Baby shower: Alien Romulus and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
We’ve gone from making things to moving money around…these endless circulations… Deep down we think: this is all there is. Another world good or bad seems impossible.
-- harsh truths found in the James Bond theme songs.
Bad world possible and guaranteed in Alien: Romulus, the kind of fan fiction where your lead character is called Jericho Ballard or Beatrix Rothko or as in this film Rain Caradine. Core Alien business - birth panic and sexual assault and a cold cosmos and true Lovecraft-ian abyssal horror - shows up but down-shifted onto the youngs, Isabela Merced’s pregnancy and orphan Cailee Spaeny’s one true friend who isn’t a real boy. Spaeny is terrific again, for the third time in twelve months.
Is there much difference between this film’s resurrection of Ian Holm and the recent Marvel comic called Aliens: What If…? co-written by Paul Reiser with Paul Reiser’s Aliens character off having further adventures very much alive? Call this film Aliens: What If…?, why not…?
The Romulus final monster is dirty old man and vampire baby, equal maternal nightmares. This tottering troll echoes those naked muscle men from LA Central Casting in Prometheus (the one element from all Alien lore that should absolutely never be mentioned again) while also leering like the most clichéd movie producer-pervert sex offender since William Hootkins sweated onto the carpet in Hardware.
Another demon baby turns up in Beetlejuice: What If…?, a screeching Chucky bursting from another of Hollywood’s young Latinas. The theme of today is the next-but-one generation in blind violent fury about something, who can say why. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has 19 working characters and everyone gets a thread, creating several knots. Jenna Ortega gets to connect with her dead dad, Winona Ryder gets to connect with Jenna Ortega and Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice, Catherine O’Hara gets to connect with all three of them and the missing Jeffrey Jones, who himself gets an arc despite being absent through actor cancellation. Danny DeVito appears, giving a warm feeling to anyone who remembers Tim Burton playing a dead person in De Vito’s film Hoffa. Think of De Vito’s janitorial purgatory as Oswald Cobblepot’s arc.
Beetlejuice himself gets an arc but hardly needs one; better to leave him as a smutty poltergeist adding to people’s troubles, not taking them away. The film dances around the fact that he apparently still thinks of Ryder’s Lydia Deetz as being 15, which was acceptable in the Eighties. The afterlife cops are CHiPs zombies like the robots in THX 1138, but the biggest film gag is a florid Brian De Palma nightmare scored to Pino Donaggio’s Carrie music. A pleasant sympathetic legacy character is apparently doomed to be forever alone and traumatised in a cruel uncaring cosmos, in the same film that earlier shows the general dead catching a joyous musical Soul Train to the cosmos, jiving happily towards blissful eternity. Choose leisurewear, choose your future, choose death.
