This is what happens, when children recklessly steal a spaceship...
I greeted this ninth (!) Alien entry with a weary sense of Seriously? Must we do this again?
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| Needing to reach another portion of this enormous space station, but with their sole path blocked by scores of adult xenomorphs, Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and Andy (David Jonsson) consider their limited options. |
No matter what the set-up, the execution is resignedly predictable.
That said, and for the benefit of those who might be approaching this as their first Alien saga...
To his credit, director/co-scripter Fede Alvarez delivers a solid first act populated by a handful of reasonably well-crafted characters. (But given that every member of this small cast is in his/her early or mid-20s, one is tempted to re-title this film Alien: 90210.)
The second act also features a very clever nod back to the film that begat this franchise, accompanied by several familiar bars of Jerry Goldsmith’s score for that 1979 classic.
However ... Alvarez and co-scripter Rodo Sayagues then squander that good will with an eye-rolling third act that piles ludicrous atop preposterous, with a soupçon of ridiculous tossed in for bad measure.
Tsk, tsk, tsk.
Alien and 1986’s Aliens were game-changing events.
This is just a routine horror flick, albeit with impressive sci-fi trappings.
The year is 2142, which — in the series timeline — is one generation after Alien (2122) and not quite two generations before Aliens (2169). The setting: Jackson’s Star, a mining colony on a ringed planet with an atmosphere so thick that sunshine never penetrates. The vast majority of the colony’s inhabitants are underpaid laborers indentured to the Weyland-Yutani Corporation (the mostly unseen villains throughout this entire series).
The corporation has a nasty habit of changing the rules as it sees fit, which Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) discovers, to her dismay. She happily believes that — having served her required contract work hours — she now can travel to a much more hospitable world ... only to be told that her contract requirement has just been doubled. (Given Rain’s obvious youth, and the length of time necessary to hit her initial quota, we’re also clearly dealing with violations of reasonable child labor laws.)
Depressed beyond words, she’s susceptible when fellow miner and ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) proposes a risky means of escaping Jackson’s Star. He and three others — his sister Kay (Isabela Merced), fellow miner Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and tech-savvy Navarro (Aileen Wu) — have detected a derelict Weyland-Yutani spaceship in descending orbit around the planet.
The hope is that it’ll contain functional cryo-pods, for the suspended animation sleep necessary during a lengthy journey to their desired distant planet. The plan, then, is to “borrow” the Corbelan — one of the mining operation’s utilitarian spaceships — to reach the derelict vessel, transfer its cryo-pods to their ship, and then just keep going.
Rain’s participation is essential, because she’s accompanied by Andy (David Jonsson), her best friend and “brother”: actually a Weyland-Yutani biomechanical humanoid — a “synthetic” — who has been her constant companion since childhood. As such, he’ll be able to access and bypass the derelict ship’s various functions and security protocols.
Andy is by far this story’s most interesting character, played with nuanced precision by Jonsson. The synthetic was designed to accompany a much younger Rain, and therefore never has lost his simple and trusting behavior; this makes him naïve and vulnerable, and prone to sharing silly children’s jokes. But he’s firmly programmed to be “what’s best for Rain” at all times, and will do whatever she requests of him.
(As intriguing as Andy is initially, he later becomes even more interesting.)
This unlikely sextet hijacks the Corbelan and blasts into space.
They quickly discover — with a shock — that the derelict is a much larger scientific space station, divided into two enormous halves: Romulus and Remus. Our young interlopers also have only 36 hours before the station’s orbit decays into the planet’s rings, and is destroyed ... but surely that’s plenty of time.
What could possibly go wrong?
After docking, and with the folly of youth, Tyler, Bjorn and Andy charge recklessly into the station, assuming ... actually, I can’t imagine what they assume. Do they give a moment’s thought to why the station is derelict and drifting? And who — or what — still might be present?
Seriously, there’s foolish ... and there’s absurd.
(Just in passing, it seems unlikely that people more than a century from now still would drop F-bombs like confetti. But I suppose anything is possible.)
The young interlopers quickly discover that the station is overrun by hundreds of xenomorphs in various stages of development. (The parasitoid, spider-line facehuggers — as always — are the scariest.) As for why, well, Alien veterans know that Weyland-Yutani has long wanted to study, refine and — if possible — control these nasty critters, the collateral human cost be damned.
And, so, let the wild rumpus begin.
We might get emotionally involved, if these characters were more than brief descriptors. Tyler is The Dashing Hero; Kay is The Vulnerable One; Bjorn is The Jerk; and Navarro is The Tech Nerd With Attitude. And, sadly, Renaux, Merced, Fearn and Wu — respectively — don’t bring a jot more to their performances.
Aside from Andy, Spaeny’s Rain is the other obvious exception. She’s given feelings, desires, intelligence, protective instincts and an impressive ability to adapt to a rapidly worsening situation. Indeed, she soon becomes this film’s surrogate Ripley (Sigourney Weaver’s character, in the first four films).
But goodness, talk about having everything except the kitchen sink thrown at her. Although Alvarez (as director) and editor Jake Roberts do their best to maintain a suspenseful pace, it simply becomes too much ... particularly during the oh-puh-leaze final 15 minutes.
That’s a shame, because — in addition to the performances by Spaeny and Jonsson — there’s much to admire here. The work by production designer Naaman Marshall and visual effects supervisor Eric Barba is excellent, with respect to both the enormous space station and the Jackson’s Star mining colony; the latter is wholly realistic world-building, with a strong echo of Blade Runner.
Alvarez also deserves credit for insisting on as many old-style (live) creature effects as possible, rather than relying solely on CGI; this allowed the actors to interact with animatronic entities, rather than feigning behavior in front of a blue screen. That adds a lot to the resulting levels of suspense and terror.
Even so, by the time this flick lurches to its conclusion, it has wholly lost the promising spark of its first act. And given the open-ended finale, I’m sure we’ve not seen the last of these xenomorphs.
Darn.
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