Caribou - Come Find Me

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Long time fans of the Planet of the Apes series may be excited to note that, just as the 2010s Rupert Wyatt and Matt Reeves trilogy dissected and embellished 1972's Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, director Wes Ball and screenwriter Josh Friedman's Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes performs a similar trick with the much less impressive Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Ball's reimagining takes the warring settlements of J Lee Thompson's film - a hippie commune ran by apes and a sunken, irradiated city packed with mutated humans and their mouldering technology - and blows them up into two larger, computer generated fiefs. Whereas Battle signalled the terminal decline of the 70s Ape films, the series then demoted to television-level adventures, Kingdom comes hot on the heels of three successful blockbusters. Any reduction in scope is therefore unnecessary. The peaceful community this time is, again, one filled with apes but, rather than huddle in bric-a-brac sets, these primates now scale the overgrown frames of rotted skyscrapers and practice falconry. Their aggressors are a different tribe of chimpanzees, an army of slaves who are lead by a wily monarch who has become obsessed with looting the treasures promised by a long sealed, nuclear bunker. 

Although digital technology is used to describe the decomposed expanses of the far-flung future, in the main the computer trickery of Kingdom is more illustrative and actorly than other, similar budgeted blockbusters. The majority of the film's cast are painstakingly animated apes who must share a prolonged amount of screen time with Freya Allan's very real and very live action Mae. Not only do these figures interact physically, they do so emotionally. The prevailing tenor of these encounters isn't always one of camaraderie either. As the film rolls on, it becomes clear that Mae has her own agenda, one not necessarily in keeping with the aims of her friendly ape allies. So it is that the film's many digital effects vendors, including Wētā FX, and the motion captured actors sitting hunched on green screen sets have to simulate a creeping sense of unease or suspicion, one that prickles up in characters who are, fundamentally, naïve but not necessarily childlike. Planet of the Apes then, as a property, continuing to represent something different in the big spend, American filmmaking space. As with its nearest contemporaries, the desire to reproduce something uncanny remains but the execution here is much more subtle. Awe and tomfoolery obviously have their place but Kingdom's appeal is an ability to transmit empathy, or clear interpersonal connections, and accomplishing this in such a way that Ball's film consistently overrides any favouritism that could be informed by the viewer's native species.

John Paesano - Human Hunt

The Uncanny X-Men #207 by Artyom Trakhanov

LTJ Bukem - Cosmic Interlude

Lucy in Disguise - Passing Mirrors

The Killer

Director John Woo's second pass at The Killer is a peculiar film, one that feels frozen in a specific, cinematic moment. The screenplay, credited to Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecken and Brian Helgeland, although presumably penned (or at least punched up) recently bears marks associated with the American studio system of the 1990s. Back then, when the likes of Walter Hill and David Giler were circling Woo's original for a remake, it seemed as if Hollywood, as an industry, was obsessed with ironing every property set before it into an easily digestible mulch. As if working on behalf of an audience of buffoons who would, it was then assumed, refuse to entertain the more impressionistic thematic axis of the original piece or, really, any sense of ambiguity at all. Despite retaining Woo at the helm, this Killer - Nathalie Emmanuel's extremely photogenic Killer - is exactly as feared. An overly literal remake that decodes the 1989 film along stringent, and far less interesting moral lines all while insisting that this supernatural murderer have a tragic, flashback-stated past. Omar Sy, the star of Netflix's Lupin series, is a highlight though. The actor a pleasant alternative to Danny Lee's Detective, able to play up the more cartoonish, Spy vs. Spy aspects of the film without allowing them to slip completely into farce. Woo does have some fun here as well - literalising the connection between his Hong Kong project and Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï through the Paris location; while also taking scissors to the frame when mapping out the competing perspectives found in heists, much like Norman Jewison did when assembling The Thomas Crown Affair - but this juiceless exercise is best described in terms of the lack of excitement its gadgets generate: a puttering, electric motorcycle that glides about, responsibly or the silenced competition pistols that track sad, computer generated splatters onto their targets. 

Unfound - Nine O Nine

Alien: Romulus by Shimhaq

Fontaines DC - In the Modern World

Benjamin Wallfisch - Raine

Alien: Romulus

Ever since Star Wars: The Force Awakens netted two billion dollars for Disney it seems that the done thing, when resuscitating VHS-era franchises, is to remix the instalments that imprinted themselves on the audience. These kind of deliberately nostalgic quotations are a difficult thing to get right though, especially in such a late-arriving sequel. Obviously, co-writer-director Fede Álvarez's Alien: Romulus plunders its beautifully appointed predecessors for grist - quite apparently the gap between productions is too long and too creatively disconnected for it to be otherwise - but it's how these pieces are refined or transferred into the new whole that really matters. So, hearing notes in Benjamin Wallfisch's Romulus score that are reminiscent of Elliot Goldenthal's turbulent, shrieking Alien³ Adagio, while an astronaut thrashes around with clawed horrors in the void of space, isn't just thematically fitting, it underlines the sheer, surging quality of the sampled work. The move is celebratory too: Goldenthal's music a beloved (and perhaps underappreciated) aspect of an unfairly maligned sequel. 

What absolutely does not work though is the decision to reanimate an actor who has, sadly, already passed on. Romulus' recreation of Ian Holm's face is frozen inside a role that the actor played over forty years earlier. This is perhaps the most overt aspect of Disneyfication that Romulus is subject to: ransom demand-level amounts of money spent on deep fake AI processing (and, no doubt, scores of end-of-pipeline tweaks courtesy of multiple computer animation vendors), all to spit out a dented puppet that is far more physically repulsive than any of the other, evolving nightmares on display. These periodic reminders that Disney is very heavily invested in these uncanny regurgitations of extremely real people has never not been alarming. It goes beyond the simple revulsion of a human face untethered from time or the personality that previously animated it. The practice is reductive, imagining human value in stark, temporary terms: the periods in which a person impacted upon some property that can be franchised off into the future. What is the end game here? Summer blockbusters packed with marionettes of these digital undead? The resurrection we're subjected to here isn't even canny enough to be brief. This shade lingers, relentlessly regurgitating lines from its point of origin. 

This is another, vivid problem in Romulus. Although the special effects departments, the stunt performers, the creature effects people and the actors themselves are very often working in fabulous concert, Álvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues (or perhaps the Disney bean counters) cannot help themselves, excreting famous lines from previous instalments all over this film's crowning moments. It's actually kind of maddening. Why work hard to add something new or genuinely exciting to such a well-worn property if the final revision is so desperate to remind its audience of older, greater episodes? Are viewers really so enamoured of reading these signposts? Of being given the opportunity to elbow the neophyte they've tricked into sitting next to them, then confidently state which sequel the quip originated from? It all depends on how you view these films really. Are they important milestones in science fiction cinema or are they the latest opportunity for a sentimental, box office haul? Thankfully, for those of us who would put the first three Alien films over any similarly lauded trilogies - Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings shrink beneath their brilliance - there is still meat to get your teeth into. 

Ron Cobb's design for an atmospheric processing tower is lifted out of Aliens then deposited onto the mining colony where this film begins. Surrounded by open-air markets and an abundance of human squalor, the pyramid takes on a sinister quality. Although it never made it into the final film, when prepping Alien, Giger imagined the egg chamber residing in a bulbous, organic pyramid; an enormous boil that had been deposited onto this inhospitable landscape then, somehow, flourished. Cobb's mastaba serves a similar function here. Not only is it a risen symbol that denotes an extraterrestrial befoulment, it allows the audience to get a sense of what one of Weyland Yutani's shake and bake colonies looks like a couple of decades down the line. Comparatively, the twin facility we saw back on Acheron was trapped in a specific moment in time. Hadley's Hope was staffed by young families looking to make a name for themselves on an unknown and unmapped planet. Jackson's Star, the Romulus equivalent, is the home of Cailee Spaeny orphaned Rain. It is a full-blooded company operation that imprisons generation after generation of its citizens into a hopeless, life-draining servitude. The frontier romance experienced by the Jordans, before they trespassed onto a prehistoric derelict at least, has long been paved over. 

Accompanying Rain throughout Romulus is David Jonsson's Andy, a gentle and childlike alternative to the other, usually far more malevolent, synthetic beings in this universe. Liberated from a rubbish tip by Rain's now deceased father, Andy is a decommissioned artificial person that has been reprogrammed to be a guileless and ever-present companion. The simplicity of this rewiring, as well as the obvious misuse of Andy before he became a part of Rain's family, has left this mechanoid vulnerable and prone to debilitating seizures. Although Rain treats Andy with the fatigued care of a glass child, her friends respond to him as either a useful gadget or as a target for bullying derision. Unexpectedly, Romulus takes a similarly sympathetic position as Ridley Scott's prequels, asking us to identify with a being built purely for slavery while still worrying what shape his self-determination will eventually take. As Andy trespasses deeper into Romulus' decaying mausoleum, his fragged directives begin to reorganise and re-emerge. Jonsson effortlessly switches back and forth between these two, clashing perspectives, using the slights aimed at his depleted form to inform an angry, emergent personality that has been radicalised by company doctrine. 

Despite any worries generated by Romulus having such a young and apparently carefree cast (not to mention the project's beginnings as a straight-to-streaming feature), Álvarez's film is actually far more considered than expected: a conscious effort to return the series to its blue collar roots. No longer are we stowing away with billionaires as they pursue their follies. We're generations removed from middle-class, middle-aged professionals attempting to hot desk in from a wooden cabin that resides in a different galaxy. The subjects here are the children that followed in their wake. The displaced, despondent youths forced to grow up malnourished under churning, leaden skies. Their dreams are tiny: Rain genuinely yearning only for a feeling of warmth on her face. No wonder they want to escape, to raid a deteriorating satellite and pilfer enough stasis tech to die a little death and be transported somewhere that has slipped through The Company's grasp. Romulus' slower, earlier passages are its best: bickering teenagers trampling over the wreckage of some doomed, inhuman experiment, completely oblivious to the danger that they are in. Although we are eventually subjected to an entire menagerie, Álvarez's film happily builds several set-pieces around the scurrying threat implied by the facehugger; that leathery-looking arachnoid that has been side-lined as a serious, ambulatory threat since the mid-1980s. 

In fact, Romulus so successfully repositions the parasite stage of the Alien as a legitimately entertaining danger that its eventual progeny registers as somewhat superfluous or, maybe more accurately, formulaic. Ever since Paul WS Anderson's AVP: Alien vs Predator, the creature's lifecycle has been in overdrive, with chest-bursters following rapidly after even the briefest of infection. Romulus does not buck this trend, with towering drones nosing around dripping corridors seemingly moments after their rib-cracking birth. The presence of these adult creatures foretells a rough, structural gear shift in Romulus as well, a move away from sweaty, creeping tension and on to a more triumphant style of redress. Of course Rain gets her hands on some heavy weaponry. Naturally, the creatures line up to get their pearlescent domes detonated as well. What else where we expecting? To Álvarez's credit though, these fist-pumping moments quickly segue into the immediate and unintended consequences of all this blood-letting, with weightless nebula clouds of hull-melting acid spiralling towards heroines dressed in little more than company-stamped sweats. It helps as well that, prior to Rain's zero gravity manoeuvres, we have a recent reference point for the kind of danger this substance represents: fingers instantly melted down to their knuckles; sternums, and the organs they encase, reduced to smoking boreholes by only a trickle. 

Finally there's Romulus' addition to the Alien lifecycle, a fourth act creeper who reveals its hairless head after several overlapping countdowns have concluded. Romanian basketballer Robert Bobroczkyi, underneath a thin layer of desiccated make up appliances, plays Offspring, another example of a ruthless biomechanoid's vision for an evolved, space-faring human being. In Romulus that brief is interpreted as a swaying, sexless giant riddled with pulsing orifices and a barbed tongue that it uses to extract sustenance. This Offspring also provides the filmmakers an opportunity to tweak and reassess Chris Cunningham's Newborn, a creature designed for Alien: Resurrection that began its life as a diseased etching that combined the black carapace of Giger with the overlong and atrophied limbs of the terminally undernourished. Unfortunately, that chimera was rendered for the screen as a slathering goo monster. Resurrection's failure to accurately translate this sickly intermingling of human-presenting flesh and airbrushed Necronom is to Romulus' benefit though. While not as visually striking as a Big Chap, Offspring allows the filmmakers to portray an Alien in the same singular, hair-raising terms as the original film. 

Although only a final stretch player, Offspring impresses because the threat it implies isn't simply that of the tooth or claw. It stalks and looms, appraising its quarry with a leering fascination that is genuinely uncomfortable to consider. Successive sequels have drained the series of the idea that the Alien isn't a static creature that will always grow to similar dimensions, it's a reflection of humanity: our basic, reproductive drives written into a massive, androgynous insect that is incapable of coupling with or even raping its prey. Hives and matriarchal scaffolding have elbowed out the notion that this orphaned mayfly doesn't necessarily want to strike and bite on sight. In Scott's film, the Alien certainly slaughtered the men it encountered but the women trapped on the Nostromo gave Kane's son pause. It appraised them, fascinated by the sight of their soft skin or some (undetectable to the audience) scent that issued from them. Romulus follows suit, even having a shot of its Offspring - drawn up on its hind legs - as if about to issue some awful, engorged member from the little crocodile button that sits centred in the frame. Romulus doesn't subject its battered cast to that kind of outrage but some underlying intent does seem to be on display. The Offspring doesn't nuzzle the bleeding mother that birthed it. This infant invades her space and prods its beak-like nose at her, using it's size and weight in such a way that an intent is clear: it's demanding to be noticed, it wants to be embraced by the shrinking, dying woman beneath it. 

Benjamin Wallfisch - The Chrysalis

Giant Robot Hellboy Returns by Duncan Fegredo

Peel Dream Magazine - Dawn

Kupla - Fade

Rebel Moon - Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness (The Director's Cut)

Parked at Netflix and issued by the streaming giant in ways that - having viewed both films in longer, bloodier cuts - now registers as a strange and cynical kind of self-sabotage, Zack Snyder's pass at Star Wars is both appropriately massive and acutely humourless. Unusually for a writer-director rapidly approaching his sixties (and therefore perfectly placed to have had his mind zapped back in 1977), Snyder is better tuned to the wavelengths emanating from George Lucas' prequel trilogy. To wit: the feeling that you're viewing an instalment rather than a self-contained piece; the self-seriousness of the characters; as well as a narrowing of outlook that exchanges naïve teenagers in alien spaces for human empires and garrulous in-fighting. Snyder even shouts out the plaid grandmaster with extra shots of scurrying, computer-generated rodents. These superfluous, distracting additions to scenes of Sofia Boutella navigating winding corridors are evocative of the charming visual noise Lucas insisted upon for his Special Edition re-releases back in 1997. 

When considering these Director's Cuts as a whole though, it quickly becomes obvious that these are (moment to moment) the better experiences. Overstuffed and exhaustive where the previous episodes felt clipped and oddly anaemic, Chalice of Blood, and now Rebel Moon - Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness, offer up a double helping of the excesses that have become synonymous with their extended edition loving director. Paced around two battles - one fought against fields of alien wheat, the other with skinhead invaders from this galaxy's equivalent of the East India Company - Curse of Forgiveness benefits from the extra sense of danger, not to mention gore, that the new, stronger R certificate implies. Basically, the bloodless extermination of the PG-13 cut simply cannot entertain in the same way as the bodily detonations on offer here. The truncated, previously released edits carry with them no sense of shock or satisfaction; built, as they are, around confrontations that have had their sudden, stunning acts of violence snipped away. 

In Curse it's not just faceless stormtroopers who explode into satisfying clouds of weightless viscera either. Cowering civilians (perhaps even children?) have their heads blasted through with molten laser fire by advancing, bearded operators. The sequences in question crossing the pitiless carnage seen in big screen Yoshiyuki Tomino anime (Snyder being one of the few American directors who proudly namechecks influences drawn from Japanese animation) with the instinctual unease generated by the sight of private military contractors. What was previously presented as, more or less, a full-on rout now has an element of wincing, human pain threaded through it. The tweaks that have been applied to Curse then, including tiny instances of dialogue that reframe the imperial war machine in starker and therefore more logically consistent terms, help to massage some individuality into a film that is, by design, deliberately derivative. Perhaps the biggest impact of these differences though are the ways in which Curse accentuates not just the barbarism but the racism of its advancing Imperium. 

Previously, when writing about the first instalment, I insisted that Rebel Moon mishandled its re-telling of Seven Samurai by failing to translate the hierarchical structure of Japanese society in the16th century. Although Boutella's Kora can mix and engage with Djimon Hounsou's disgraced general or Bae Doona's sword master on an equal footing, that's not the important element in these relationships. What unites the warriors recruited to protect Veldt - and even the shorter cuts state this outright - is that they are, predominantly, non-white casualties of a white European coded empire that has either smeared their civilisation (for no detectable advantage) or recruited these people then used them as cannon fodder. Here, the betrayals premised on the social inferiority of non-white instruments land a little harder when the floors and the braying, invective spewing accusers are themselves fouled with recently spilled blood. Even the bone eating engines that the Imperium's ships run on are now named for Hindu Gods; towering women shackled in iridescent prisons that are only able to disobey their sneering conquerors in tiny, barely detectable ways. Where Star Wars used stuffy British thesps as a natural antithesis to its louche, American freedom-fighters, Rebel Moon broadens this conceit to focus in on actors who can trace their real-life lineage to countries that have suffered horribly under colonial aggression: Boutella is Algerian; Hounsou is Beninese; while Staz Nair spoke about his Malayali heritage when promoting Game of Thrones. Hardly a fix all for a film that is desperate to immediately undermine its hard won victory with graceless pleas for further sequels, but it's not nothing. 

Fontaines DC - Here's the Thing

The Punisher by Gavin Mitchell

Peel Dream Magazine - Central Park West

Rebel Moon - Chapter One: Chalice of Blood (The Director's Cut)

The first part of writer-director Zack Snyder's streaming serial returns, half as long again and brandishing a stricter ratings board certificate that allows for swearing, nudity and varying degrees of sexuality (including gagging submission to a mass of writhing tentacles), as well as moments in which heads are blasted into glowing, molten slag. Really, everything that was originally expected upon hearing that Snyder was plotting a course to a galaxy far, far away. Although, like its first draft, Rebel Moon - Chapter One: Chalice of Blood does eventually flounder, the film's opening passage - already the better section of the feature - benefits further from a new prologue that portrays Ed Skrein's Admiral Noble departing from a drop ship that looks very much like White Dwarf's scratch-built Grav-Attack vehicle (made from a used stick deodorant, Zoid sprues and several plastic cough syrup spoons, back in the late 1980s), before slowly advancing on a cornered, royal family. 

Flanked by necrophilic clergy, Noble is in his element: wearing a furrowed brow when surveying the cultural detonation he is party to but, nevertheless, delighting in the powerlessness of Lim Yu-Beng's rifle-racking monarch. Apparently considered extraneous when compiling the original, holiday season-friendly 'theatrical' cuts, this twenty five minute prelude is, comfortably, more personal and emotionally excruciating than anything else that this saga has previously offered up. The central dilemma of the addition - should a son stave in his father's head to save his weeping sisters - has broader consequences within the piece too: it foreshadows the unexpected bravery of Michiel Huisman's Gunnar when faced with another no-win situation; knitting this naïve farmer into a collective of hardened warriors. Staz Nair's Tarak actually congratulates Gunnar, perhaps recalling his own powerlessness when faced with the might of the Imperium. Similarly, frequent visits to the wheat planet to see how Anthony Hopkins' robot pacifist, Jimmy, is getting on helps massage the bullet point plotting of the theatrical cut's middle section, even if these scenes basically repeat the same idea over and over again. 

The real lesson in all of this, which Chalice of Blood enthusiastically underlines, is that Snyder is often at his most purely effective when using compressed time and collage as a means of leaping, anthropological study. The director then more naturally attuned to telling tales in massive, sweeping strokes that match the grandeur of his vision. Snyder and his co-writers, Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten, have compiled a terrible path for mankind's future, one that looks to the smoking, industrialised empires of the 19th century then blows them up to function on an intergalactic scale. As with the Dr. Manhattan on Mars sequence in Watchmen or 300's demented opening narration, Sofia Boutella's Kora, and Rebel Moon as a whole, are at their most engaging when this brainwashed orphan takes a moment to detail her path through the screaming, bone-shovelling machinery of conquest. A whispering Kora, confiding in a would-be lover, is given the space to talk through the complicated pride and intermingled guilt she feels about collaborating with, and succeeding within, the regime that doomed her civilisation. These embellished interludes, which now feel complete thanks to a greater scope for emotional incongruity, have a vulnerability and dimensionality to them that was previously lacking in Rebel Moon. 

Red Arremer by Jack Teagle

Caribou - Volume

Eagle Eyed Tiger - Something More

Kubi

Set during a period of Japanese history in which the country was trapped in an almost constant state of civil war, Takeshi Kitano's latest, Kubi (or Neck), is a darkly comic period piece that charts the rise and fall of several scheming warlords. Originally conceived back in the early 1990s, in tandem with Kitano's commercially unsuccessful (at least at the domestic box office) Sonatine, Kubi works a similar sort of genre-dismantling magic. Just as Kitano drained the heroism, anti or otherwise, out of hardboiled cop and organised crime films, Kubi similarly refuses to venerate its historical figures, lasering in on their selfishness or self-absorption and how the depressed permissiveness central to samurai chivalry allowed that mania to then be transmitted out onto a quivering nation. Although the cast stretches into the dozens, with each person's name and standing announced by an onscreen scrawl, Kitano largely focuses on three main, competing camps: those of Ryo Kase's Nobunaga Oda, Hidetoshi Nishijima's Akechi Mitsuhide, and Kitano's Hashiba Hideyoshi. 

Kase's Nobunaga is completely demented, the Great Unifier of Japan portrayed as a swaggering gangster who plays his subordinates off against each other with promises of succession while he plots with his children to plunge the country into an even deeper level of chaos. Rarely seen without an entourage that includes Jun Soejima's Yasuke, a Portuguese-speaking African who knows when to cut and run, Nobunaga conducts himself as an object of great, physical desire. When he deigns to touch his inferiors it is, very often, calamitous. In one instance Nobunaga demands one of his generals chew on his blade (not a euphemism) before Oda forces his tongue into their bloody, ruined mouth. These strange demands for supplication are a constant in Kubi, a film that depicts a society where lives are constantly under threat, often condemned in casual or even flippant ways. Even a character like Mitsuhide, nominally heroic because he defies his bloodthirsty monarch and houses Kenichi Endo's fugitive Murashige, uses his social inferiors as expendable playthings. Before he spends the night in Murashige's arms, Mitsuhide strolls his grounds, blasting condemned men with a matchlock rifle, the act positioned as a curious form of foreplay between these two samurai. 

Lastly, there's the actor credited as Beat Takeshi. His ageing Hideyoshi is a great, swollen bully who cackles in shadow while his rivals tearfully sign their own death warrants. Referred to as Monkey by Nobunaga, either for his curious countenance or the impatient, mischievous way he presents himself, Hideyoshi is actually the Daimyo's biggest rival largely thanks to one of his lieutenants, Tadanobu Asano's Kanbei, who comfortably runs rings around the other, creakier lords. Kitano's minimalist approach to portraying Hideyoshi is key to extracting enjoyment from Kubi: as an actor, Kitano has a magnetic pull based largely around his casualness or indifference to the harrowing strife that surrounds him. This aspect of his performance has only deepened with age, as Kitano has grown larger (at least in this role) and even less mobile. Hideyoshi, who frequently makes reference to his beginnings as part of the peasant class, isn't constrained by the same circuitous logics of pride and propriety that cage his suffocating peers. The studied ceremonies of the people he has infiltrated are actually physically excruciating for him, largely because a great deal of it is premised on extended displays of suicidal etiquette. He finds it all just plain boring. Kitano, a comedic actor through and through, approaches each new, outrageous development as a hassle rather than a calamity. Despite the (comfortably) hundreds of lives violently extinguished over the course of Kubi's runtime, Hideyoshi views all of the film's churning developments as the latest wrinkle in some ongoing cosmic joke aimed squarely at him.

Shuggie Otis - Purple

System96 - Shift

Popeye by Jonathan Edwards