Monday new releases: 19 August 2024

Alien: Romulus and Ghostlight are in cinemas, The Instigators is streaming on Apple TV+ and Jackpot! is streaming on Prime Video

Greetings once again to new sub­scribers. Once a week, I do a quick (ish) run­down of the new releases that I’ve been able to get to in the pre­vi­ous sev­en days. Unlike the oth­er daily posts, these won’t always be recom­mend­a­tions so be warned.

I’m not an Alien expert but I sus­pect that Alien: Romulus is the first of the fran­chise to make expli­citly clear the amount of evil and exploit­a­tion the Weyland-Yutani com­pany is cap­able of and, because they are a proxy for cap­it­al­ism gen­er­ally, one sus­pects that Karl Marx would feel right at home with it.

Alien-ation, if you will.

Indeed, this is the Alien film that finally sug­gests that the xeno­morphs are actu­ally a bet­ter altern­at­ive than the face­less com­pany that is strip-mining the uni­verse for profit. Both are essen­tially breed­ing work­ers to serve their mis­sion of uni­ver­sal dom­in­a­tion, it’s just that the ali­ens are more hon­est about it.

Several years after Alien (but also some dec­ades before Aliens), a young mine­work­er named Rain (Cailee Spaeny) is told that her peti­tion to leave for a new life some­where green­er has been rejec­ted. The com­pany has doubled her quota which means anoth­er eight years (at least).

Equally frus­trated co-workers, with estu­ary English accents, have hatched an escape plan. An aban­doned Weyland-Yutani ship has appeared above their plan­et and with the help of Rain’s adop­ted android broth­er Andy (David Jonsson) they can steal the cryo­pods aboard and fly away to freedom.

As you might expect, that ship is empty for a reas­on and the script – by dir­ect­or Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues – pro­ceeds to set up sev­er­al tick­ing clocks as well as rein­tro­du­cing the adult xeno­morph from Alien, lots of its babies and sev­er­al genet­ic­ally mod­i­fied improvements.

There’s lots of fan ser­vice call­backs which can some­times be tire­some but in this case, I really didn’t care enough to take offence.

If you think about it, the fact that so much of Alien: Romulus feels like a copy of earli­er Alien films is just a meta com­ment­ary on mod­ern fran­chise film­mak­ing. Just like the single-minded acid-blooded ant­ag­on­ists, this film exists solely for the pur­pose of urgently rep­lic­at­ing its own DNA until there’s noth­ing left but ali­ens. And Aliens.

For the first half of Ghostlight, I felt cer­tain that it had bit­ten off way more than it could chew as it attemp­ted to nav­ig­ate deep fam­ily trauma, the bard as the source of all that is good and true, and also broad com­edy at the expense of ama­teur act­ors – one of my least favour­ite tropes. But then it man­ages to del­ic­ately glide in to land and the pain­fully man­u­fac­tured setup actu­ally pays off. Bravo!

Real-life fam­ily of pro-actors, Keith Kupferer (fath­er Dan), Tara Mallen (mom Sharon) and Katherine Mallen Kupferer (teen­age daugh­ter Daisy), por­tray a working-class Chicago fam­ily slowly fall­ing apart fol­low­ing the tra­gic loss of son Brian. Dan works for a road­ing con­tract­or and his dis­trac­tion is affect­ing his ongo­ing employ­ment pro­spects. Sharon wants to plant a garden in the back­yard, where Brian passed. And Daisy is act­ing up at school and on the verge of expulsion.

Somehow, Dan is temp­ted to wander into the old cinema where the loc­al com­munity theatre are rehears­ing Romeo & Juliet, a pro­duc­tion where every­one is enthu­si­ast­ic­ally mis­cast, and he finds him­self read­ing in for Capulet and being drawn into a secret life.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

At first it’s about escape but even­tu­ally he comes to real­ise that the empathy required to be a suc­cess­ful act­or is a trans­fer­able life skill and the route to some kind of healing.

The Instigators reunites Matt Damon and Hong Chau from one my favour­ite films of the last few years, Alexander Payne’s Downsizing. It also reunites Damon with co-star (and co-writer here) Casey Affleck from Good Will Hunting (and oth­ers), Damon with co-producer Ben Affleck from lots of things, and Damon with dir­ect­or Doug Liman from The Bourne Identity.

So, all very chummy and good on the deep pock­ets of Apple for pay­ing for them to have such a good time together.

Chau plays a psy­chi­at­rist who is treat­ing Marine vet­er­an Damon for depres­sion. He gets drawn into a very poorly planned heist by Affleck’s small-time alco­hol­ic crim­in­al and, of course it goes ter­ribly wrong. They find them­selves being chased all over Boston – Good Will Hunting and Ben Affleck’s The Town come to mind – by Ving Rhames’ relent­less cop and Paul Walter Hauser’s dim­wit­ted rep­res­ent­at­ive of their unhappy employers.

This is a big­ger film than it looks – explo­sions, car chases – but also has the requis­ite amount of amus­ing banter at the expense of mas­cu­line fra­gil­ity (fra­gile mas­culin­ity?) and cor­rupt loc­al government.

There is also a quite extraordin­ary amount of swear­ing – to the extent that even I got a little uncom­fort­able watch­ing it at home.

I’ve long believed that the more fun a cast and crew has mak­ing a movie, the less fun the audi­ence has watch­ing it and that is proven once more by Paul Feig’s gra­tu­it­ously filthy Jackpot!

A very long cred­its sequence shows the self-satisfied cast pro­du­cing ever more dis­gust­ing impro­visa­tions and break­ing each oth­er up in the process.

Even when some­thing like this isn’t to my taste, I know I have to try and appre­ci­ate it for what it is, so I will say that it is quite a clev­er comed­ic twist on The Running Man, the relent­less viol­ence is often quite amus­ingly staged, Awkwafina finally gets a role that breaks her out of fam­ily anim­a­tion voice-hell, and John Cena also leans into the fact that he is a pretty odd look­ing dude.

It’s 2030 and California has pro­duced a new twist on the tox­ic gambling mess that is the State Lottery. In the Grand Lottery, win­ners are noti­fied digit­ally that they have won, a drone loc­ates them, and then the pub­lic have a chance to take their win­nings if they can kill them before sun­down. No guns or bal­list­ics, but everything else is fair game.

This has pro­duced a luc­rat­ive secur­ity industry where – for a per­cent­age of your win­nings – freel­an­cers will try and pro­tect you. This is where John Cena’s peace-loving ex-mercenary comes in, try­ing to keep the mob from doing in Awkwafina’s down-on-her-luck act­or with the 2.3 bil­lion dol­lar win­ning tick­et slash bounty on her head.

In the cyn­ic­al vein of films like Idiocracy, this will prob­ably find a long tail of an audi­ence but I just felt old and out of touch when I real­ised I lit­er­ally had nev­er heard of the cru­cial celebrity cameo, rap­per Machine Gun Kelly.