Capsule Reviews: 'Alien: Romulus,' 'Borderlands' & 'Cuckoo'

by Philip Price

Alien: Romulus

Photo: 20th Century Studios

It does bum me out a little bit that this is what we got instead of the final chapter in the ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Covenant’ trilogy but I am not a big enough fan of the franchise in general for the ‘Force Awakens’ effect that writer/director Fede Álvarez implements in “Alien: Romulus” to bother me all that much. Álvarez balances homage and fan service well, but includes as much that it's evident he's trying to appease multiple crowds (including the *cough* shareholders *cough*). Yet, it simultaneously feels like he's genuinely making the ‘Alien’ movie he always wanted to make - especially given the final half-hour or so, which is batshit.
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The film is a grand visual scale (mostly) with well-executed tension and creative action sequences more than enough to make it one of the more memorable theater experiences of the summer, even if that's all this will largely amount to despite Ridley Scott's most recent films in the series dealing with committing genocide against an entire species to create the "ultimate, perfect life form" ... but ya know, it's all about purpose and intent and to say Álvarez didn't have as much would be false.

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Borderlands

Photo: Lionsgate

Remember when 2012's “John Carter” was released and caught a lot of heat for feeling derivative despite being the subject of stories published some three decades before ‘Star Wars’ even existed? The IP may have come first, but it was not the cultural representative for those types of stories; thus, it came off a tad recycled, if not necessarily reductive, as one could feel the effort and creativity Andrew Stanton had poured into the project. Having no familiarity with the “Borderlands” property, I wasn't sure what to expect, but where “John Carter” made up for its familiar journey in other ways, director Eli Roth's adaptation of this video game series offers no reason either in the writing or execution to suggest viewers should invest their time or emotions in it.
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Having enjoyed much of Roth's output over the years and considering the caliber of the cast involved, I expected a little more than what was ultimately delivered but it would be unfair to call this mess completely incompetent. This hollow shell of genre stereotypes might be a prime example of the emblematic difference in what regular movie-goers and critics want from their theater experiences. Even still, those casual movie-goers will have forgotten much of “Borderlands” by the time they reach their car afterward. The difference between forgettable and offensive and why “Borderlands” straddles this line is not because of its silly gimmicks - lots of movies have those - but because we never buy into the half-assed world-building or characterizations making the silliness feel stupid.

My “Borderlands” hot take is that Cate Blanchett is only good with the right material and is not good here. Honestly, I don't know if there is a good performance in this, except maybe Jamie Lee Curtis, who gets most of the exposition dumps (and I guess Florian Munteanu by default) ...maybe. It's hard to interpret what’s meant to be sincere and what’s being played for comedy in each performance, but I would like to know if Gina Gershon might have been better in the Blanchett role. It also looks like a late-era Robert Rodriguez movie, which is to say, total shit.

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Cuckoo

Photo: Neon

It will take *at least* another watch to somewhat understand what they were going for with “Cuckoo.” I’m unclear if writer/director Tilman Singer has children of his own or if he was the subject of a traumatizing childhood himself, but this idea of transplanting these breeding behavioral patterns from animals like the bird “Cuckoo” takes its name from and applying them to human beings is both fascinating and genuinely disturbing. Layers upon layers of meaning could be divulged from Singer's film, I'm sure, but given the title, premise, and several specific dialogue exchanges, it would seem evident Tilman is either wrestling with the thought of having kids himself or has realized the insanity of doing to children what adults did to him (or potentially someone he knows, I guess).
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“Cuckoo” is one large exercise in symbolism that the viewer is sure to get lost in the longer the film runs, and consequently, I found myself more appreciating what it was trying to accomplish than enjoying it. The value is not hard to see as the vision is as specific as the architecture featured, and the prime antagonist of the piece offers a few legitimate scares when in cahoots with the film's sound design, yet nothing about the film resonated enough to create a personal investment in or connection to the material. The ideas on evolution and the machinations that go into speeding up this process can certainly be adapted to a larger scale, but Singer's script seems to narrowly examine the tradeoffs in nature vs. nurture, the pros and cons each theory presents, as well as the ramifications of both the benefits and consequences that are born from such experiments to reach this hypothetical state of higher existence. On many occasions, though, such granularity can cause those on the front lines to miss the bigger picture, so even if each new generation that is bred is seemingly more powerful than the last, we still have to step back and consider the greater mosaic being painted – if we’ve been stuck in this loop before - and maybe even more importantly, the factors fueling such actions.