bravery

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.

Inspired by a Guardian ranked list, I’ve decided to spend the summer rewatching John Cusack films—I’m not sure why, but I’ve been rather obsessed with him for about 35 years—and where better to start than one of the most insane films of the 90s. It was intended as an action film, but it works far better in hindsight as a dark comedy: a postmodern blend of Top Gun, The Rock, Speed, and Face/Off, celebrating and unwittingly sending up those sorts of films by sheer excess.

An absurd premise, stacked cast, bonkers juxtapositions of scene, score and dialogue, an audience set up to cheer for a cannibalistic child killer’s escape to freedom… I ought to watch this more often. Cusack plays his honest, moralistic US Marshal straight as the madness unfolds around him.