Author: BRWC

Alien: Romulus – Another Review. By Daniel Rester.  

With Alien: Romulus, the Alien franchise is bursting out of chests and into theaters again after a seven-year hiatus. Ridley Scott has hit pause on his prequel run and Evil Dead (2013) director Fede Álvarez steps in for Romulus. The new entry takes place between Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986), with Álvarez and his frequent co-writer Rodo Sayagues returning to the spaceship settings and horror roots of the series.  

Cailee Spaeny plays Rain, an orphan who works as a miner on a dark planet called Jackson’s Star. Her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) invites her and her android – and brother figure – Andy (David Jonsson) to join him on a mission to recover cryostasis pods from a derelict spaceship floating above Jackson’s Star. This will allow them to leave their hardships behind for a better life on the planet Yvaga. 

Also along for the ride are Tyler’s sister Kay (Isabela Merced), their cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu). The six characters make it onto the abandoned ship and find the pods. But they also find something far more dangerous…. 

Álvarez is clearly a fan of the Alien series, calling back to aspects of the previous films – and even some of the video games – throughout. The practical creature effects, sound effects, and music score are all meticulous, but what really takes viewers back to the first two films is the production design by Naaman Marshall. He perfectly recreates the retro tech vibe of Alien and Aliens, stripping away the sheen of later entries and going back to the lived-in, grimy look of those first two films. Marshall’s work provides Álvarez and cinematographer Galo Olivares a great collection of environments to unleash scares in. 

Romulus takes its time in the first 45 minutes to set up the character relationships and to build suspense. Once it gets going, however, it rips. Álvarez proves once again that he knows how to frame threats and deliver boo and gore moments for maximum effect. The Xenomorphs are impressive and scary like usual, but the facehuggers actually steal some of the spotlight this time around. Álvarez has fun with the creepy-crawly creatures as they hide in everything from water to shadows. 

The cast of Romulus does well, and none of the six main characters feel like weak links. That said, Jonsson steals the show as Andy. The Alien series has always had interesting android characters, and Andy is no different. The character’s main priority is to protect Rain, but he has an intriguing arc once Rain reprograms him on the spaceship. Jonsson and Spaeny make Andy and Rain’s emotional journey together completely believable. 

While a lot of Romulus clicks into place smoothly, some plot holes are easy to think of once one steps back and thinks about certain turns. There is also use of CGI on a character in the film that is distracting, landing in the uncanny valley. The final 15 minutes didn’t really work for me either. Álvarez makes a bold choice in that section, but the result feels like one of the lesser aspects found in the abysmal Alien Resurrection (1997). 

Romulus is familiar, slimy, and bloody entertainment for fans of the series. Its plot is unchallenging and lacks the thematic ambition of Scott’s prequels Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017). Álvarez and his team do a great job of recreating the look and feel of Alien and Aliens though. Romulus isn’t a masterpiece like those two films, but it delivers enough sci-fi horror goods.  

Rating: 8/10

The Crow: The BRWC Review. By Sarah Manvel.

The deeply underappreciated director Rupert Sanders has given us the deeply wonderful The Crow, based on the nineties comic by James O’Barr, and heavily in the shadow of the first movie adaptation from 1994, directed by Alex Proyas, during which an on-site accident claimed the life of its star Brandon Lee. But to compare 2024’s The Crow with the 1994 version is false; the only parallels are the names of the lead characters and the concept of the crow accompanying the souls of the dead into the afterlife.

On its own merits, The Crow is an astonishing movie about an unloved young man learning just how deep a capacity for love he actually has, based around a disturbingly good central performance from Bill Skarsgård. It is also so violent it is very nearly unwatchable, and certainly the fight scenes are filled with a level of gore and injury detail which is almost impossible to stomach. But it actually does the thing many movies claim to do: the violence is all an act of love.

Eric (Mr Skarsgård) meets Shelly (FKA Twigs) in a rehab center which is essentially a prison. Eric has such an enormous amount of disturbing tattoos that his gentleness – his knuckle tats spell out PARADISE, for goodness’ sake – is easily overlooked. Shelly is in the center to hide from the evil Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), a man whose ability to manipulate others is literally supernatural and quite possibly demonic. He has bottomless wealth and an endless number of henchmen to enforce his bidding, led by the imposing and graceful Marion (Laura Birn). When Marion finds Shelly in rehab Eric decides to join her on the run, and they swiftly fall in love.

They live in an unspecified American city – the movie was filmed in Prague, Munich and Chicago – where Shelly has access to gorgeous penthouse suites belonging to absent friends, and Eric squats in an empty factory filled with countless mannequins wrapped in plastic. It’s there they are attacked and gruesomely murdered, though shortly after Eric finds himself in a waterlogged, abandoned train station populated with hundreds of crows and a guide named in the credits as Kronos (Sami Bouajila). And it’s there he is given the news about the crows, and the choice he can make about returning to the world to seek vengeance on those who killed him and his love. 

The major fight sequence takes place in the foyer of an opera house, intercut with the performers onstage, and while this staging is not fresh cinematographer Steve Annis and the editors Chris Dickens and Neil Smith do a gorgeous job of interweaving the onstage melodrama with the bloody mayhem in the halls. The fights are so supremely violent and with such injury detail – Eric discovers his immunity from death when a stabbing wrenches out some of his intestines, and that’s just for starters – that the film very richly deserves its R/18-only rating.

But the thing is, it also deserves to be seen by many teenage boys, because the movie is about the power of love, and the impossible feats true love can motivate a previously unloved boy to do. Both Eric and Shelly are meant to be in their early twenties at the most, meaning both actors are somewhat too old for their parts. That said, both do an excellent job of depicting how thoroughly they felt themselves to be unlovable and how happy they are to realise that is no longer true. 

When Eric discovers Shelly is not the perfect person he had thought she was, he also has to make a choice if whether his love for her can remain pure. This is a pretty important lesson for the current moment! And while buckets of gore certainly do help the medicine go down, the abiding sensation the movie leaves behind is that of the masculine capacity to love. There are no sarcastic quips about any of the violence and the pain everyone is in is made brutally clear. The black eye makeup with which Eric smears himself are meant to be tears of blood, too. In a world where violence is more normally in movies treated like a joke, it’s difficult to emphasise how bold and unusual this is. All this hell that Eric is putting himself through is for a higher purpose and there’s nothing funny about any of it. His love for Shelly is the most important thing in his life and the movie takes that seriously. It’s so refreshing.

But it seems the movie is already being harmed by Sanders’s knack for controversy and his seeming inability to make work that’s easily marketed. 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman not only proved Chris Hemsworth could act but also altered the passivity with which fairy-tale heroines were normally portrayed onscreen, within a remarkably violent and violently beautiful setting, but it was overshadowed by personal drama. 2017’s Ghost in the Shell’s casting controversy swallowed the movie, which must have been infuriating, because the movie’s entire point is whether or not a body like Scarlett Johansson’s is actually the most desirable. That movie’s use of cybernetics and artificial intelligence also made the friendly rapport between Ms Johansson and Pilou Asbaek even more important, because they were the only human-ish people left in an increasingly artificial world. 

People seem to have expected this version of The Crow to be an adaptation of the one with Mr Lee, and are surprised that instead Mr Sanders has provided an entirely different kind of superhero movie, with love at its core. In the current moment no one seems to know what to do with the feelings of young men, and certainly in Western culture the goal seems to be to suppress those feelings at all costs. The Crow is a pleasing antithesis to that, and let’s hope it’s able to find audiences who will appreciate it for exactly what it is. 

By Sarah Manvel.

Alien: Romulus – The BRWC Review. By Simon Lalji.

The most terrifying organism in the galaxy has roared its way back to the silver screen and cinematic cheer.

Set twenty years after Ridley Scott’s genre defining, iconic 1979 film ‘Alien’, a crew of desperate miners embark on a mission to the Romulus space station in search of a better life away from the wicked Weyland-Yutani corporation, only to come face to face with the most terrifying organism in cinematic history. Thus discovering that ‘in space no one can hear you scream’…

From the terrifying yet terrific mind of director Fede Alvarez (Don’t Breathe, Evil Dead) comes ‘Alien: Romulus’ but the question from all fans is of course, can Romulus compete with this beloved juggernaut of a franchise that has undoubtedly defined the horror genre for over 40 years? Thankfully, to the grace of several starving ‘Alien’ fans the answer is a chest bursting yes! Fede Alvarez and crew deliver in ‘Alien: Romulus’ almost exactly what fans have grown accustomed to; carnage, chaos and horror, as Alvarez resembles an almost uncanny resemblance to every Alien film before. ‘Alien: Romulus’ takes the best aspects from each film in the franchise, meticulously crafting an Alien film fit for fans of all films in the franchise. Gripping the horror, carnage and pure fear from Ridley Scott’s films to James Cameron’s naturalistic eye for action and even David Fincher’s dark and somewhat sinister tone, Alvarez truly knows how to please and unite all of the different factions of the ‘Alien’ fandom.

It’s no secret that fans have grown attached to multiple marvellous variations of ‘Alien’ from the classic Ripley films to the fun of ‘Alien vs Predator’ or even the mind bending ‘Prometheus’ films, with each film bringing something new to the table. Thus making Alvarez’s decision of taking the franchise back to basics even more genius. Though some may say Alvarez’s ideas aren’t one hundred percent original, perhaps going back to basics is exactly what this franchise needs. Alvarez pivots ‘Alien’ back to its horrifying roots, presenting the film with a crystal clear love towards the franchise. Whether through simple fan pleasing easter eggs such as 80s style computers to the priceless practically produced Xenomorphs and Facehuggers that may present a franchise best visually, Alvarez honours the franchise’s past and legacy in all of its entirety. However, Alvarez doesn’t stop at making this simple and relatively safe ‘Alien’ film but he instead infuses ‘Romulus’ with the grotesque, dark and suspenseful tone and style that Fede Alvarez has become known for within the horror community throughout his filmography with beloved flicks such as ‘Don’t Breathe’ and ‘Evil Dead’ (2013). Alvarez and crew clearly manifest every shot, every scare and every creature with immense care and love, all in the genuine effort to give audiences a fun, terrifying and simply gory time. ‘Romulus’ certainly proves the point that if there’s one thing Fede Alvarez can do, it’s craft a tension filled, visually beautiful and disgusting sequence that audiences may even have to look away from… suffice to say ‘Alien Romulus’ is not for the light of heart.

With this being said, an Alien film is only as good as its cast, after all Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley raged her way to an oscar nomination for 1987’s action packed and fan favourite performance in ‘Aliens’. Thus forcing fans to wonder, is it truly possible to come close to Weaver’s star making performance? While the whole cast delivers masterclass, fear filled performances throughout, the clear future Hollywood stars are Cailee Spaeny (Civil war) and David Jonsson (Rye Lane), starring as the film’s two lead characters of Rain and Andy. While Spaeny embodies the action star, scream queen and heartfelt final girl persona that all horror and Alien fans adore, it’s Jonsson who manifests the heart, soul and emotional core of the film. Jonsson’s character being the chosen synthetic android, as per Alien tradition, reigns true to the legacy of androids standing out and stealing the show in the ‘Alien’ franchise. Whether through Michael Fassbender’s ‘David’ or Ian Holm’s’ Ash’, Jonsson cements himself as the draw audiences need to watch ‘Romulus’ in cinemas. Though some fans may be tired of the traditional ‘Alien’ formula and wish to see a continuation of more unique Alien stories such as Prometheus, Jonsson alone is a worthy enough draw to not only give the film emotional depth but also to enhance the bloodlusting, carnivorous and downright horrifying Xenomorphs.

Though ‘Romulus’ presents masterclass filmmaking as well as insane Alien carnage, action and horror, unfortunately the film does not come without its flaws no matter how small they may be. In an effort to avoid spoilers while keeping things simple, Romulus dispenses itself with an interesting and somewhat unique third act twist that will no doubt split audiences with most either loving or hating it. Though Isabela Merced (Instant Family) delivers one of the most petrified performances in the Alien franchise in an absolutely invigorating and bloodbath filled act, the twist unfortunately bags the film down and leaves a somewhat mixed but still relatively positive ending to the film. 

Overall, ‘Alien: Romulus’ though not perfect, understands exactly what makes an ‘Alien’ flick tick and how to give audiences one hell of a good time at the movies. However, with ‘Romulus’ recent one hundred million dollar opening, a potential sequel is all but guaranteed. Whether the franchise’s future once again follows Spaeny and Jonsson or Fede Alvarez’s recent comments about co-directing an ‘Alien vs Predator’ reboot with ‘Prey’ Director Dan Trachtenberg come to fruition, one thing is for sure and it’s that this franchise still has some chests to burst.

4/5