Film Reviews by SV

Essentially this is an 80s style Cronenberg body horror, so if the awards hype is what brought you here but you're not into over the top tongue in cheek gore, it's probably not for you.

As such, it's a solid entry in the genre, bringing together the styles not just of Cronenberg but Paul Verhoeven and perhaps Lynch and a few others who made distinctive 80s cult movies. There's an absurd sci-fi premise (but you suspend your disbelief, because all such movies have an absurd sci-fi premise), and the film has a lot of fun with it, and doesn't hold back from going beyond where you might expect the limits to be for a mainstream movie.

That said, a lot about this film only really makes sense when you learn the director is a French woman.

First of all, there's a lot of female nudity, and a lot of soft core, male-gazey lingering focus on the female body, which doesn't seem to have been called out - but of course in French culture, ideas of femininity and beauty and sex are traditionally all bound together, and to present them as so is totally uncontroversial. Obviously having a woman director makes it subjectively ok (whereas a male director would probably have been criticised for making exactly the same film). Of course, the 80s movies of the canon (which the director is exactly the right age to have grown up with) also had plenty of all that, so I didn't really find it jarring so much as surprisingly anachronistic.

Secondly, there is also a lot of absurd humour which falls flat, in the way that French absurdity does to an English viewer - there's a difference between ridiculous and ridiculously funny.

So the film is fundamentally dumb but fun, and veers between the two erratically - more fun for the first hour and more dumb for the second. It's certainly fairly predictable - you can foresee the exact ending about an hour in.

Nevertheless as a fan of the genre I enjoyed it, enough to think about it and write all this, which is I think the mark of an above average film.

This isn't exactly AAA HBO-style high concept, high budget sci-fi, it's more "permium network TV" quality. Halle Berry is obviously a big star, and there's the hunky doctor chap from ER all those years ago, but all the other actors you've seen before somewhere too. The visual effects are better than you'd expect, more Hollywood than Dr Who.

The story is a decent X-Files type alien conspiracy yarn with a bit of robots thrown in, and it moves along at a fair old clip, so if you're looking for something not too challenging but not too dumb to veg out to, this'll do yer.

Sometimes I'll rewatch a film just because it happens to be on, but this is more or less the only film I actively, deliberately go back and watch again and again.

What sets this apart from all other action films is that there is no deux ex machina. Everything that happens is a logical consequence of what happened before and the choices made by the protagonists given their circumstances - there is no moment where something you didn't already know about intrudes to change the course of things, and no moment where people make unfathomable decisions, given who they are. It's also true that the plot only plays out the way it does because of the conflicting interests and motives of the protagonists - despite a sort of inexorable, slow motion trainwreck narrative, nothing that happens was actually inevitable.

It is also fabulously lean, without any guff that doesn't serve either to establish the characters so their subsequent actions make sense, or to move the plot along. I'm talking specifically about the theatrical cut - the director's cut should be avoided (or at least, saved for a later viewing) as it only adds crap which diminishes the film: an unnecessary opening sequence which only serves to destroy all mystery as to what the expedition finds when it arrives; the scene about Ripley's daughter which was intended to explain why she relates to Newt and connect her to the alien queen as a mother, neither of which is necessary; the corridor cannon scenes which only expose the aliens as men in rubber suits.

If I'm totally honest I also consider the final scene unnecessary - the film could have convincingly ended before that and been no worse for it - but it's an iconic scene and the rest of the film is so good, I can happily go along with it.

In short, if you're not an action movie sort of person, I'd say just for once case put aside your misgivings and watch this.

One of Marvel's comedy movies that fails at comedy. The core dynamic is between Venom and his host, but their humorous banter is unsophisticated to the point that I was wondering if the movie was actually aimed at children. The banal visual slapstick would seem to back this up, but the amount of gore and profanity makes me think otherwise, and so I'm left bemused as to why they didn't get the Deadpool writers in on this for some actual wit.

The plot is route one good-guy bad-guy revenge, and the minimal cast consists of characters that were established in the first movie, so that leaves pretty much nothing but action to engage, and even that is the usual CGI superpower fare.

Even if you kind of liked the first movie I'd say you can skip this one.

The plot is borderline incomprehensible, with about a dozen incoherent threads spliced together intermittently, some of them in the past.

There are a million characters, none of whom you will be able to bring yourself to care about at all. Apparently some incidental characters are from previous installments, and much is made of this, even though it matters not a jot.

The acting is on a par with the script, that is to say, execrable. I suspected Jamie Lee Curtis might stay in a coma throughout to avoid being associated with this but seemingly her career is in freefall.

The whole thing has a straight-to-video feel but without any redeeming charm. It's entirely free of humor and lacking in any kind of suspense or character investment, which renders even the vivid gore kind of objectionable.

I didn't mind the last one, which is why I bothered to give this one a go, but it's unimaginable to me that another Halloween film will be made after this.