Alien: Romulus Is An Absorbing Return To Basics |
Alien: Romulus' suspenseful set pieces, intelligent visual effects and gory body horror invoke the Ridley Scott original without looking dated, writes Rahul Desai |
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FOR THE SEVENTH INSTALMENT of a 45-year-old movie franchise, the plot of Alien: Romulus is alarmingly bare. It’s borderline fan-fiction, circling back to the oldest sci-fi horror trope in the book: A ragtag crew encounters hostile creatures on a space station. That’s all there is. Not much else happens; the before and after barely matter. Never mind that the book itself was authored by this franchise, starting with Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) followed by James Cameron’s Aliens (1986). Alien: Romulus is an interquel, set between the events of those two films. So the “space station” here is the wreckage of Nostromo, the infamous commercial tug destroyed by the struggle between Sigourney Weaver’s warrant officer Ellen Ripley and the deadly xenomorphs with acid for blood. (Stream top-rated movies and shows across platforms and languages, using the OTTplay Premium Jhakaas pack, for just Rs 249/month.) The crew in Romulus plans to steal some cryopods from the wreckage to enable their escape to another planet. But little do they know that they’ve entered a metallic house of horrors. This film’s Ripley is Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny), a young space colonist whose pursuit of a better life is derailed by slimy facehuggers, chestbursters and human-xenomorph hybrids. Her journey is nothing madly original – a Greatest Hits rehash of the early Alien instalments at best, including a creepy AI-resurrected avatar of a dead actor from the 1979 film. I could say it’s unnecessary and poses an ethical conundrum, but let’s not pretend that cinema is not already moving in that direction. At least this movie finds the context to reintroduce an old face; after all, do people truly die in the futuristic Alien universe? |
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Kottukkaali: PS Vinothraj's Powerful Film Deserves Its Berlinale Acclaim |
Kottukkaali is a road movie where an ensemble, a family, travels in a tiny motorcade for an exorcism at their family deity’s temple. Aditya Shrikrishna reviews. |
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PS VINOTHRAJ (in an interview with Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin) said that the idea for his film Kottukkaali came from a poem in Kuruntokai, the anthology of Tamil Sangam-era poetry, more than 2000 years old. It is quite possibly the one by Sangam-era Avvaiyyar, Kuruntokai-23, in which the heroine’s friend subtly suggests to the sorceress that the woman she is treating is not possessed, as her family believes, but is in love. The poem describes a hilly, green landscape, and we see that in the frames of Kottukkaali as well. The family in Kottukkaali believes that the heroine, played by Anna Ben, is possessed. She looks straight with powerful eyes that conceal great longing and tragedy. There is hope and fight in them. She does not speak. It's a silent rebellion. Kottukkaali premiered earlier this year at the Berlin Film Festival. Like his debut feature Koozhangal, Kottukkaali is also constantly in motion. If Koozhangal unfolds as an unwilling, laborious journey of a father and son then Kottukkaali is a road movie where an ensemble, a family, travels in a tiny motorcade for an exorcism at their family deity’s temple. Vinothraj’s cinema is a cinema of movement. Even when the camera is still the events are kinetic and ideas in flux. Nature is integral to his filmmaking. The sun, the different animals, land, hills, foliage and the sky, all of them speak in his cinema. Water flows as people wrestle. Leaves rustle as vehicles pass. A farce unfolds as two men look for a bar under the sun. A fierce bull halts the journey, but a young girl’s resounding voice saves adult men. A cremation ground is overgrown as two men discuss lost opportunities and how a man from their caste has done well in life and they must be proud, nonetheless. |
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Vaazhai Is An Antithesis To Coming-Of-Age Films |
Vaazhai is a shattering film that embraces us with the warmth and sweet innocence of childhood, sheltered but not protected from harsh social realities that govern day-to-day vagaries. |
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| Cast: Nikhila Vimal, Ponvel M |
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GREEN is lush. Green is fertile. Green is calming and relieving. It is cathartic and powerful enough to cleanse the soul. It is why people holiday in the hills and forests, in the lap of nature and away from the bustling cities. Nature as it should seem and as it should heal. In Varumayin Niram Sivappu, Rangan (Kamal Haasan) paints green on canvas and calls it sezhumai. The Tamil word’s closest meaning is fertile. In Mari Selvaraj’s new film Vaazhai, we see this greenery all around the frame. The green envelopes the frame to the extent that it eats its characters and allows little space for them. The characters become the worms we see in some of the scenes, minute and invisible within the lush greenery of farms, plantations, hills and mainly banana fields as far as the eyes can see. A peaceful and serene atmosphere where one can imagine nothing but a beautiful life, a thought that misses the violence and injustice amidst it all, that conceals the loss of innocence and an entire childhood. Our protagonist is Sivanaindhan (Ponvel M) who lives with his mother (Janaki) and his sister Vembu (Dhivya Duraisamy). They are all wage labourers in the banana plantations surrounding the village of Puliyankulam, their day goes by breaking their bones with banana stalks over their heads carried through mud and slush for little money. The plants even grow between Sivanaindhan and his best friend Sekar’s home, the adults stand on their toes to tower over them to communicate. Sivananindhan cowers away from this job, he is one of those children who finds refuge at school, not only because he is the only kid in the class who passes his exams, but also because it keeps him away from the job in the fields. He goes to great lengths of lies and deception to keep away, to rush to school with Sekar to study or interact with his boyhood crush—his teacher Poongodi (Nikhila Vimal). — A.S. |
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The one newsletter you need to decide what to watch on any given day. Our editors pick a show, movie, or theme for you from everything that’s streaming on OTT. |
| Each week, our editors pick one long-form, writerly piece that they think is worthy of your attention, and dice it into easily digestible bits for you to mull over. | | In which we invite a scholar of cinema, devotee of the moving image, to write a prose poem dedicated to their poison of choice. Expect to spend an hour on this. | |
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