alien

Relatively well reviewed, and I don’t understand why. “A love letter to Hollywood’s golden era”, perhaps, but only for its first half; once the talkies arrive it decamps to fifties sci-fi and a save-the-world blob plot. The references are real enough (Muybridge’s horse, Keaton’s collapsing house front, some Lovecraft) but recognising one isn’t the same as the film doing anything with it. And the voice work is mostly phoned in. Not Jesse Eisenberg, who does well as a robot who appears for no reason. Trey Parker just does Cartman, in a children’s film, because nobody seems to have asked him not to.

Gosling carries this, as he often does. He’s the only human on screen for big stretches and never less than watchable, which the film asks a lot of. Rocky is the other triumph: from what I read, it’s roughly half puppetry, half CGI, and the two techniques together give the alien real character. The overall alien design and technology is a fine balance. Any cuter and it’s Flight of the Navigator; any weirder and it’s another Nolan bore-piece (fight me).

Tonally it just about holds. The premise is bleak, and a braver film might have leaned into that for a bigger payoff. Instead it stays small and personal, the resolution focusing on the Grace–Rocky friendship rather than the fate of humanity. Crowd-pleasing, in a specific sense that I didn’t mind.