Can we talk about? - Fan service getting out of control.
By Martyn Conterio [Total Film magazine, October 2024 issue]
‘Get away from her, you bitch.’ Great line. Actually, it’s iconic. But when it’s uttered towards the end of Alien: Romulus, you won’t believe your ears. Same goes for the other memorable bits cribbed directly from Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens. Because it’s not just dialogue: there are shots replicated, moments revisited from the series (and video game Alien: Isolation) and one familiar actor from the franchise is brought back from the dead with VFX.
In such instances, does fan service start to feel like a snake eating its own tail? Say what you like about the various merits (or lack thereof) of anything after Aliens, but each film had a distinct identity. Alien movies should aspire to be more than fan fiction.
Audiences have always gotten a kick out of movies referencing other movies (they were doing it as far back as the silent era). But fan service is a relatively new phenomenon linked to properties such as the MCU, the DCEU and Star Wars. A savvy, geek-literate audience now demands Easter eggs and callbacks in every film, every show, and acts vocally disappointed when those treats fail to materialise to their satisfaction.
‘A SAVVY, GEEK-LITERATE AUDIENCE NOW DEMANDS CALLBACKS IN EVERY FILM, EVERY SHOW’ f0026-03 Fury Road: fan service done right (ALAMY) Still, fan service can be creative. George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road provided a laundry list of nods to the original Mad Max trilogy: it just didn’t shout about it. And the nostalgia factor worked too - primarily because it was Miller’s own creation, not somebody else’s.
The recent Deadpool & Wolverine is another film stuffed to the gills with scenes designed to cause whooping, hollering, and ‘amagawd’ reactions in the auditorium. Meanwhile, 2023’s The Flash is a comic-book spectacle that delivered fan service up the wazoo. Did we really need Michael Keaton returning as Batman? Or a CGI Nicolas Cage as Superman (in reference to Tim Burton’s abandoned 1990s project)?
How can a blockbuster film stand any chance of becoming a potentially beloved classic on its own terms? A line must be drawn between heartfelt homage and unnecessary (and lazy) nostalgia.
We all love these characters, these franchises, but it’s how they’re served creatively that matters the most.
That was the straw that broke this camel’s back. Up to that point I was prepared to let the glaringly recycled elements slide as they were doing a lot of things right that I’d wanted to see for a long time (ordinary people trying to live their lives in a pretty dystopian system before you add xenomorphs to the mix). When they, clangingly, dropped that line in I had to admit that this was either just bad fan fiction or it had been spat out by an AI trained on the first four films. What could have been the third best Alien film is now relegated, in my mind anyway, to the pile of all the other stuff.
Meanwhile, I really liked Deadpool and Wolverine - I think that, using the Void, gave them a chance to reflect on the nature of franchises and second chances in a fun way. They were able to have their metafictional cake, feed it to you and you can forget how it may not be that good for your health in the long-run. They did the same thing in Spider-Man: No Way Home and, while I enjoyed it and it was a blast watching in the cinema as everyone was into it, I did feel a but dirty and used afterwards because my buttons had been some mercilessly pressed. I prefer Far From Home out of the Tom Holland films and I suspect, with some distance, I’ll end up preferring Deadpool 2 (another data point in my theory that, outside the MCU, the second superhero movie is always the best).
I still liked Romulus, but it’s definitely despite that eye rolling line.