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.
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Yeah, lazily reusing quotes and references to prior movies is getting really out of hand. Good to see the author made the distinction between good and bad uses as well, as there are some examples where the reference is both plot relevant and well executed.
Terminator 2 uses “I’ll be back” for comedic effect, and it is well timed. But the one that is the best example of using a callback to directly benefit the movie as a whole was “Come with me if you want to live”. In The Terminator Kyle Reese said the line to Sarah Conner. In T2 the T-800 (Arnold) said it to Sarah Conner to let her know he was on her side.
Then the later entries keep reusing those line, making it worse and worse each instance.
Yeah, T2 was the only one that did it right. It was also the best of the sequels.
The entire point of fanservice was to give small nods to people who are really familiar with a franchise, but we’ve reached a point where studios are so creatively bankrupt that the entire move is just fanservice because they literally don’t want to bother making anything original.
Matrix 4 is a prime example. A total wankfest of “Remember this? Remember this? Remember this?”. What were they thinking?
Another non-superhero example was Kingsman 2, when they brought a popular character back to life just to exist in the movie again. A lot of recent sequels feel like they’re just digging out parts of the previous movies and just doing them again. I’ll see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice when it hits digital but I also am extremely suspicious it’s going to just be “Beetlejuice 1 again”.
I think Matrix 4 was specifically made to bury the franchise. It goes out of its way to make fun of its own existence and couldn’t be more obviously a lame rehash of the first one. And as a franchise killer I can respect it.
I can get behind this theory. They made it clear that they didn’t want the movie, so they may have intentionally made it as terrible as possible.
You know, that makes sense. I kinda wonder if you’re right.
The first ~30 min was a very explicit meta commentary inside the film about the current film industry…
You are spot on about the new Beetlejuice. It’s much like the first one just without any sort of story arc.
Oh, well, that’s put me off Alien: Romulus a bit, to be honest. I kind of hate these call-backs, especially when there’s no sophistication to them (I can forgive the “I’ve got a bad feeling …” in Rogue One, but am utterly bored of hearing it in other Star Wars output).
The ominous side to all this, is that when films become entirely about referencing themselves, they stop being about anything else. Sci-fi works best when there’s an analogy for something that exists in our lives, and offers an opinion on that matter. For example, Lucas has argued that the Ewoks in RotJ represented the Viet Cong, which is a bit clumsy, but it’s better than the sequels, that only seek to represent earlier iterations of Star Wars.
I kind of hate these call-backs
Then Romulus isn’t the film for you.
I’m just not interested in any franchise because of this. LOTR is suffering from it a lot at the moment as every man and his dog is trying to cash in on the IP. That’s with tv shows and games too, it extends beyond just films for these franchises.
People complained when they tried to take the series in a direction of giving more context, depth, and worldbuilding to the aliens and engineers. So now they’ve gone back to just giving us yet another familiar movie from the same template of people running away from aliens, with same old tropes and callbacks.
The world building wasn’t the problem or the complaint about Prometheus
The world building was the best part, but it does start to fall apart when they introduce the whole black goo turns your offspring into an alien thing.
‘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.
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.
Fan service used to be a wink and a nod, which was fun, now it’s an entire industry, which is so not fun.
The snake doesn’t eat it’s own tail, it cuts it off, sells, it and grows the same fucking tail again, then sells it again, ad infinitum.
Movies that have no utility except to make money from fan bases who can’t say no, and Television so bloated with callback and fluff, stuffed into season shortened to 6 -8 episodes, the object of the story is lost.
Say what you like about the various merits (or lack thereof) of anything after Aliens…
Well, I know I’m not going to take anything this person has to say seriously after they suggest that there are no merits to the Alien franchise.
after Aliens
You could tap out after the first two and not miss much.
standing here with my "I ❤️ Alien³ (Assembly Edition) T-shirt on. 😄
