Bone day, if you accidentally created a huge plot hole in your sci-fi saga, you're done, your goose droid is cooked, and you look forward to nothing more than the prospect of future generations looking back with disdain at your ever-tainted work of cinema.
But then along came Star Wars: Rogue One, a movie that somehow made sense of all the truly stupid bits of 1977's Star Wars, like the climactic sequence in which Luke Skywalker managed to blow up the Death Star in his tiny starfighter. It turned out (albeit almost 40 years later) that this was not a plot hole but an ingenious, intentional flaw in the system of a giant planet-killing monstrosity put there by Imperial scientist Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) because he was resentful of the fact that the Empire forced him to build it.
And it worked. Rogue One is a good movie, probably the best Star Wars movie since the original trilogy. All because someone decided to generate a new plot and put galactic-sized glue on something that had irritated fans for generations. Everyone wins!
Could this be a fresh creative template for filmmakers looking to rescue other popular science fiction sagas that have fallen into disrepute? Can you really fix someone else's film by incorporating its abject failures into your own glorious recent entry?
We could find out soon, given the imminent arrival in theaters of a (frankly exciting) new episode of Alien: Romulus. The debut trailer suggests a return to the minimalist, thrilling space slasher of Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien – director Fede Alvarez even hinted he had something up his sleeve that rivaled the Chestburster scene – but with something extra that would take on the British director's ill-fated return to the same universe in recent days, namely in the overly sinister, ultimately cursed 2012 and 2017 entries “Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant.”
“[Romulus] … is connected to all of them,” Alvarez told the Hollywood Reporter. “I love all these movies. I didn't want to leave out or ignore any of them in terms of story level, character level, technology level, and creature level connections. There are always connections between Alien and Alien: Covenant.”
That's all great until we remember that Scott still rules the Alien universe, and that if you're an emerging filmmaker hoping to be handed the keys to the Nostromo, you'd probably better make sure you don't ruin the great man's last two efforts.
However, there is already an atmosphere of vacuum-sealed, bloody noise around Romulus. The trailer is great and Alvarez says what he says. The new film will take place between “Alien” and James Cameron's more testosterone-fueled sequel, 1986's “Alien,” which in itself gives it a strange (yet irresistible) air of authenticity. You get the impression that Alvarez would have to have some serious nerve to step between two such titans of sci-fi cinema, and somehow he failed to bring his A game up.
The fact that the premise of the new film is based on a deleted scene that Cameron ultimately included in his special edition of Aliens only makes it even more appealing. “There is a moment when you see a group of children running around the corridors of this colony. And I thought, “Wow, what would it be like if these kids grew up in a colony that took another 50 years to terraform?” Alvarez told the Hollywood Reporter. “So I remember thinking, 'If I ever tell a story in this world, I'm definitely going to be interested in these kids when they get to their 20s.'”
after promotion in the newsletter
From movies based on plot holes to movies based on deleted scenes. If there were an even more voracious beast than the xenomorph, perhaps it would be Hollywood itself, which eats everything, including its own waste.
And yet this one still seems promising, unless David the Android shows up at some point to explain in excruciating detail how he hand-created the xenomorphs from genetic plasticine and we can avoid encountering Scott's pointlessly mundane Engineers again. If the Blimmin' Predators show up or someone tries to bring in an Ellen Ripley clone, we'll know in about five seconds that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.
