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.