One of Westside’s most popular tourist attractions is the National Sea Life Centre in Brindleyplace, which opened 28 years ago.
Visitors always marvel at the weird and wonderful sea creatures in display. And so, if they can live generally unseen in our oceans, what might be lurking beyond Earth?
To find out, watch the latest movie in the ‘horror-in-space’ Alien series out now in Westside’s two brilliant 12-screen multiplexes, Odeon Luxe Broadway Plaza and Cineworld Broad Street.
The Odeon’s premium offers include iSense and Dolby screens. Over at Cineworld, you can also see Hollywood’s latest slobbering creatures in IMAX and 4DX formats. Take your pick!
Alien: Romulus (15, 119 mins). Young space colonisers are feeling done with life on a ruthlessly-operated mining planet and decide to see what they can scavenge from a derelict space station.
Once they are there, Alien history tells us they will inevitably get more than they bargained for. Late teens watching this kind of fictional violence for the first time will particularly enjoy suddenly feeling both squeamish and screamish.
The cast includes fast-rising Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla / Civil War), sensibly more girl-next-door than trying to be another Sigourney Weaver. British actor David Jonsson (Rye Lane) also clearly enjoys giving a memorable performance in what might well be his career-making performance as an ‘artificial human’.
As well as offering plenty of jumpiness, Uruguayan director Fede Alvarez (Evil Dead) creates an IMAX-worthy spectacular sense of what space really means before the sense of claustrophobia begins to kick in half way through.
The verdict: **** Even if you discount the two shockingly bad Alien vs Predator ‘imposter’ movies from 2004 and 2007, this is now the seventh Alien movie including Ridley Scott’s 1979 original.
With Scott back as a producer here, the action is set 65 light years away and chronologically in between his own groundbreaking opener and James Cameron’s post-Terminator sequel, Aliens (1986), still the chest-beating daddy of them all.
Invigorated by the challenge of matching those two giants of action cinema, Alvarez creates energy and visual delights in equal measure. His youthful, talented and cast-facing creatures have been hand built – avoiding the trap of them being seen as a digital artist’s CGI-fuelled that is obviously not real.
Despite the fact there’s only so much any director can achieve inside grey corridors and lift shafts, there are degrees of life here that many franchise sequels lack. These range from distorting the opening 20th Century Studios’ ident to grisly births, and a trick necessitating an end credits’ thank you to ‘the estate of Ian Holm’, a star of the first film.
Yes, we know Alien VII cannot be jungle-fresh meat, but Alvarez is effectively saying: “When you fully defrost a quality cut, are you be sure you will always be able to truly tell the difference?”
And so, given the cerebral but dull nature of Scott’s more recent exhumations (Prometheus, 2012 and Covenant, 2017), Romulus comfortably lands on the grid in third place overall – certainly well ahead of Alien 3 (1992) and Resurrection (1997).
Of course, in a summer full of similar reboots, one can but hope this is truly the end of the money-making matter and that everyone will go off to find something much more original to do to next. But don’t bank on it! What’s the betting we end up with an AI-lien next?
ENDS
