In Review: 'Alien: Romulus,' 'Caligula: The Ultimate Cut'

A horror franchise goes back to its roots and a notorious Penthouse production gets a dramatic makeover.

Alien: Romulus
Dir. Fede Álvarez
119 min.

One argument for the overall greatness of the Alien franchise—with its sequels and prequels and, now, an interquel—is that each entry has strongly reflected the priorities of their director, rather than trying to conform to some pre-established template. Perhaps credit for that goes to James Cameron, whose Aliens picked up where Ridley Scott’s original left off, but pivoted sharply from the creeping horror of a mining ship stalked by a single creature to an action classic about space Marines gunning down scores of them. Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection may be partially or even fatally flawed, but they’re recognizably the work of David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, respectively, and Scott’s return to the fold with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant seemed like attempts to reclaim the series and adapt his style to a new set of circumstances. 

And so it’s a mild disappointment to discover that Fede Álvarez, the shrewd craftsman behind the Evil Dead remake and the superb horror exercise Don’t Breathe, has opted to replay the hits rather than stake out his own unique terrain. Part of the trouble is that Alien: Romulus nestles itself in the timeline between Alien and Aliens, so the temptation to square the two films by cherry-picking pieces of both is great, especially in a more risk-averse Hollywood. Based on his previous work, Álvarez has a knack for slick, visceral, cut-to-the-bone genre pictures with plenty of violence, and if nothing else, his entry affirms his technical bravado. Yet he’s too inclined to cling to old ideas, like a fan who wants to pay off past triumphs rather than an artist who wants to imagine new ones. He’s an expert impersonator in a business starving for original voices. 

Alien: Romulus does return, however, to the newly potent idea that a tech-driven future where populations resettle on terraformed planets might not be so swell for the working class. The blue-collar types on the Nostromo in Alien had plenty to complain about before bringing a foreign species on board, and now the young colonists of Álvarez’s film are stuck in indentured servitude on a sunless mining planet where they’re certain to die of unnatural causes before they can pay off their debts to the company. With that in mind, Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) is open to her friends’ long-shot plan to board the abandoned space station that’s drifted nearby and direct it to a more favorable location. Rain’s companion Andy (David Jonsson), a friendly android who’s been programmed to act as her brother and protector, could prove useful to the mission. 

Needless to say, things don’t go as planned. There’s a grisly reason why the space station has been rendered derelict, but it’s too late for Rain and company to abort their plans, because there are multiple creatures on board, ready to breed and attack the newcomers. Alien: Romulus introduces another major character with a connection to the series that I won’t spoil here, except to say that his fascinating impact on Andy’s shifting role in the party isn’t worth the ethical red line that Álvarez and his effects team have crossed. Save for Spaeny and Jonsson’s complicated partnership, the characters are mostly difficult flavors of chum in the water, and so the film relies wholly on the strength of its action sequences, which are mostly convincing. For all the cues Álvarez takes from Alien films past, the best stretch of the movie counts as self-homage, a “don’t breathe” gambit where the humans have to slip through the skittering hordes without making a sound. He should have given himself license to slip off with the movie, too. — Scott Tobias

Alien: Romulus opens tonight in theaters everywhere.

Caligula: The Ultimate Cut
Dir. Tinto Brass
178 min.

Per legend, Rome takes its name from Romulus, one of a pair of twin brothers fathered by Mars, left to die on the banks of the Tiber, and rescued by a she-wolf. The origins of Caligula are a little less murky. Having amassed a vast fortune via the adult magazine Penthouse, Bob Guccione decided to make a movie filled with class and sex, financing the $17.5 million production himself. For the script, he turned first to Lina Wertmuller, then Gore Vidal. For the production design, he brought in Danilo Donati, whose past work included Franco Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet and films by Fellini and Pasolini. For the cast, he enlisted acclaimed actors like Malcolm McDowell, Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud, and Helen Mirren. For the director, he found Tinto Brass, who’d made westerns, giallos, black comedies, and romantic dramas, sometimes with name stars like Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero. With that dream team, they could make a film that would push the boundaries of sex and violence but artistically. What could go wrong?

A lot, as it would turn out. Vidal clashed with Guccione and Brass and exited the project, leaving a trail of disparaging words behind him. After filming was ostensibly completed, Guccione fell out with Brass and ordered reshoots featuring unsimulated sex that would then be edited into the finished product, turning Caligula into the most expensive, star-studded pornographic film ever made. It’s this cut, and the R-rated edit derived from it, that would play theaters throughout the world in 1979 and 1980. And play and play. Despite its troubled production, Caligula became a controversy-fueled hit, one trotted out for annual revivals through most of the ‘80s as it simultaneously turned into a video store staple (albeit often a behind-the-counter item).

Despite this, Caligula had few defenders and many vocal detractors (including most of its cast). Critics savaged it and it’s hard to imagine any but the horniest of moviegoers thinking a few minutes of the hardcore stuff worth sitting through all the surrounding sadism and shouting. Yet, in any form, it’s one of a kind, offering, through  the story of the rise and fall of Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (Caligula to his friends), an unrelentingly bleak view of humanity in which madness and violence inevitably crush any more tender concerns. For all its considerable flaws, the film has a kind of awful integrity.

Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is an attempt to redeem its reputation via a new edit, but it’s an odd one. Guccione died in 2010. Brass, 91 and now seemingly retired after segueing into making softcore erotica with an intense focus on generously proportioned backsides, had nothing to do with the project. It’s also effectively a new film, one assembled by culture and art historian Thomas Negovan using hours of alternate takes and other unused footage with Vidal’s screenplay as his blueprint. (The film bears no directorial credit, only “Principal Photography by Tinto Brass.”) As a reconstruction effort it is, as far as I know, unprecedented, the cinematic equivalent of the Ship of Theseus. With all new parts subbed in for the old, is it even Caligula anymore?

For those who’ve previously seen the film, The Ultimate Cut will look at once familiar and fresh. Beyond the new scenes and alternate versions of familiar moments, it’s been given a more coherent dramatic arc and a greater investment in the development (or disintegration) of its protagonist, played by Malcolm McDowell. What Negovan puts together comes closer to what might have been somebody’s vision, be it Guccione’s Vidal’s or Brass’s: a grand Cinemascope-era costume drama with all the graphic sex and violence, pessimism, and camera zooms allowed in the 1970s. Squint and you might even think it gets there.

At its heart, Caligula is a fascinating, one-of-a-kind film that goes places no other film made on its scale or with a cast of its repute had dared to go before (or would ever again). The problem? It’s just not very good. An early sequence in which Caligula visits his great-uncle and imperial predecessor Tiberius (Peter O’Toole), who had not yet had the decency to die and pass on the empire to his nephew, captures everything great, terrible, and impossible to classify in the film. McDowell and O’Toole deliver unrestrained performances against a backdrop of Roman decadence in which naked, writhing bodies fill seemingly every square foot of Donati’s massive sets. Dramatically, it doesn’t really work, but the overall effect is remarkable. The largely set-bound film has a suffocating airlessness and the extras going about all manner of sexual activities as the leads wander around create a kind of dizzy, even nauseous quality. Sex looks less like pleasure than an uncontrollable compulsion. The effect isn’t just anti-erotic, it borders on anti-human.

McDowell delivers a vivid performance from start to finish but, even in this cut, anyone who’s ever complained about Jack Torrance losing his mind too quickly in The Shining might see that film in a different light. That our hero’s more innocent, pre-coronation state still involves a passionate affair with his sister Drusilla (Teresa Ann Savoy) suggests he never had that far to fall anyway. Once Caligula has established a baseline repulsiveness and made its argument about power corrupting to the point it drives those who wield it insane, it doesn’t really have anywhere to go but in a loop. Sometimes that path brings it to moments of repellent sadism, like a wedding night scene in which Caligula, put politely, joins the bride and groom. Sometimes it arrives at some inspired moments of black comedy, as when Caligula decides to make his horse—and occasional bedmate—a consul or provokes the Senate to bleat like sheep. The story spirals down but never moves forward.

That may be the point of Caligula: The Ultimate Cut and if Negovan has successfully restored Caligula to something like the film that Vidal or Brass envisioned (though their visions for the film don’t seem to have lined up) that makes Caligula possibly the most brilliant bait-and-switch in the history of film. Come for the dirty movie. Leave feeling despondent about existence itself. Has The Ultimate Cut revealed a great movie hiding beneath Caligula? It has not. But don’t be immediately deterred by the star rating below. For those with the intestinal and moral fortitude to withstand a toga-filled, blood- and semen-drenched plunge into nihilism, complete with a moving wall equipped with head-chopping rotor blades, there really is nothing else like it. Thank Jupiter. —Keith Phipps

Caligula: The Ultimate Cut opens in limited release tomorrow.