Moving Pictures

I am utterly baffled that people still watch them. I'm no movie snob, as has been established here previously, but I remember the last MI film I watched (MI3 maybe) being an utterly predictable slog.

Still, glad you are happy!

Last I saw properly was MI2, which I hear is a bit of a black sheep in the series?

MI2 is the only actually bad one. It's a complete outlier in the series, and feels more like a Bond movie than Mission.

MI3 is fine (Philip Seymour Hoffman is the best bit of it, but what a bit), but they really kick into high gear from #5 (Rogue Nation) when Chrisopher McQuarrie took over as director. They've all had the same team since, follow a (fairly loose) continuity, and feature increasingly batshit stunt work.

They're not particularly clever, but they're easily the best action movies going at the moment.

The first one is a pretty straightforward spy thriller, and probably the least interesting one to revisit as it doesn't have the stunt work of the later films. I have kind of a soft spot for the outright ridiculousness of M:I 2, and it arguably helped set the template for the early part of the franchise by departing so completely from the tone of the first. As mentioned, M:I III is worth it for Philip Seymour Hoffman alone, but I think it's a good entry overall despite the JJ Abrams-ness of its visuals. Ghost Protocol has the Burj climb, but I don't think it's all that memorable.

Rogue Nation is where things really start getting more consistent; McQuarrie's directed the rest of the films so far, so there's been less experimentation in the tone and visual style but Cruise has made up for it by upping the ante on the stunts. Fallout is the best of the bunch by a considerable distance – some of the best hand-to-hand fighting in a non-martial arts movie, a great car chase, that helicopter chase and even some solid character stuff.

I found Dead Reckoning: Part One a little long for a film that doesn't have a conclusion and its turn into scifi nonsense is a little too sudden (it's never not funny when they get all serious talking about "The Entity", and I also don't really buy into Esai Morales' villainous zealot), but Hayley Atwell is tremendous – I'm hoping she either gets a spin-off of her own, or takes over from Ethan Hunt when Cruise retires (or dies on screen).

Hayley Atwell is tremendous – I'm hoping she either gets a spin-off of her own, or takes over from Ethan Hunt when Cruise retires (or dies on screen).

I want a whole franchise of Grace & Paris.

I can't remember a film that's burned every scrap of goodwill in the last 20 minutes quite so thoroughly as Alien Romulus. Fucking hell.

I have not seen it and I don't know what happens. Please feel free to spoil it for me.

The first hour or so is a decent Alien movie - not a patch on the first two, obviously, but above average for the series - about on par with Alien³ (which I seem to have a higher opinion of than most).

The plot (strap in, it's gonna be a long one)
Spoiler - click to showAn automated Weyland-Yutani ship finds the wreckage of the Nostromo, and recovers a chitinous lump from the debris field. It's taken to a Facility™, where they laser it open and recover a (the?) Xenomorph.

Spoiler - click to showCut to a few months later on Jackson's Star, a mining colony where it rains forever and everyone is an indentured worker. Main character Rain and her synthetic "brother" Andy are headed to the Company office - she's worked off her indenture time and wants travel papers approved so she can go somewhere less depressing. Instead, the Company adds another 15,000 hours to her contract for what seems to be no

Spoiler - click to showShe gets a call from her friend Tyler (I'm having to look up all these character names on IMDb), who's putting a crew together for a less-than-legit job: he works on a ship that recovers scrap from orbit, and on their last run they got a ping off a decommissioned W-Y ship that they think might still have cryosleep pods. If they can get up there and recover the pods, they can just leave, contracts be damned, and fly away to a new and better life. The crew is Tyler, his sister Kay, his cousin Bjorn, and Bjorn's pilot girlfriend Navarro. They specifically need Andy because he's a W-Y synthetic, and will Freddie be able to interface with the derelict's systems and make it easier to get around.

Spoiler - click to showThey head off, and get to the derelict station without much trouble. On the way, we find out that Kay is secretly pregnant, and if you guessed that they're going to do something fucked up with that before the end, you're absolutely right, and it's the main part of what ruins the movie. Anyway, Tyler, Bjorn, and Andy board the station and restore artificial gravity. They find the pods, but there isn't enough cryo fuel to get them where they want to go. "Forunately", there is a cryo storage room nearby where they can get more. Unfortunately, it's storing facehuggers, which start to wake up as the door locks behind them and Andy doesn't have clearance to open it again.

Spoiler - click to showRain and Navarro board the station to help, and macguffin an upgraded security clearance for Andy from a defunct synthetic on the station. There's a good, tense sequence where Bjorn and Tyler have to fend off facehuggers in a half-flooded room while Andy reboots, but they eventually escape. They seal a bulkhead behind them, but one facehugger gets through and Navarro gets got.

Spoiler - click to showThey wake up the defunct synth (a very bad CGI Ian Holm, though the guy doing the voice is spot on), who's called Rook. Rook explains The Whole Deal with the facehugger. In a series first, they manage to get it off by freezing its tail with the cryo fuel, but Rook warns them she's probably already infected. Bjorn fights off the others and flees back to the ship with Navarro rather than leave her behind, and locks everyone but Kay (who's still on the ship) out.

Spoiler - click to showAs they disengage from the derelict, Navarro's Chestburster wakes up (already!?). In the commotion, the controls get jammed, causing the ship to crash into the station, blowing up a fuel pod and ending up in a cargo bay on the far side from Tyler, Rain, and Andy. The explosion knocks the station's orbit so it's going to crash into the planet's ice rings in 40 minutes.

Spoiler - click to showAs Rain and Co. make their way to the ship, Bjorn gets got by the newly-hatched xeno, but Kay escapes long enough for the others to arrive and see her get snatched. We also find out that Andy's new security clearance came with a new prime directive, and he's a Company man now. He won't let them leave without first recovering some of the black goo (FFS) from the station.

Spoiler - click to showSo they go get the goo, but on the way to the exit they stumble into an alien hive, where a badly-injured Kay has been restrained pending facehuggery. They rescue her and get to an elevator, but Andy falls behind and Tyler gets got. In the elevator back up to the ship, Rain decides to go back for Andy and sends Kay on alone - all she has to do is get into a cryo pod, and the ship will fly her back to the colony where she can get medical help.

Spoiler - click to showThis is where things really start to go wrong for the movie, because once she's alone, Kay injects herself with the black goo (it was explained earlier W-Y had engineered this version in an attempt to improve human healing and resilience), but she gets to the ship. Rain finds Andy and resets him back to his old self, but now they're trapped in the xenos' nest on the bottom level of the station - if they shoot the aliens, the acid blood will eat through the floor, immediately venting them into space.

Spoiler - click to showAs the xeno horde descends on them, Rain turns the station gravity off again and opens up on them with an auto-aiming pulse rifle she picked up earlier, and no gravity means the acid is just kind of floating about - between them and the ship. They zero-g their way through the blood, make it to the elevator shaft, and start climbing, pursued by yet more xenos.

Spoiler - click to showThere's some nonsense in the elevator shaft, but they make it to the ship and bug out as the station crashes spectacularly into the rings.

This is where the film should have ended. Instead we get twenty more minutes of nonsense that annihilates my opinion of the film entirely.

Spoiler - click to showAn alarm sounds from Kay's cryo pod. Rain opens it to find her mid-birth of a Xenomorph egg. She picks it up to try and get rid of it, but it secretes some kind of acid and she drops it. As it melts through the floor into the cargo bay below, the egg begins to open and she sees what looks like a human face on the thing inside.

Spoiler - click to showShe goes to the cargo bay (IN HER PANTS BECAUSE SIGOURNEY WEAVER AT THE END OF ALIEN, REMEMBER???), where the thing has somehow instantly become nine feet tall, an alien/human hybrid that is as bad as the one from Alien Resurrection, but in entirely different ways. It kills Kay and badly damages Andy, but over the course of ten excruciating minutes Rain manages to lure it back into the cargo hold and vent it into space (LIKE ALIEN! REMEMBER???). Finally safe, Rain gets into her cryo pod and fucks off to wherever.

THE END.

Before that abominable last 20 minutes, it's a solid good time, albeit one that's a little too keen to reference the original movies ("I can't lie about your chances, but… you have my sympathies" and "Get away from her, you bitch" both feature in the script). It would have been a much stronger film if it used those 20 minutes in the first act building up Rain's relationship with the other characters (she only really has any connection with Andy, and possibly some kind of Past with Tyler), and ended with

Spoiler - click to showKay not injecting herself, and the three of them just getting away as the station burns. Hell, have Rain and Andy sacrifice themselves to save their pregnant friend who is only on this trip because she wants her baby to live on a world with a sunrise.

I'll be annoyed about this for a very long time.

Not to "And another thing..!" it, but I think what makes it especially heinous is

Spoiler - click to showIntentional or not, the original Alien was very much about male fear of pregnancy. To violate a character who's a pregnant woman in the way this does is fucking abhorrent anyway, but it belies a complete lack of understanding of that basic premise. The fact that it's done for no narrative reason at all is just vile.

Ok, yep. That's worse than I was expecting. The guy who's in charge of the IP continuity is also the guy who writes the RPG books for Free League and the bullshit he adds there is similarly half baked and annoying.

Honestly, I think the RPG does a better job integrating it than Romulus did.

Afaik, Gaska's job is just to catalogue and keep track of things (he wrote a fairly interesting blog post about it), and I doubt very much he has any creative input on what the movies do.

I definitely had to tone down the black goo presence in Destroyer of Worlds.

Yeah, I suspect I'll probably do the same, if I run it. The scenario I wrote a couple of years ago had (unknowingly) some conceptual crossover with the 26 Draconic Strain stuff, but it wasn't anything like the focus.

I've only skimmed it, but the Rapture Protocol scenario for Evolved Edition seems to go back to basics a bit, in terms of Xeno presence.

Maybe this should be in the RPG thread. 😅