What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[MSU]

I got round to watching Aftersun for the second time as the clock ticked into my birthday, as if I wasn't feeling self-reflective enough. It was a relief to find the movie as perfect as I remember it, and again pretty fitting considering what it has to say about memory. Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio, once again, make me forget that they're not actually father and daughter. There's a real sense of dread that comes from nowhere but never really leaves and it's impossible to be sure what exactly generates it. Charlotte Wells does in a debut what most directors will never achieve in a career. Remarkable stuff.

The final strobe scenes made me feel as unsettled and anxious as I was on a (thankfully very rare) moment where I found myself wondering if it was all worth it, which scared me a bit but ended up being oddly comforting when the feeling passed. The whole experience made me remember a moment in my life where my mum and dad tried to reconcile after years divorced but three weeks into a trial co-habitation, they realized that they simply couldn't live together. I helped my dad move back into his flat and I recall him telling me how he'd f**ked everything up and he wasn't one to swear in front of me often. Today, I'm two years older now than he was when we had that conversation and he passed away about five years later and for some reason this is really freaking me out. I guess I'm feeling a bit like old Sophie watching the old videos. Memories bring comfort, but not always.

Anyway, a longwinded and self-absorbed way to say that I love this movie about as much as I've loved any movie.

[Scorge]

Alien: Romulus - not bad for a late night B-movie. There are quite a few nods to the first two films (which are obviously better), however this one is not as scary or subtle. Would work better on a huge screen I reckon.

Also saw Borderlands, which was utter toot.

[BFTD]

Alien: Romulus - bunch of kids escape from indentured servitude on a Weyland-Yutani mining colony to a derelict space station. Everything is fine and they live out happy lives on the ha ha ha no, it's crawling with aliens, of course.

This was one of those weird films where I'd have said it was perfectly fine until the end shat the bed and soured my opinion of everything that came before, and now it just feels like a pretty bland and generic entry in the series. It commits a few unforgivable (to me) crimes:

• Dreadful CGI of an actor from one of the previous films.
• Utterly hilarious final boss monster; like someone saw Alien Resurrection and thought, "nice idea, but I can do it even worse".
• Constant reminders of the previous films in the second half, including repeated lines of dialogue and similar scenes. Why Hollywood continues to do this, I really don't know - you've already got our money, stop reminding us that we'd have been better off staying at home and watching the originals.

For people who hated Prometheus and were hoping this was entirely unrelated, it also bends over backwards to tie in to that film with a major plot point. I was fine with it, personally, but it might induce flashbacks in those who hated it.

There were a couple of decent ideas (the story with the protagonist's brotherdroid had potential, only to peter out), but it just gradually sagged into the modern big-budget sequel formula and had no reason to exist by the end other than to make money.

Edit: just occurred to me that, if they ever make another Jaws sequel/reboot, it will feature the following things:

• an unfunny scene where a character says, "we're going to need a bigger <x>"
• the hero's girlfriend saying, "smile, you son of a bitch" jokingly at some point, possibly when posing for a photo
• the main characters sitting around a table singing a song to relieve tension
• a smattering of random names from the original; possibly a bar called Orca's
• an old tape recording of a CGI Roy Scheider or Robert Shaw
• at least one CG shark that looks worse than Bruce
• someone being eaten in a move-for-more rendition of Quint's demise

Spoiler

Another thing about the Alien film - at one point they're clearly building up to an Alien breastfeeding scene, and it's even telegraphed in a painting early on, but they understandably backed away screaming from showing this happening in the final edit. What the actual f**k.

 

Edited August 17 by BFTD

[BFTD]

I've seen a few Alien franchise lists going about, so here's mine:

1. Alien
2. Aliens
3. Prometheus
4. Alien vs Predator
5. Alien³
6. Alien: Covenant
7. Alien: Romulus
8. Alien vs Predator: Requiem
9. Alien Resurrection

If we're being honest, they ran out of ideas after the first two, with Prometheus being a desperate attempt to try something new, which people hated.

[MSU]

102 Jackpot! -- Near-future Awkwafina doesn't know that the California Lottery has taken a leaf from The Purge's rulebook which means that the first 30 minutes of the movie can happen. It's debatable if that's a good thing or not. John Cena and Awkwafina are decent together and there are a few good gags from the supporting cast but this is such an obvious one-trick pony it all becomes rather dull long before the end. 4/10

103 Alien: Romulus -- I thought that Fede Álvarez's attempt at an Alien movie wouldn't be as good as Alien or Aliens, but hoped it would wrangle with Prometheus to take up residency as my third favourite of the franchise. That's exactly what happened but what surprised me was that it's closer to the Aliens end of the spectrum than I expected.

After a sequence where a probe recovers an artifact from the Nostromo, which doesn't make a huge amount of sense, it starts off great as we're introduced to Rain who lives on a mining colony that might as well be a prison. She's 60-odd light years from earth, living on a planet that gets no daylight ever, and left with her dead parents' synthetic, Andy, for companionship. She dreams of getting out of her neverending contract with the company and leaving for a distant farm planet and seeing the sun. Her pals reveal they've spotted a derelict, Romulus, that's wound up in orbit and reckoning it'll have stasis pods they can salvage and use to escape from their miserable lives. So off they go to do that remarkably easily, and everything goes well. For a bit.

Once aboard the Romulus, the invention of the opening drifts and it becomes more in keeping with other movies in the franchise where the alien picks off a bunch of stupid people we mostly don't like in narrow corridors. Álvarez, though, leans into his work on Don't Breathe and manages to inject a good bit of tension into some well-worn dynamics, and he throws in a few well-timed jump scares and Evil Dead creaky bone noises for good measure. The production design, sound design, music, and cinematography are all fantastic. The planetary rings around the colony are beautifully realized and took my breath away every time they were on screen and as a bonus, they play a vital role in proceedings.

There are a few nods back to the earlier movies and if this was an MCU or a Ghostbusters movie, I'd certainly be complaining about them. Things like the recreation of the shot where Ripley is taught how to shoot a blaster, or where she pours herself into a spacesuit I can handle. But there's a line of dialog from the android character that has absolutely no place in this movie and is 100% there just for the memberberries. The recreation of Ian Holm's face as a different version of the original Ash synthetic was ill-advised and only proves that in 2024, this kind of digital resurrection still can't produce something that looks 3D and still doesn't know how a mouth works.

Cailee Spaeny is fine as Rain, but it's David Jonsson as Andy who steals the show. His personality and capabilities shift as the movie progresses and he handles essentially playing different characters brilliantly and delivers enough dad jokes to keep me stocked into the new year. Never boring, always entertaining, done in under two hours -- the last twenty minutes of which is utterly bonkers -- and even though it doesn't always pass a sense check, I didn't care. Excellent fun. 8/10

[JustOneCornetto]

Hope to get to watch Alien Romulus in the next week as I'm a big fan of the franchise. Alien always features in my all time favourite films and while I don't expect Romulus to match up to Ridley Scott's masterpiece it's good to see a very positive review by @MSU

[Zetterlund]

21 hours ago, BFTD said:

• Constant reminders of the previous films in the second half, including repeated lines of dialogue and similar scenes. Why Hollywood continues to do this, I really don't know - you've already got our money, stop reminding us that we'd have been better off staying at home and watching the originals.

I remember The Last Jedi being horrendous for this. Literally the entire movie was just a sequence of remade scenes from the original films.

[BFTD]

10 to Midnight (Blu-Ray) - Detective Charles Bronson investigates a vicious murderer, only to find his own daughter becomes the target of the killer's attentions.

Got this for my mum, as she's a Bronson fan. At the time, there was a wee subgenre of particularly unpleasant slasher films that lingered on the suffering and dismemberment of women, and this turned out to be one of them. It's also a bit of a time capsule in other ways, displaying a lot of the "cities are irredeemable hellholes full of monsters" stuff that Cannon Films were particularly keen on.

It's OK, though not terribly interesting or well plotted. With films like this and The New York Ripper, I can't help but get the feeling that you're supposed to be enjoying what the killer's doing, which...yeah, not for me, Clive.

12 minutes ago, Zetterlund said:

I remember The Last Jedi being horrendous for this. Literally the entire movie was just a sequence of remade scenes from the original films.

It's The Force Awakens that I remember kicking this off in a big way. Absolutely stuffed full of hundreds of wee references and parallels to the original Star Wars films, to the point that it felt like a remake without actually being one. The only thing I really remember about The Last Jedi was that it got praise from some people for breaking a bunch of storytelling rules, which...hey, I've still got a story I wrote when I was a kid that ends with "...then I died and I'm writing this as a ghost", so maybe there's hope for my screenwriting career yet.

[Groundhopping Adventures]

The Keeper. Bert Trautmann's biopic. The CGI stadiums were a bit naff but did really enjoy the film. 

[KnightswoodBear]

Went to see Alien: Romulus this evening.  It's not as good as Alien, Aliens or even Alien 3 (Assembly Cut, obvs) but it's still a pretty good effort at an Alien film and maybe proves that their is still life in the franchise after Ridley Scott did his best to destroy his own creation.

It maybe tries too hard to keep fans of the first two films happy and it never quite knows which one of them it wants to be.  I liked the relationship between Rain and her android "brother" Andy, but the rest of the characters are there purely to be dispatched in increasingly gory ways. I didn't even think I can remember any of their names. 

The effects for the creatures are practical for a lot of it and the film looks much better because of that, but the one thing that almost ruins the whole thing is the CGI used to bring back an actor who died a few years ago. It's so badly done and it's almost totally distracting every time they are on the screen. The character in question isn't even vital to the story, it could have been anyone, but they've gone for fan service and it's ended up being pretty distasteful.

The final act gets a bit too close to Alien: Resurrection territory, and nobody wants that.

This probably sounds like a negative review, but I did actually enjoy the film quite a bit. 

 

[BFTD]

2 hours ago, KnightswoodBear said:

The effects for the creatures are practical for a lot of it and the film looks much better because of that, but the one thing that almost ruins the whole thing is the CGI used to bring back an actor who died a few years ago. It's so badly done and it's almost totally distracting every time they are on the screen. The character in question isn't even vital to the story, it could have been anyone, but they've gone for fan service and it's ended up being pretty distasteful.

I'd forgotten that they'd made a thing about using practical effects - it's a shame about Rook, and there's some facehugger scenes that look dodgy as f**k too IMO. On the other hand, there was one point where I noticed a background facehugger scuttling about while barely moving its legs, so practical effects aren't perfect  

Another thing I remembered about Alien: Romulus - it has one of the worst Bond One-Liners I've heard in a while in, "die, motherf**ker". Really jarring and didn't feel like it fit with the tone of the film at all, nor the character saying it. Maybe we'll all live to see Sigourney Weaver say "GIRUY, cunto!" when they eventually bring her back again at some point.

Also...

Spoiler

I kinda dismissed it at the time because I assumed I'd somehow misunderstood (and was still stunned by the awful "get away from her, you bitch" they'd shoehorned in for no reason), but our heroes are manually climbing to the top of a huge Aliens-style lift shaft, only to drop a very long distance, then somehow climb hundreds of feet (at least) in the space of ten seconds, yes? Reminded me of that bit in Morbius where our hero Morbs his way up to the top of a ridiculously long flight of stairs to the top of a skyscraper, only to be joined seconds later by another character without superpowers. Imagine being the editor who had to stitch those scenes together with their fingers crossed.

They did a fair bit of f**king about with the Alien lifecycle again too, but I guess at this point they're just making up whatever they fancy with regard to that. I guess sticking in Rook saying, "uhh...I totally made super-facehuggers who impregnate humans and produce fully-grown Aliens in about fifteen minutes, you guys" wouldn't really have improved matters any, which is what I assume they'd have done if anyone had noticed.

Edit: I only just realised why he's called Rook, because I'm dim. Looking forward to the android called Horsey in the next installment.

 

Edited August 19 by BFTD

[Craig fae the Vale]

Godzilla Minus One on Netflix

A brilliant Godzilla film. The post war Japan setting worked really well and there were engaging characters and a plot that didn't feel forced. A really enjoyable two hours.

Will be going to see Alien: Romulus at the weekend, looking forward to it even more having read the opinions over the past few posts.

[KnightswoodBear]

1 hour ago, Craig fae the Vale said:

Godzilla Minus One on Netflix

A brilliant Godzilla film. The post war Japan setting worked really well and there were engaging characters and a plot that didn't feel forced. A really enjoyable two hours.

Will be going to see Alien: Romulus at the weekend, looking forward to it even more having read the opinions over the past few posts.

Godzilla Minus One was tremendous. 

[KnightswoodBear]

13 hours ago, BFTD said:

 

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Edit: I only just realised why he's called Rook, because I'm dim. Looking forward to the android called Horsey in the next installment.

 

I'm obviously dim too, as I don't know why he's called Rook.  Is it a Chess thing?

[BFTD]

Just now, KnightswoodBear said:

I'm obviously dim too, as I don't know why he's called Rook.  Is it a Chess thing?

Spoiler

It's a reference to the android from Aliens being called Bishop.

Yet another weird, "hey, remember this other film that you liked?" prompt. I really can't wait for this trend to go out of fashion again.

 

[BFTD]

2 hours ago, KnightswoodBear said:

Godzilla Minus One was tremendous. 

I think the rule has to be "Godzilla film? Go watch in the cinema".

Even if turns out to be shite, you're still watching a skyscraper-sized lizard kick the shit out of a major city and/or other similarly-sized creatures. Really annoyed that I missed the limited run of Shin Godzilla, which was also tremendous.

[KnightswoodBear]

1 minute ago, BFTD said:

  Hide contents

It's a reference to the android from Aliens being called Bishop.

Yet another weird, "hey, remember this other film that you liked?" prompt. I really can't wait for this trend to go out of fashion again.

 

This would only really make sense if every other one in the films followed the same naming pattern.  It's just misguided on every level and really adds nothing to the film.

[Steve_Wilkos]

I have never seen a Godzilla film before. Would this affect my enjoyment of Godzilla Minus One if I were to watch it?

[BFTD]

46 minutes ago, Steve_Wilkos said:

I have never seen a Godzilla film before. Would this affect my enjoyment of Godzilla Minus One if I were to watch it?

It's another origin story; you'll be fine.

There aren't a bunch of references to Godzilla's prior exploits as a cat burglar or anything.

[Craig fae the Vale]

5 hours ago, Steve_Wilkos said:

I have never seen a Godzilla film before. Would this affect my enjoyment of Godzilla Minus One if I were to watch it?

No, I don't think you'd need any prior knowledge going in. Very much a standalone and very much worth watching.