hunter has a lung condition requiring filters for an oxygen machine while he sleeps and of course the supply runs out. The hospital in Boulder, CO will have plenty, but it's below the line. Nina demands to come along because she has a theory about the Reapers and how to kill them, but requires chemicals in her lab in Boulder. There's bad blood between Will and Nina for fairly predictable reasons, but he agrees to let her tag along. Katie (Maddie Hasson) is a tomboyish hunting pal of Will's who also invites herself along.
While the route only dips below the line at a couple of places before the final long leg into Boulder, it's no surprise that they manage to run into Reapers and it won't be much of a surprise who gets killed, who survives and how. While director George Nolfi (The Adjustment Bureau) does an OK job trying to keep the tension up, the committee-written script doesn't have enough originality to really keep the mystery of the Reapers going and when they're finally explained, it's mostly to set up a sequel that will never happen and begs a question that the 8000-foot limit being arbitrary shouldn't have been an impediment at all. (See below the trailer for a spoiler about this.)
Clocking in at a tidy 91 minutes, at least Elevation doesn't try to pad out the proceeding too much. The performances are OK considering the thinness of the writing, but if Baccarin was actually drinking as much as Nina is portrayed as guzzling, she wouldn't been looking that choice.
While A Quiet Place elevated the post-Apocalyptic monster movie genre in a surprising way, Elevation is strictly plodding along in the valley of adequacy.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.
>>>> SPOILER ALERT!!! <<<<<
The Reapers are revealed to be alien robots and a mid-credits scene shows three "meteorites" in the night sky - presumably alien ships approaching Earth with updated models to finish the eradication of carbon-based life forms infesting the third planet in the system. But why was there a limit in the first place? If you're going to depopulate a world, why leave the high ground as a refuge? Set the height limit to 25,000 feet to cover Mt. Everest or just not have one at all.
Identity theft is a nightmare for those it happens to. But what if you're a semi-famous musician who discovers someone (or someones) has been impersonating you to your fans, leading them to believe they have been Close Personal Friends with you? This is the situation Tegan Quin - half of the musical group Tegan & Sara (probably mostly known to Normies who've even heard of them as "those identical twin lesbians") - found herself in over a decade ago and now recounted in the sparse documentary, Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan & Sara.
Opening with a quick recap of their career, starting as 18-year-olds in Calgary, Alberta, Canuckia, their early adoption of social media and close bonds with their fans - coming out to greet them outside venues in line, going to the merch table after the show, posing for all the photos requested - also laid the foundation for who (or whoms, plural, it develops) became know as "Fake Tegan" or "Fegan" to begin building years-long relationships with fans, leading them to believe they were actually pals with Tegan.
This erupted in 2011 when Fegan sent a fan named Julie a link to a drive containing their passport photos, info about their band members, and very personal details like their mother battling breast cancer. Sensing something off about this escalation, Julie contacted their management and was told in reply Tegan had no idea who Julie was. As management put the word out to fan boards that anyone interacting with Fegan was being had, more reports of fans having been suckered by the catfisher came in, some even believing they were in line for some up close & personal happy fun times with Tegan, if you follow.
The distress over this hit the fans hard, leaving them embarrassed or hurt, especially a Vancouver musician named JT who lashed out publicly against Tegan (the real one), whom she'd had a real world friendship, after feeling dissed by Fegan. But on the band's side, the question of how tightly secured song demos and items like the passport photos got released led to paranoia about their friends and employees. Who was using their access to then harm the fans. While no one lost money, they lost more: Their sense of privacy, trust, and security. Some said they couldn't listen to T&S's music anymore because of the feelings of betrayal or embarrassment.
So, who was this perpetrator? Well, that's the problem because Fanatical never finds out. Several suspects were identified, including a woman named "Tara" located in Maine who the director, Erin Lee Carr (Britney vs. Spears), traveled to interview only to get stood up. Ultimately, Tara takes a conference call with Carr and Tegan where she denies being Fegan, but is actually another hurt fan who only reached out to others to have her feelings validated. In a post-call discussion, Carr and Tegan decide to believe her.
With no resolution, Fanatical overall lacks much of a purpose. Many of the incidents occurred over a decade ago and even Tegan had relegated the experience to background noise. They had never publicized it during its peak, so what's the benefit of dredging it up now when there is no resolution other than a long therapy session for her and the fans whom she communicates over Zoom calls? The reunion of JT and her is poignant, but the imbalance of their statuses hangs over the meeting.
The line between being a really big fan and a danger to the objects of their adoration is touched on. They had to stop mingling with fans before or after the show, resorting to VIP meet & greets where they know who's coming in. "The barricades and security are there for a reason. We've had people rush the stage and bearhug us." and these are just fans wanting to show their love, not dangerous psychos like the lunatic who assassinated Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell on stage at a Damageplan gig. But the added level of invasion of privacy with these catfishings must suck even more of the joy out of the art.
Without a resolution and so far removed from events discussed, Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan & Sara ends up feeling like a video of Tegan's group therapy sessions with those who were deceived.
As Saturday Night Live begins its 50th season, it's hard to believe there was a time where the show's existence was hanging by a thread and that the whole thing may've just been a gambit in a contract dispute with King of Late Night Johnny Carson at the time. Thus is the background for Saturday Night, the semi-biographical portrayal of the final 90 minutes before the airing of the first episode on October 11, 1975.
Gabriel LaBelle (The Fabelmans) stars as Lorne Michaels, creator and el jefe of SNL for most of its half-century run. The 30-year-old Canadian comedy writer and producer had been given 90 minutes of time at 11:30 pm Saturday nights which normally ran reruns of Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show to do something with and he assembled a rogues gallery of writers and performers from the National Lampoon, Second City, and The Groundlings along with short films by Albert Brooks, Jim Henson's Muppets (not Kermit or the Sesame Street ones, but original adult ones), musical performers, etc. Not a typical Seventies variety show, the question of "What is this?" looms over everything.
Told in close to real-time, Saturday Night portrays the countdown as utter chaos with friction between the cast, open rebellion from the union stagehands and technical staff, and a menacing network executive (Willem Dafoe) who has the power to kill the show and air another Carson rerun if he loses faith in Michaels.
Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith, Gotham) is a vainglorious a-hole already plotting his next career move; Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris, no relation, New Girl) is a Julliard-trained published playwright and at 38, far older than most of the cast and writers and wondering why he's there; Billy Crystal (Nicolas Podany) is looking at show rundown - the dress rehearsal ran three hours - and wonders how he's going to get on the air; host George Carlin (Matthew Rhys) thinks it's all a joke. Chasing after Michaels is Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman, Licorice Pizza), a network exec who's trying to keep him on course, but also trying to shoehorn product placement. (Ebersol would take over as producer of SNL for part of the five-year interregnum where Michaels was away.) Will the show go on in time? Duh.
There are two major problems with Saturday Night which hamper it despite the energetic direction and go-for-broke efforts of the cast. First off is the real-time conceit where we're supposed to believe all this stuff went on in the 90 minutes before air and I saw this as someone who watched every season of 24 where we accepted that Jack Bauer could get across LA in 15 minutes. To believe the movie is to believe Michaels left the studio, went to a nearby bar and met and recruited writer Alan Zweibel (Josh Brener) about 11:15 pm and the audience was still waiting to be let in five minutes before the show started. If they had simply made it the 5-6 hours before that first show, all those moments would've been infinitely more believable.
The second problem was manifested by the disappointing box office (about $10M gross against a $25-$30M budget) as the question of "Who is this movie for?" isn't answered. Unless you're an older Gen Xer who remembers the OG SNL and/or is familiar with the behind-the-scenes intrigue from one of the two books written on the show, you won't really know what the actual heck is going on, who these people are, etc.
Now, as a member of both cohorts, I was able to keep up with (and sometimes fact-check) what was being portrayed, but with nearly two dozen major characters fighting for time, characterizations are mostly shorthand at best - Chevy's a jerk, John Belushi (Matt Wood) is surly, Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O'Brien, The Maze Runner series) is a motormouth, and so on. It mostly comes down, like so many biopics, to how well the actors imitate their counterparts; the Morris, Aykroyd and Carlin ones are the best matches. J.K. Simmons also has a blast cameoing as Milton Berle.
LaBelle chooses not to imitate Michaels unique tone - which Mike Myers based his Dr. Evil accent on and if you've ever heard anyone tell an anecdote involving Michaels they ALL fall into doing this voice - but perhaps he should have because with not much more time than the rest of the mob to make an impression, maybe doing an impression would've triggered some latent familiarity in the viewer.
While the haters insist "the show hasn't been funny since the original cast left", the show simply couldn't have coasted without regular infusions of new stars like Eddie Murphy, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Dennis Miller, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Keenan Thompson, Fred Armisen, Jason Sudakis, and countless more for the ensuing 44 seasons. It's been around so long you have to be eligible to join AARP to remember a world without it and the story of how Lorne Michaels cobbled together what turned into a comedic institution is why there are two oral histories in print about it while Saturday Night ends up a rushed, chaotic sliver of how it came to be.
The unknown and unsung musicians who played on the hit songs of he 1960s have been assayed in acclaimed documentaries Standing in the Shadows of Motown (which covered the Funk Brothers, the house band of Motown) and The Wrecking Crew (covering the L.A. session players which included pre-solo artist Glen Campbell and legendary bassist Carol Kaye) and fans of these retrospectives now have another documentary to check out from Denny Tedesco (son of Wrecking Crew guitarist Tommy Tedesco), director of the latter doc, Immediate Family. (Bad title even in context.)
Focusing on the quartet of players - guitarists Danny 'Kootch' Kortchmar and Waddy Wachtel, bassist Leland Sklar, and drummer Russ Kunkel - who became the first famous session cats thanks to manager/producer Peter Asher putting musician credits in album liner notes, they backed a Who's Who of 1970s stars such as James Taylor, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Stevie Nicks, Linda Ronstadt, and more and became in demand as others wanted the guys who played on so-and-so's album.
With testimonials from those they worked backed with copious clips, we're given the quick rundown of their lives and how they rapidly coalesced into the unit they became. Whereas the Wrecking Crew musicians didn't tour because they feared someone else getting their chair in the studios, times changed where artists wanted the guys who recorded the album to be their live band, so they had active studio and touring careers. Sklar and Wachtel are both recognizable to normies due to their distinctive looks - Sklar has a massive white beard and Wachtel long tight curly hair - so this may be revelatory to non-liner notes nerds.
There are amusing stories like when Everly Brothers superfan Wachtel auditioned for their touring band and met their music director, Warren Zevon, and showed he knew the material better than Zevon and the time Waddy accompanied Ronstadt to a strip club when she didn't have any ID on her. Don Henley's solo career is basically owed to Kootch as the fellows branched off into different career paths of production and writing in the Eighties.
The pacing drags a bit towards the end as the focus shifts to what they're doing now - they're all still active in their seventies, but also slowing down to enjoy life more - and their recording and live shows as The Immediate Family, but for fans of music docs (and liner notes), it's worth a watch.
Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Viewed on Hulu.)
Sometimes you're disappointed by a movie even when it's not actually that bad and that's the case with My Old Ass (bad title even in context), the second feature by actress-turned-writer/director Megan Park (The Secret Life of the American Teenager). What is being touted as a sci-fi comedy co-starring Aubrey Plaza is not remotely sci-fi and it's more a dramedy as my tags indicate. Due to the incorrect expectations set by the trailer and reviews, we went in expecting something it wasn't, not that it was bad. Let's get into it.
Maisy Stella (TV's Nashville) stars as Elliott (no explanation for the male name), a newly 18-year-old girl from a rural Canadian town in lovely country with a lake. Her family owns a cranberry farm, she has a couple of gal pals - Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) and Ro (Kerrice Brooks) - and a girlfriend, Chealsea (Alexandria Rivera), who we know nothing about other than they're always making out, two younger brothers (the youngest of which is obsessed with Saoirse Ronan because that's a thing that really happens), nice non-stupid parents, and she can't wait to get out of this podunk town and move to Toronto to start having a real life.
While her family sits waiting with her birthday cake at home, she and her pals go camping on an island and drink tea made with a lot of hallucinogenic mushrooms. While her friends start tripping balls, Elliot doesn't feel anything until suddenly Aubrey Plaza appears next to her and announces that she is Elliot at age 39. (How the vanilla white Stella transforms into the Puerto Rican Plaza is never explained either.) Older Elliot is cagey about telling her about the future, but only lays down one firm recommendation: Avoid a boy named Chad.
Of course, Elliot almost immediately encounters a boy named Chad (Percy Hynes White, The Gifted) who is doing summer work on the family farm. And also of course the more she hangs out with Chad, the more she becomes attracted to her causing confusion about her being gay because straight kids in movies aren't a thing much these days. Compounding matters is that she can't reach Older Elliot (who left her phone number in Elliot's contacts as "My Old Ass" leading to many chats); she's stopped responding to her calls and texts leaving her to wonder what's so bad about Chad?
The fundamental "problem" with My Old Ass is that we went in expecting much more Plaza than it delivers. (We're on a bit of a kick with her lately, having watched Agatha All Along just because she was in that and also wasn't in it enough.) About halfway through the missus grumbled that "this is an Afterschool Special" and groused about the trailer being misleading. (She also found White not hot.) Semi-valid complaints, but what remains is still a nice modest dramedy about not taking life for granted & appreciating the times you get to have with family and friends.
Park sets a naturalistic tone in the girls conversations and performances which gets tripped up when Elliot spouts off woke blather which also makes one wonder how a movie where a gay teen goes straight got financed and the little brothers Ronan infatuation. But it also shows Elliot not being such a self-absorbed brat under her older self's influence. Stella's performance is fine, but Plaza sparks so much when she's there, her absence lowers the energy level.
As for the supposed sci-fi element, it's reminiscent of the underappreciated 2000 film Frequency which starred Jim Caviezel and Dennis Quaid as a son and father who communicate across 30 years via ham radio enhanced by aurora borealis and how they literally change the world with their actions, albeit on a micro scale. All we learn of the future is that salmon are extinct, people aren't allowed to have three kids, and there are air raid sirens going off, but Older Elliot doesn't seem too concerned.
The film's ending is nice, but requires one final massive suspension of disbelief to accept what's happening. How this connection works isn't explained and perhaps is besides the point. My Old Ass is a pleasant enough coming-of-age story. Just adjust your expectations going in.
There is an annoying habit of film critics losing their minds over weird movies because they are so numbed by the usual mindless dreck Hollyweird pumps out that anything that's remotely unique triggers a herdthink stampede of fawning slobbering about how "important", "thought provoking", "blah-blah-woof-woof" a film is. Toss in some elite festival prizes, like winning Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival and the synchronized baaing intensifies. Thus it is with 2024's cause célèbre, the dark satire/body horror freakout The Substance.
Demi Moore stars as Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging ("OMG, she's 50! That's like....dead for women!" is the text, not even subtext here) actress who hosts an aerobics fitness show that's a cross between Jane Fonda and the 20 Minute Workout show which ran from 1983-84 featuring hot babes working out while making O-faces for the camera. (IYKYK, Gen Xers) As a birthday present, she is fired from her show by the producer, Harvey (a wildly flamboyant Dennis Quaid), and distracted by her billboard being taken down, she's in a big auto accident which miraculously leaves her uninjured.
While at the hospital, a male nurse slips her a flash drive labeled The Substance on one side with a phone number on the other. At home she watches its promo video promising a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of herself. Initially, she tosses the drive away, but after seeing an ad in the paper for auditions for her old job, she calls the number and is given an address in an alley and sent a keycard to access the dropbox where The Substance and refills will be left.
The setup is simple and clear: After taking the Activator, she must stabilize herself with injections daily, and after seven days she must switch back with The Matrix, the original version of herself. (The emphasis is important.) What's not made clear in the packaging is that the Activator doesn't transform Elisabeth's body, it causes it to divide into a wholly separate person who emerges from a split in her back. (Zoiks!) While Elisabeth lays unconscious for the week, fed intravenously, her new improved version will be on the loose until she returns, cross-transfuses with her, then going dormant for a week.
The new girl is Sue (Margaret Qualley, whose mother is Andie McDowell, who costarred with Moore in St. Elmo's Fire) and she promptly goes and gets the job as the new host of Pump It Up, the updated edition of Elisabeth's workout show. Harvey loves her and is fine with her cover story that she needs alternating weeks off to care for her sick mother.
Of course, where there are rules with severe consequences for breaking them - like getting a Mogwai wet and feeding it after midnight - it doesn't take long for Sue to start bending them. When time runs out just as she's about to hook up with some dude, she rushes to extract more stabilizing spinal fluid from Elisabeth's inert body, switching back the next day. But Elisabeth wakes up to her index finger being withered. She calls the Substance hotline and is told that whatever has been taken cannot be returned - the damage is permanent; follow the rules.
What follows is a game of passive-aggressive warfare between the two. Elisabeth spends her week just eating or watching TV while Sue parties and rapidly advances in her career. Sue begins to stay out longer and longer, wrecking ever more damage on Elisabeth. Eventually it gets VERY out of control leading to an utterly gonzo bonkers finale.
Writer-director Coralie Fargeat (whose last movie was her debut, 1997's Revenge) isn't hiding the ball as to her intentions and inspirations. She's fusing the body horror of David Cronenberg movies like The Fly and Crimes of the Future to a commentary on how society and especially the entertainment industry pressure women to look young and attractive at all costs lest they lose their value and be discarded. However, while you can see the obvious outlines of theses, the irony of The Substance is that its execution lacks much substance.
There was an LOL moment in Barbie when Barbie was crying about not being traditionally Barbie pretty and narrator Helen Mirren snarks, "Note to the filmmakers: Margot Robbie is the wrong person to cast if you want to make this point." This immediately came to mind as we are presented Moore's fully nude 59-year-old body (at time of filming in 2022) which despite some sags & remnants of plastic surgery effects is holding up quite well. When an actress can pass for a decade younger & even pass muster by the supposedly merciless beauty standards the movie contends to rage against, you're starting in verisimilitude hole.
The sterile art-directed world & calculated cinematography adds to the unreality. After taping her show, Elisabeth walks down a long hallway festooned with huge posters cataloging her career only to find the women's restroom out of service, forcing her into the men's room where she conveniently overhears Harvey's plans to replace her. She doesn't have her own dressing room with private bathroom?!?
The rules of the Substance also seem situationally random. We're told there is only one person and the switching process involves hooking up a two-line transfusion device, implying that memories would be downloaded into the other body, but neither is aware of what the other does except environmentally as Sue is disgusted by Elisabeth's binges and Elisabeth resents Sue's rapid fame as shown on the billboard outside her window. But Elisabeth's binges don't harm Sue; she eats her way through a French cuisine cookbook and Sue remains a hardbody; but Sue's cheating wrecks Elisabeth.
It also suffers from what I call "no one in the world but the people in the movie." Elisabeth has no family, no friends, no ex-husbands or children, not even a therapist. She is utterly alone. The one outside man she encounters who knew her from school, she makes a date with out of desperation, but ends up standing him up because she didn't think she looked good enough when she looked fine.
Which leads to the ending, which I shant spoil here, but for all its Grand Guignol excess, it's just too much in a movie where excess was the medium. There is a shot where Sue appears on stage at the climatic New Year's Eve show which should've been the end of the movie. But Fargeat didn't end it there.
I have a suspicion that much of the fawning adulation for The Substance & uniform commentary echoed by critics comes from reading the press notes about what the movie is about more than what the movie actually has to say in its telling. Too arch & sterile in its milieu, too sparse in its actual storytelling - surprisingly it's 2-1/4 hour runtime didn't drag - its commentary is inferred rather than explicit and the choices made in telling the story ends up leaving things to interpretation - "Like, wow, man, what did it mean when Bowman saw himself as a dying old man reaching for the Monolith at the end of 2001 and did he turn into the Space Baby, man?" - which you'd think were explicit according to those who got the explainer notes in their press packets.
It's not that the subject doesn't merit discussion. Hollyweird has always liked its starlets young and tales of ridiculous ageism are legion like how then-28 year-old Olivia Wilde was considered too old to play 37-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio's wife in The Wolf of Wall Street so the role went to 22-year-old Margot Robbie, her career-making big break.
But wouldn't it have made more sense to cast an actress who was once a sexy star, but clearly lost the genetic lottery for aging? Elizabeth Hurley, Salma Hayek, Nicole Kidman, and Ming-Na Wen range from 57-60 years old and would have little trouble attracting the so-called male gaze. Kelly McGillis was blunt when asked why she wasn't asked to return for Top Gun: Maverick - then 48-year-old Jennifer Connolly was cast as then 57-year-old Tom Cruise's love interest - stating, “I’m old, and I’m fat, and I look age-appropriate for what my age is." (She's also five years older than Cruise.) People age, some better than others, so how stunning and brave is it really to cast one of the lottery winners in a story of unrealistic beauty standards when she's already waaaaay ahead of the game compared to mere mortal women?
Moore is being talked up for Oscar attention and I can see the case for it, but let's be honest, most of that is because she was willing to play "old" & get naked in the process. Someone snarked that Patricia Arquette won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Boyhood (which I call Twelve Years A Movie) for "being willing to age 12 years on screen." Considering how shrill and one-note her character was, that's likely. Moore is good and she needs to work more - perhaps some of the roles Jennifer Connolly is too busy to take - but again the overpraise.
Qualley has the different task of being both a naif and a malevolent actor in the story. Decked out with impressive prosthetic breasts - makeup has become so advanced that actresses who used to have to get implants (e.g. Mariel Hemingway's modest upsizing to play doomed Playmate Dorothy Stratten in Star 80) now can play boob queens like Pamela Anderson (Lily James in the Pam & Tommy miniseries) or Angelyne (Emmy Rossum) - she almost fares as badly as Moore as The Substance wreaks its havoc on rulebreakers, but as with everyone else, the script infers more than explicates.
Quaid is clearly having a blast filling in for originally-cast Ray Liotta, who passed away before filming started, but he's playing a cartoon.
While the sum is less then its parts, The Substance is still worth a look for those seeking something....different, yeah, let's go with that. If you didn't grow up with Cronenberg body horror movies in your life, it may seem like the craziest thing you've ever seen with its gooey old school makeup effects. But for all its slickness & grotesque excesses, it's a shame that there's not more thematic, narrative & character substance to The Substance. (Yes, I enjoyed the pun enough to use it twice. Sue me.)
Almost as fraught as the Terminator franchise is the Alien franchise with the good-bad ratio decidedly in the red. After Ridley Scott's seminal Alien and James Cameron's genre-defining Aliens, the series suffered through David Fincher's disowned & meddled-to-death Alien 3, the worse-than-you-remember Alien Resurrection, and a pair of Alien vs. Predator movies no one talks about. Scott returned to the series with 2012's Prometheus which suffered from a disjointed script, but looks slick, and its far worse sequel Alien Covenant which was both stupid and a victim of being an Alien prequel which was stuck trying to meet up with the original's continuity despite a totally different aesthetic like how the garbage Star Trek: Discovery series' ships look like the Kelvin Timeline's Apple Stores when the time frame is just ahead of the original series.
Overall, the scorecard is two good, five bad, and one middle. Into the breach steps Alien: Romulus, co-written and directed by Fede Álvarez (2013's Evil Dead remake; Don't Breathe) and is set in between the first two movies while Ripley was off sleeping lost in space for 57 years.
Opening with a montage of a ship collecting what turns out to be a cocoon holding the xenomorph from the wreckage of the Nostromo (which was supposedly blown to dust by Ripley's overloading the reactors, so huh? Also, how did they know there was any alien to recover when Ripley and her logs are three decades away from being recovered?) we meet our obvious Final Girl, Rain (Cailee Spaeny, Priscilla), and her "brother" Andy (David Jonsson, HBO's Industry), who was a broken android fixed up by Rain's now-deceased father and programmed with plenty of dad jokes.
They live on the Weyland-Yutani (the Alien universe's Big Evil Corporation) colony of Jackson's Star, a miserable place which gets zero hours of sunlight per year. An orphan whose parents both died of diseases on this godforsaken rock, she has been laboring to finish her contract with WY, but when she goes to get her travel permit to emigrate to a free colony called Yvaga she learns that due to staffing shortages her contract has unilaterally extended from 12,000 hours of servitude to 24,000 hours, meaning another 5-6 years, but now in the mines. (How her family got into this contract situation and the reason WY can basically enslave workers isn't explained.)
Facing a bleak non-future, she's receptive to a scheme proposed by her friends - her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux, Netflix's Shadow & Bone), his sister Kay (Isabela Merced, Madam Web), their cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn, say it out loud), and his adopted sister Navarro (Aileen Wu) - to go up and loot a derelict spaceship for hypersleep cryo pods which could allow them to make the nine-year journey to Yvaga, leaving the oppressive control of WY behind. They need Andy, a WY product, to go to open doors and access systems for them.
With Navarro piloting, they head into orbit - so the Big Evil Corporation that literally enslaves its workers to borrow the company cargo ships for heist jobs with no oversight, remote controls, etc.? - and discover its more than a ship, it's a space station in a degrading orbit heading for the planet's ring in a matter of hours. Docking with the station, they quickly find the pods, but they don't have enough fuel to power themselves long enough to make the trip. More cryo fuel will be needed and they figure the station's lab may have some.
Upon reaching the lab they discover a scene of chaos with dead bodies and holes melted in the deck. While retrieving the fuel cells, they trip an alarm which locks down the room Tyler, Bjorn and Andy are in and Andy can't open the door due to lack of clearance. Rain realizes the half-melted android in the main lab could have a chip which would upgrade Andy's privileges and while they're retrieving it, the containers holding many facehuggers begin thawing, opening, and unleashing their peril on the young group, eventually landing on Navarro's face and, well, if you've seen an Alien movie you know what's coming. (Especially if you've seen the trailer which spoils the event.)
After that, it's a race to get off the station before it's accelerated decay crashes it in less than an hour while masses of facehuggers and full-grown xenomorphs lurk everywhere and Andy's upgraded programming causes a shift in allegiance from protecting Rain to protecting WY's interests.
Where Alien: Romulus shines is in nailing the grungy lived-in low-tech aesthetic of the first two movies, especially the original. Displays are CRTs, not flat panels or transparent or holographic; the emphasis is on practical sets and effects; the design language is of a piece with Scott's first trip into space. The colony is dingy & bleak, making the young people's decision to try and escape perfectly rational. Álvarez's staging of things also works for the most part in ratcheting up tension in a 45-year-old franchise where we know the drill a bit too well.
But where it lacks is in the story and some dubious choices in callbacks. It's always tempting to member berry new movies with references to previous entries (e.g. Terminator movies have to say, "I'll be back") and for the most part Alien: Romulus handles things subtly, fun for those who catch the references without being obvious (e.g. the computer is called "Mother" for MU/TH/UR; oooooh, look, Colonial Marine pulse rifles), but it wildly goes overboard quoting Aliens' signature line verbatim then borrowing one of the lamest bits from Alien Resurrection with a similar denouement. But more questionable is the distracting attempt to resurrect a deceased actor's character to play a similar role. It would've been fine to just create a new character, but in trying to chain it directly to the original and doing such an odd job of it backfires.
Spaeny and Jonsson are good in their roles with the latter having more notes to play as he changes levels of sophistication. The others are written too flatly - Navarro's distinguishing traits are being Asian, having a shaved head, being a pilot, and dying first (not really a spoiler if you saw the trailer) and she's more fleshed out than the guys - and the twists aren't really surprising. The whole deal about the absent government allowing WY to abuse its workers for years, the independent colonies, etc. begs for more amplification. The cast also feels too young; despite the actors being 23 to 31 years old, they all seem like teenagers raising questions about why WY had families on such a harsh world as laborers, unlike the families terraforming LV-426 (Hadley's Hope) in Aliens. Merced's Kay draws the shortest straw and is such a non-entity that when she was shown after a while I'd forgotten about her.
While not an unqualified return to form, Alien: Romulus sits below Prometheus in my rankings by virtue of returning to stylistic terrain of the original and its monster-in-the-house plotting, while missing out on staking its own claims to fresh storytelling or world-building. Cameron took the bare bones of the original's milieu and was off to the races, creating THE defining space marine archtype which everything from Halo to Starship Troopers tapped; making Weyland-Yutani into the Big Evil Corporation that overshadow the galaxy. While he nibbles at some new concepts, Alvarez ultimately falls back into member berry box checking.
The A/V presentation is good with the dingy environments never crushing to indistinct blacks on my QD-OLED display. There's not a lot of bright highlights as the color palette is mostly grim browns, grays and blacks, so it's the holding of shadow detail that benefits from the HDR grade. Surround audio is clear and active.
