The Life Before Her Eyes

Year 17, Day 312 - 11/8/25 - Movie #5,184

BEFORE: Things are progressing, I guess - I've worked 3 shifts at the home of the Brooklyn Nets, all nets games, no concerts yet, and they've put me on the craft beer station, which is a self-serve station, so people swipe their credit card and then pick out their own beers from the fridges, so the only thing I really need to do is check IDs and tell them about the different beer options, which is kind of right up my alley. A little re-stocking at the end of the night, moving some beers around in the fridges to keep them looking nice, so far it's all tasks I can handle, and I'm making a little extra scratch to help pay my bills. But now I have two evening/night jobs, really so when you throw movies into the mix I've got roughly the schedule of a vampire, if a vampire woke up around 11 or noon and was able to go out and grab bagels. 

I've got a busy week coming up, there's a red-carpet event Monday and then DocFest starts up, so I've got to shift my movie reviews to weekends-only for a little while - it's fine, only 16 movies left to watch this year and 53 days to do that, it's going to all work out, even when I figure in another vacation in December. I'm still going to make it, one way or another. At this point in the count last year I still had two horror movies to go in October, and then I only watched FIVE films in November. This year I'm planning to watch 10 in November and then the last 10 in December, but you know, I've got to be a little flexible. 

John Magaro carries over one more time from "18 1/2". 

THE PLOT: A woman's survivor's guilt from a school shooting 15 years ago causes her present-day idyllic life to fall apart. 

AFTER: This film starts off as a double-timeline film, there are two actresses playing the same character, Uma Thurman plays Dianne when she's older and married and has a young daughter, and Evan Rachel Wood plays her as a high-school student. We've seen movies like this before, but then it starts to get a bit more complicated when we learn that Dianne is a survivor of a shooting event at her high-school - the anniversary of the shooting is approaching, and the town wants to have a memorial for the students who died and also a reunion of the survivors. As you might imagine, that brings up a lot of trauma and emotions and throws Dianne's life into a bit of chaos.  

The problem here, for a filmmaker, is that there's no mystery to that story, the film can depict the horror of the event in question, but we know that Dianne survived the shooting, because she's a living adult. Therefore, no mystery, and from what I know about filmmakers, that's a waste of their time. By using the split-timeline format of editing, we the audience kind of know the answers before the questions even come up, and that's a really inferior form of story-telling, so of course, that filmmaker just HAS to mess with it. God forbid they start at the beginning of the story, progress to the middle and end at the ending. Oh, nay nay, we can't do THAT. Then we might actually learn something constructive about school shootings and how they work and how to stop them in the future, nope, can't do that, won't do that, we wouldn't want to risk losing half of our audience by suggesting that gun control is a positive thing.

So the film starts at this point in adult Dianne's life, where she's starting to get triggered by the upcoming anniversary of the event, and we only see flashes of the event in the past, but that past storyline is only going to inch forward, bit by bit, in a maddening fashion. Then the story jumps back a year so we can learn more about young Dianne and her best friend, Maureen, who is NOT in the adult timeline, so we can therefore assume that she does not survive the shooting. (Careful, though, just when you think you know what's happening here, remember that filmmakers can be tricky and trying to trick you by showing you only what they want you to see.)

Then it's back to the adult timeline, where Dianne has to deal with the teachers of her young daughter, Emma - the nuns at the parochial school tell her that Emma is a "handful" and often disappears. Dianne doesn't think much of this, because she often plays "hide and seek" with her daughter - but of course it could be symbolic of a larger problem that will occur later. Dianne also sees her husband out with another woman, younger of course, so perhaps there's some trouble in her adult paradise, perhaps her marrying a professor who once gave a speech at her school about visualizing the future for yourself that you want to have was not the greatest idea. While standing in traffic after spotting her husband with a younger woman, Dianne gets hit by a truck, and while she's being taken to the hospital, she has a vision of bleeding very badly, however the truck didn't hit her that hard, so this is summarily dismissed as a flashback to an abortion she once had but this isn't explained until much later on. Again, the split-timeline and jumping around in the plot is very wonky here. 

Then we're back in the past again, where Dianne has a number of different boyfriends, which of course explains the pregnancy thing and while we're cheapening school shootings for the sake of our story we might as well cheapen the abortion issue while we're at it. Once again we inch closer and closer to that school shooting, to the point where the shooter confronts both Dianne and Maureen in the girls bathroom and decides to kill just one of them, but not the other.  Sure, because a psycho kid who just killed 50 students and teachers without stopping suddenly decides that he's going to kill one more kid but not two, because that would be too much. Yeah, right, THAT'S how it all works. Give me a break. 

When a person with a gun asks two people which one he should kill, really the only acceptable answer is "Shoot yourself, you a-hole, because you know you're going to have to do that anyway."  Yes, of course in doing that you might piss him off, causing him to shoot you, but perhaps you can reach that part of him that is suicidal, or will be shortly after the realization of what he's just done sinks in, or if he thinks about how he's going to spend the rest of his life in prison.  

The title hear comes from the phrase about watching your whole life flash before your eyes when you know that you're about to die - which could be a complete myth, for all we know. Eventually the entire adult life of the main character here is (spoiler alert) revealed to be one giant flash-forward, as she essentially imagines the next 30 or so years of her life if she manages to survive the school shooting. There are little inconsistencies, things about her adult life that don't make much sense, and they build up, eventually forcing us to come to terms with the fact that it's not real, it's all her fantasy about what her adult life is going to be like. 

First off, it's bullshit to tell me that half the movie I just watched was a dream and didn't really happen, because it was edited in as if it were the future, and therefore real. I don't like wasting even an hour of my time watching something that just turned out to be imaginary.  Second problem is that when a person imagines their life 20 or 30 years into the future, they tend to only imagine the good things, like being married, having a child, being successful in their career - people tend not to imagine the bad stuff like having their spouse cheat on them, having their kid get abducted, or getting older and less active or getting sick.

This is what I call mortar, not a brick - the film makes absolutely zero sense, and the only purpose this serves is to get me to the next film in the chain, which might be better and actually have something constructive to say. 

Directed by Vadim Perelman (director of "House of Sand and Fog")

Also starring Uma Thurman (last seen in "The War with Grandpa"), Evan Rachel Wood (last seen in "Kajillionaire"), Eva Amurri (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Gabrielle Brennan, Brett Cullen (last seen in "The Turkey Bowl"), Oscar Isaac (last seen in "10 Years"), Jack Gilpin (last seen in "Heartburn"), Maggie Lacey, Lynn Cohen (last seen in "Walking and Talking"), Nathalie Paulding, Molly Price (last seen in "How Do You Know"), Oliver Solomon (last seen in "The Night Before"), Anna Moore, Isabel Keating, Adam Chanler-Berat (last seen in "Delivery Man"), Tanner Cohen, Aldous Davidson (last seen in "Happy Tears"), Ann McDonough (last seen in "For Love or Money"), Sharon Washington (last seen in "Joker: Folie a Deux"), Kia Jam (last seen in "The Misfits"), J.T. Arbogast (last seen in "When in Rome"), Jewel Donohue (last seen in "The Irishman"), Shayna Levine (last seen in "The Happening"), Anslem Richardson (last seen in "Freedomland"), Evan Neumann (last seen in "Serendipity"), Reathel Bean (last seen in "The Good Shepherd"), Tuck Milligan (last seen in "Of Mice and Men"), Jessica Carlson (last seen in "Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant"), Molly Shreger, T.J. Linnard, Marie Brandt (last seen in "The Box"), Brian M. Wixson, Dianne Zaremba

RATING: 3 out of 10 useless facts learned in biology class (but they're all going to be on the test, for some reason)

18 1/2

Year 17, Day 310 - 11/6/25 - Movie #5,183

BEFORE: Jon Magaro carries over from "September 5" and I'm sending a big Birthday SHOUT-out to Sullivan Jones, who played Muhammad Ali in "Big George Foreman", which I watched just a couple months ago. I'm not scheduling by actor birthdays any more, but I still check each day to see if one popped up. With the new late-fall schedule of just watching a film every two or three days, I have some flexibility in scheduling each one, I can push a film one day in either direction if I want things to line up. 

I tried to find some Nixon-era tie-in also, but nothing really popped up. However, it's election time so there's a bit of a political tie-in there. Today in history, 11/6/1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected for the first time, and it's also the 125th Anniversary of William McKinley getting re-elected, with Theodore Roosevelt, former Governor of New York, as his V.P. That led to Roosevelt becoming President in 1901 - sorry, that's the best I can do, but it's something. 

THE PLOT: In 1974, a White House transcriber is thrust into the Watergate scanddal when she obtains the only copy of the infamous 18 1/2 minute gap in Nixon's tapes. 

AFTER: This is a bit of a weird one, if you're looking for actual historical information about Nixon and/or Watergate, you've come to the wrong place. Sort of. This is meant as a comedy (umm, I think) based on the scandal, specifically one audio tape out of Nixon's library that was missing, or there was 18 1/2 minutes that had been erased or edited out or something, and for some people that was a focal point of the investigation, like what information was missing, and why? So much information about Nixon's dirty dealings had already come to light, so it made people intensely curious about what could be SO BAD that it needed to be removed or destroyed. It's a weird phenomenon about active history, in a world where nearly everything is recorded or archived for posterity, something missing kind of gets our attention. 

Like those few seconds that got cut out of the Zapruder film - or the current furor over the Epstein files, and those 2 minutes of security cam footage from the prison where Mr. Epstein supposedly took his own life, what more could we learn about the case of the dead pedophile if there wasn't that mysterious glitch? I know what people THINK they might see, but that's not really the same thing as seeing it, is it?  Anyway, with all the crap that Trump has pulled over now (almost) five years in the White House, he's really done his part for Nixon's legacy, like Nixon wouldn't have thought of so many different ways to defraud the American people and separate them from their money. Imagine Nixon selling trading cards or his own brand of steaks, vodka or bottled water - that would be ridiculous, and at that time it would have been insanely illegal for the POTUS to have a side-hustle, but this is where we find ourselves.  

The premise for this film is that a woman who works as a transcriber contacts a Washington reporter, who meets her at a hotel because she's got a copy of the missing audio tape, technically it's a recording of the meeting where Nixon and his aides erased the original tape, but in the process of listening to it and discussing it before erasing it, supposedly Nixon was unaware that he was being recorded, meaning that he was also creating a copy of a copy. Umm, sure, that's not really how dubbing works, but OK, let's roll with it. 

Connie and Paul meet up at a Maryland motel, she brings the tape and he brings the reel-to-reel player, and their cover story is that they're a newlywed couple, they're on a honeymoon road trip and they only need the room for one night. There's a wild cross-section of 1970's people staying at this motel, and the motel manager is quite a character, too, so it's really trippy. And when their tape recorder appears to be broken, they have to go on a quest to find another reel-to-reel machine in the motel or perhaps the surrounding neighborhood. 

I think maybe even in 1972 reel-to-reel players were a bit archaic. The "hippies" in this film talk about how they've switched to stereo 8-tracks, which of course were more convenient because the tape stayed in the plastic cartridge (most of the time, anyway) and you didn't find yourself picking up audio tape from the floor and trying to wind it all back on a reel. And then of course in the early 1980's everyone had switched over to smaller cassettes, which was the second time everyone needed to re-buy all their Beatles albums in a new format - the third time was when CDs came out and the fourth time was digital files, so, umm, are we done with that yet? 

Connie and Paul find out that the older couple who invited them over for dinner are listening to bossa nova music, which means they probably have a reel-to-reel player - which means they must have brought one from home, such things were not standard equipment in motels, unlike, say, color televisions. But to borrow the tape player, they have to accept that dinner invite and then stick around for drinks afterwards, and then, you know, what if those people are swingers? Well, it was the 1970's, anything is possible, but how far would Connie and Paul take their newlywed act in order to borrow that tape player?  And at what point does pretending to be a couple put them close enough to each other where there might be a bit of real romance in the mix?  

It kind of felt for a while that this storyline was going nowhere fast - actually that's not accurate, it felt like it was going nowhere very, very slowly - I can assure you that it does go somewhere, but that somewhere might not be very realistic or even believable. Well, at least there's a narrative arc to it all, however it's still about five minutes of story stretched out to fill a 90-minute space. I'm not going to really trash this film because I know the director, Dan Mirvish, he's one of the founders of the Slamdance Film Festival, which means I had dealings with him back in 2004 when I produced a film that screened at Slamdance. 

What's presented here as the "information" contained on the missing 18 1/2 minutes, is, of course, completely fictional. In reality, nobody knows who created the gap in the audio tape and what it might have contained. Production on this film began in March 2020, 11 days before the COVID shutdown, so the shoot was on hold for six months, and during that time the filmmakers changed their schedule to work on the recording sessions with the actors playing Nixon, Al Haig and H.R. Haldeman, which all took place over Zoom. Filming resumed in September 2020 after COVID protocols had been put in place for live-action shoots. 

Directed by Dan Mirvish

Also starring Willa Fitzgerald (last seen in "Strange Darling"), Vondie Curtis-Hall (last seen in "Eve's Bayou"), Catherine Curtin (last seen in "Saturday Night"), Richard Kind (last seen in "Beau Is Afraid"), Sullivan Jones (last seen in "Big George Foreman"), Alanna Saunders, Claire Saunders (last seen in "The Intern"), Lloyd Kaufman (last seen in "Superman" (2025)), Marija Abney (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Gina Kreiezmar, Alexander Woodbury, Elle Schneider, Joshua A. Friedman,

and the voices of Bruce Campbell (last seen in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness"), Jon Cryer (last seen in "Brats"), Dan Mirvish (last seen in "Animation Outlaws"), Ted Raimi, Samantha Michele Buchanan, Chris Quintos Cathcart, Modesto "La Voz" Moya, Donald Ray Schwartz, Marv Wellins, 

RATING: 5 out of 10 reasons to not eat Wonder Bread (it is true that Wonder was made by Continental Baking, which at one time was owned by ITT. My father also worked for Continental Baking for a while, but he was allergic to the flour that they used, so he had to stop - but for me, that's reason #11 to not buy the brand)

September 5

Year 17, Day 308 - 11/4/25 - Movie #5,182

BEFORE: All right, I can finally call the horror chain over for this year, it's a little late, but you know, the romance chain has a way of spilling over into March, so it's fine if the horror chain makes it to November, I was really busy in October and we can overlook this. So no more horror films for the next 11 months, unless I really really need one to be somewhen else to keep the chain alive. Now I can return to regular movies, but the current choices are all ones that are going to get me closer to Christmas. After that I can start setting up the romance chain for next February, and so it goes - but one possible horror chain for next year is already set up (more or less), I'll just have to figure out how to get to it. 

Daniel Betts carries over from "Alien: Romulus". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Munich" (Movie #345)

THE PLOT: During the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, an American sports broadcasting team must adapt to live coverage of Israeli athletes being held hostage by a terrorist group. 

AFTER: This is based on a true story, the team broadcasting from the Summer Olympics and the problems they had, in addition to jet lag and having to work the night shift to transmit the sports to U.S. viewers live (or close to it). But this was the first instance of using satellite technology to beam the video footage (even though they still shot on film, for some reason) directly to the broadcast feed. This was ground-breaking because there was no internet yet, and even VHS technology hadn't take over, it was a pre-digital world - even if somebody wanted to put a caption on video footage, somebody had to stick little plastic letters into a tiny pegboard, and make sure they got the spelling right. Nowadays you would just push a button and type the letters on a keyboard, but everything was analog back then - no touch-tone phones, either, they had to rotary dial !!  Even pop-top beer and soda cans wouldn't come along for a couple years.

The big challenge was to make sports relatable for non-sports viewers, and that meant focusing on the back-stories of the athletes, trying to evoke some emotional response or support in the American public. Since Mark Spitz, an American swimmer, was Jewish, the plan was to focus on what it meant for him to be competing in Germany - OK, West Germany, but still echoes of Nazi Germany could probably be found. The German government was looking to present the country to the world in a new light, which could have had something to do with why the Olympic Village was easy for the terrorists to take over - how would it have looked to have German armed guards patroling the property? That might have evoked too many bad memories from the past. 

So a terrorist group called Black September broke into the apartment complex that was housing the athletes, and took Israeli athletes and coaches hostage, demanding the release of 200 Palestinian prisoners, who were also charged with terrorism. I would say that it was a very different situation in the Middle East back then, only it wasn't, was it?  This film got released during a time of a different occupation, one where Israel was the aggressor in Gaza and was holding Palestinians hostage, so there's another echo of the 1972 event (and others) in our current history, and vice versa. 

What goes on in a broadcast center when the team suddenly finds itself with access to the biggest news story in the world? Well, it's really what you expect, they pivot, they plan, they play a little fast and loose with the rules, and they send their star reporter (Peter Jennings) into the middle of the action, same as they would do for any big war or weather event. There's a delicate balance between breaking the story and getting the facts confirmed, but that's all news stories across the board, if you think about it. But this was back before there was such a thing as "fake news", there was just news. 

However, it might have been the first time that a news organization realized that their reporting might be affecting the story. The ABC camera trained on the apartment that the terrorists were holed up in showed that there was a television on, and the terrorists might have been watching the coverage of their own incident. This could, for example, reveal the location of the police snipers to the terrorists, so perhaps the German police were right to try to shut them down. I bring this up because it's Election Day, and up until just a couple elections ago, the news organizations were reporting early polling results, which has the potential to discourage late voters from turning out, if they see that their candidate has a big early lead. But all of the votes are important, the early ones and the late ones. We're looking at a nail-biter here in NYC, where the Socialist candidate has a perceived 5-point lead, and the former governor with the harassment record is a close second. Just even KNOWING what the point spread is could affect people's decision over whether to vote or not, and that's dangerous. Even if you can't pick the lesser of two evils from that pair (forget the vigilante Republican, he's got no chance) it's still important to get out and vote and make sure your voice is heard. My wife and I are voting for different people but then it's super-important that we both vote and cancel each other out. 

What happened in Munich was that the head of the control room had received a fax from the German government that the hostages had been freed at the airport, and he relayed the news to reporter Jim McKay without waiting for double confirmation. What was important to him was breaking the news FIRST, however the actual news from the rescue attempt was much more serious, all 11 hostages actually died in a failed rescue attempt. So ABC had to issue a retraction, and I'm sure that the head of the control room thought he would be fired, but no - his special punishment was getting NOT fired and being forced to continue working in the same position, with the special knowledge that he'd screwed up, big-time. Very relatable, his boss now had extra power over him.

Look, I don't know how you make an international hostage crisis boring, but they found a way. It's got something to do with the action being out THERE while we're all stuck in the broadcast center HERE with the reporters and the technicians. Needed more show and less tell. Jeezus, it's bad enough that some people work hard making TV shows and they don't see the sunlight for hours and hours, or they're stuck on the night shift and that means they don't see the sun for DAYS. I've been there, working on music videos that shot during the winter months, it wasn't fun, that will give you Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D.) for sure. 

Directed by Tim Fehlbaum

Also starring Peter Sarsgaard (last seen in "Year of the Dog"), John Magaro (last seen in "Big George Foreman"), Ben Chaplin (last seen in "The Water Horse"), Leonie Benesch, Zinedine Soualem (last seen in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"), Georgina Rich (last seen in "Radioactive"), Corey Johnson (last seen in "All the Old Knives"), Marcus Rutherford, Daniel Adeosun, Benjamin Walker (last seen in "The Ice Road"), Ferdinand Dörfler, Solomon Mousley (last seen in "Rocketman"), Caroline Ebner, Leif Eisenberg, Rony Herman, Jeff Book, Robert Porter Templeton, Stephen Fraser, Leon Dragoi, Doris Meier, Mark Ruppel, Christian Ulrich, Gunther Wernhard, Antje Westermann, Harry Waterstone, Andreas Honold, Stefan Mittermaier, Miguel Abrantes Ostrowski, Kim Hanfland, David Iselin, Nikita Borisov, Karolina Gabinger, Robert Glade, Immanuel Rahman, Paul Böhme, Saeid Yazdani, AF: Howard Cosell, Jim McKay

RATING: 5 out of 10 ski masks

Alien: Romulus

Year 17, Day 306 - 11/2/25 - Movie #5,181

BEFORE: Well, best laid plans being what they are and all, somehow I kind of did run out of time in October, and today's film was SUPPOSED to be my Halloween film. You can always count on an "Alien" film to have a couple creatures and some jump-scares, right? Along with something bursting out of somebody's stomach or eating somebody's face off - but then a few things happened. First and foremost, I watched the "Smile" movies and really decided that nothing could really top that for both gore AND shocking moments, so it kind of made sense to let that one stand as my Halloween film, I just didn't think anything could top it, maybe I was wrong, and if so, I'll find out today. 

Then I had to work on Halloween itself, really, it's OK, I'm fine with it - I'm past the age where I feel the need to dress up or go to a party, and if I want candy, I'll just buy some, whatever I want. That's called being an adult, and most of Halloween is designed for kids, unless you're single and you want to go to a party to try to get some action. That's off the table for me, so what's the point, then? Anyway, I worked at the theater at an animation event for the students, they screened a bunch of the films that the undergrad animators were working on, with a break for a pizza party and then a costume contest after. A few trick-or-treaters stopped in at the theater (more than stopped at home, apparently) and sure, a good time was had by the students, but after, I was really BEAT and just wanted to get home, where I still had to eat dinner and take the trash out to the curb. No rest for the weary, I guess....

Well, it was also Friday night, so I had a Dogfish Head pumpkin ale and also a Sierra Nevada Narwhal Imperial Stout - it had a weird creature on the label that I mistook for a sea monster, but no, it was a narwhal, which is a real fish, it turns out. Anyway I fell asleep almost right after sitting down to watch a TV show, so I never would have made it through a movie, anyway. Again it's totally fine, I'm not behind because my chain is designed to slow down here in the late fall, we're just two months from the end of Movie Year 17, and I only have to watch 20 more films to reach the annual goal of 300. So, 10 in November and 10 in December, so it made sense to stop for a pause after Movie #5,180, and now I just have to watch a movie like every other day or every third day to make it to Christmas on time. 

So I only watched 24 movies in October, not 25, again, it's fine. I'll watch this one tonight and still be on track. Here's the format breakdown for October: 

14 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Awake, The Eye, Mom and Dad, Dream Scenario, Trap, Renfield, Haunted Mansion (2023), Sinners, Blink Twice, A Ghost Story, A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), Strange Darling, Smile, Smile 2

4 watched on Netflix: The Munsters, Kraven the Hunter, I Lost My Body, The Discovery

2 watched on Amazon Prime: The First Omen, Nosferatu (2024)
1 watched on Hulu: The Pope's Exorcist

2 watched on Tubi: "The Fog" (2005), Cooties

1 watched in theaters: The Fantastic Four: First Steps

24 TOTAL

Sure, October was a crazy month, I was away for a week so it's still amazing that I got 24 movies watched - I cheated and pre-gamed a couple, of course, but it's what I do. So here we go with November, and these are the links that should get me to, say, Thanksgiving: Trevor Newlin carries over from "Smile 2", and then Daniel Betts, John Magaro, Sharon Washington, Paul Raci, Riz Ahmed, Frances Conroy and Ben Sinclair. It looks like Riz Ahmed will be in three films, not four - I was waiting for a film called "Relay" to be available on streaming, but it looks like it won't be. Again, it's fine, I had a back-up plan ready in case that film wasn't available, I'll still have a way to get to Movie #5,200. Plans within plans are sometimes necessary, I've learned.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Alien: Covenant" (Movie #3,191)

THE PLOT: While scavenging a derelict space station, a group of young space colonists come face to face with the most terrifying life form in the universe. 

AFTER: Yeah, it's like I figured - this is definitely an "Alien" movie in that it ticks off all the boxes, but then that becomes a problem because it's so busy ticking off those boxes that it doesn't really get around to showing us something we haven't seen before, except for one new bit at the end, but it's such a LONG walk there, you may wonder if it was worth all the effort. This is what tends to happen when a franchise reaches that point where they stop numbering the movies, like I said last week, and they start using colons and more words in the title to both confuse us and try to draw in the young viewers who simply won't watch a "Part 4" because they have not seen parts 1 through 3. Kids, go back and watch the old movies, they're on TCM or something, if you want to learn a few things. If they're not on TCM they're streaming somewhere for "free" on one of the 17 services you're paying for. 18 if you count the services that pretends to find all your other duplicate accounts and cancel them for you, you big dopes. Do you NOT know how to look at your own credit card bill and figure out what you're paying for every month? Or do your parents still pay all your bills for you, you entitled bastards? 

Anyway, kiddos, meet the xenomorph alien, his race is going to take over the whole galaxy someday, or maybe just one planet at a time is enough, all you really need to know is that it's hungry and was born to reproduce. Oh, it's not going to look like that when it starts out, it's going to look like an egg or a crab that washed up on the beach, only DON'T TOUCH it because it's going to go RIGHT for your face, and then where will you be? See, this is why you should watch those old movies, so someday when you're in another solar system investigating another world or a mysteriously abandoned space station, you'll know what NOT to do. The classic films have value, I promise. We look to the mistakes of the future past so we can avoid making them again in the future future. 

The film follows 6 colonists from the planet LV-410 who are in the employ of the Weyland-Yutani company, and whenever they try to transfer back to earth, they are told that their contract has been extended and they have to put in another 4,000 hours in the mines before they qualify for a transfer. Relatable, right? I just started a second job and I have to work at 30 Brooklyn Nets games before I get a raise, do you think once I hit 30 they'll raise that to 40? Between the uniforms and the pre-game meal served in the cafeteria, I don't think I've ever had a job that felt so much like being on a prison work detail, just saying. I'm now motivated to find a better or at least less physically taxing job, but if I have to keep this one for a couple months, it will at least allow me to earn some money during the college's winter break. The tricky part is all just scheduling, figuring out how many shifts at each job I can do without creating any conflicts.  

Oh, right, alien xenomorphs. You know that most of the six people who visit the abandoned space station are probably going to die, right? At this point doing something innovative in the "Alien" franchise would involve the majority of people surviving after battling the face-huggers, or coming out on top, or blowing up the station AND also being able to escape from it, instead of that being an either/or proposition. It feels like with most franchises, like "Nightmare on Elm Street", "Superman" and "The Omen" (among others) that we've looped back around to the beginning again, or a beginning of sorts.  While this is not really a shot-for-shot remake of the original film, there's a lot in common, they share the same DNA, for sure. But Wiki tells me that this one is set between "Alien" and "Aliens", so it's really Alien 1.5, the franchise is having its "Rogue One" moment, though I don't remember enough about the old films' plots to see exactly how this one ties in. Maybe it doesn't, except for having a broken-down android that looks a lot like Ian Holm's character. 

One thing this film shares with the original is that the cast is very small, just six humans and an android. But the original cast has been dying off - Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto, that's four of the original 7 alien-nauts who are no longer alive. Well, damn, now I feel old(er).  The 1979 film was proof that a director could do a lot with a little, provided you had the special effects to back you up, and gross things and jump-scares could make up the difference. 

I can't help but think that this is all some kind of metaphor for something, but I can't quite work it all out. Normally I'd think that there's some political point or argument being made, but even if I try to impose Trump or MAGA-ism on this, it doesn't really line up. Like do the aliens represent Obamacare, or the January 6 rioters, or fascism?  I'm probably over-thinking it again, right? Not everything is a political allegory, even if most things are these days. But damn, I at least wanted one giant alien at the center of all the evil with a big mass of orange hair, and I was very disappointed. OK, not really. There could have been an anti-immigration tie-in here, you know, the other kind of "aliens" and that didn't really happen either. 

So this is just meh, at the end of the day, they'll keep the franchise going with this one but again, there wasn't much new ground broken, and the story is just a filler one taking place between two of the original films, so come on, who cares? The space station was split into two parts, Romulus and Remus, and I didn't really understand why, that's just bad storytelling I guess. There is, however, a proper viewing order for all seven "Alien" films, and maybe someday there could be something gained by watching them all in that order. Maybe.

Directed by Fede Alvarez (director of "The Girl in the Spider's Web")

Also starring Cailee Spaeny (last seen in "Priscilla"), David Jonsson, Archie Renaux (last seen in "Morbius"), Isabela Merced (last seen in "Superman" (2025)), Spike Fearn (last seen in "The Batman"), Aileen Wu, Rosie Ede (last seen in "The Flash"), Soma Simon, Bence Okeke, Viktor Orizu, Robert Bobroczkyi, Elemer Szatmari (last seen in "Dune: Part Two") and the voices of Daniel Betts (last seen in "Here"), Annemarie Griggs

RATING: 4 out of 10 cryo chambers