Predator: Killer of Killers. I was pleasantly surprised. While the franchise itself has always been underwritten and sometimes clumsily written, I would be willing to argue this might be the best written entry in the entire franchise, even compared to the original iconic entry (which has strong archetype characters but only the barest smidgen of actual written character arcs).
This film is a triptych of stories all then pulled together into a final conclusion story. Each protagonist has an actual articulated and experienced character arc that then plays heavily into the fourth piece. And their individual arcs work without necessarily the predators even being involved. The predator element just adds to the spice and provides them additional opportunity to complete their individual arcs. I can't begin to tell you how pleased I am with the work they've been doing on this franchise over the last few years, and I'm glad someone took the franchise seriously enough to actually tell stories versus just throw out another bland and mindless predator torture p0rn entry.
Not that there is not some heavy violence in these story arcs. There definitely is, and some pretty great fight sequences, and they take full advantage of the setting (Norse, Japan, WWII) in terms of how the fights play out environmentally. Really creative sequences appear here. (Extra stars given for using a kusarigama in the Japan fight sequences.) I also appreciate how the predators each looks different in terms of build / appearance, and also fight differently. It all felt pretty unique and gives me hope for the future of this franchise, as far as it goes.
I recommend this film even if you're not a Predator fan per se, due to the actual character arcs that were developed. It was all pretty nifty.
I can't say the same for Alien: Romulus. I'm sorry. I really wanted to super-appreciate this film and generally like Fede Alverez' films, but I watched it recently for these second time and it felt even less impressive this time around. The main reason for this is because the film had a lot of potential for a unique entry and getting back to its horror roots, but it CONTINUALLY and smugly seems to allude back to the two best films in the franchise. SO many lines, imagery, etc., were yanked out of far better films, and every time it happens it (1) knocks me out of this film (2) deadens the unique contributions of this film. One of the most obvious was needlessly CGI'ing Ian Holm's face for a synthenoid that WASN'T named Ash, and another is how many hoops had to be jumped through for the least likely character to tell an alien, "Get away from her, you bitch" -- but that's not even close to the total number of audial and visual callbacks that were just glopped into this film.
Of course, this is worsened by NOT doing what the two best films did: Creating easily memorable archetype characters. Every character from the first and second film is quickly established and named, and despite not really knowing their backstories in any detail, you quickly get a strong impression of who each of them is. Here I can't even remember the characters names except for the only two worth remembering: Rain and Andy. Who are the others again? This is the second time I've watched the film, and a week later I can't recall their names! Nor can I really recall anything interesting about any of them, except one was pregnant and another hated Andy because an artificial human had resolved a Trolley Car paradox not in his parents' favor in a mining incident when he was younger. I literally have no idea who these characters are.
So you get a great film like Aliens that stands on its own and earns its beats without directly stealing stuff from Alien, and then you get a shit film like this that is constantly is trying to steal from prior films.
This film had a few unique moments that I liked. One was a total onslaught of facehuggers that need to be escaped from (normally we've only seen 1-3 at a time), and another was the anti-gravity flaw in the system boot being utilized to get through an impassible tunnel of aliens. And MAYBE, just MAYBE, the last act counts as something unique -- the new alien hybrid worked for some people, didn't work for others, but there's a nicely grotesque and twisted image of baby coming back to momma to nurse, probably the most horrific thing I've run across since reading about Mordred's birth in King's "The Dark Tower" series. The imagery of the ring and the station slowly grinding into it was pretty impressive. Even the idea of the ship having two separate pieces (Romulus and Remus) could have been played up on more, but was a neat idea.
But this film even failed in basic story writing 101. Rain literally opens the film dreaming about being on a planet with a sun. It's the one thing she wants -- it's her "I want" moment. But the film then ends with Rain and Andy escaping leaving a numb journal entry, which is cribbed from BOTH Alien and Aliens. Besides being yet another copycat ending that worsens the film's integrity, this isn't resolving her initial "I want" arc. The proper ending was her getting in the pod and going to sleep, and then you think she's dreaming as we next see her sitting on the same cliff by herself watching the sun rise, looking like the same dream... except then Andy walks over and sits next to her and you realize that this is not a dream, it's REAL. She's there. They made it. An Alien film with a happy ending: Who would have thought?
(You could even ratchet the tension with some question about whether the ship's pods truly have enough fuel to reach the planet and/or whether the ship has enough integrity to finish the 7 year journey. So you're tense, seeing her dream... and then relief as you recognize that she and Andy both made it. Thank god. No shitty next film about her crashing on a prison planet and Andy getting mangled in the crash, lol.)
And if you want to also cap Rain's journey from just considering abandoning Andy as a synthetic but then truly coming to view her as her "brother," you'd be looking at their backs with the sunrise beyond them, and then Rain slowly leans over and puts her head on Andy's shoulder, in a move very reminiscent of a sibling putting her head on her larger sibling's shoulder.
Even with all the other shit, I would have given this film higher marks if it had stuck the landing. But nope, it's just mostly recycled pabulum. With all the overhype, I have to wonder how low the bar is for the Alien franchise nowadays.
