tributarystu

Following up on last year's HL1 documentary, Valve go around the table once more to tell the making of its sequel.

In many ways, HL2 is the perfect sequel, by taking Gordon Freeman and placing him in a universe that's more grand, more complex and more (dystopian-y) relatable. But as this documentary points out, nothing was a given, the creation of the game world was unpredictable and took a while to shape up to what we know it as now.

I think this is generally a better documentary than last year's, as it frames the technical discussions and constraints in the wider context of game development. It is helped by some of the behind-the-scenes drama that took place, like the lawsuit with Valve's distributor Vivendi, or the hack and leak of the unfinished game.

The story also bears the heavy cross of the unreleased Episode 3, which fans have yearned for all these years. While the documentary does cover it and makes fair points, I sure feel it could've dug deeper and also elaborated more on the way HL: Alyx came in to complete the adventure.

What I would really like to see next is a proper documentary on the rise of Steam, ideally done by a third party. Even the hints present here tell of what a crucial moment the advent of the platform was for PC gaming and it has come to be unavoidable in ways that are, surprisingly, not completely dystopian.

The Alien saga is back, baby! And it's back with a solid entry - but don't take that from me, I already (really) liked Prometheus and got enough of a kick out of Covenant.

This one feels like a mesh between the first two movies of the series, with so many reverences that it gives off a sense of trying a bit too hard. Starring a gen Z (ish) cast for the first time and set between Alien and Aliens, it's not a very ambitious movie in terms of furthering the lore, but what it does, it does very well - most of the time.

The highlights are the amazing scenes in space and the synthetic person, here powered by Rye Lane's David Jonsson. With some awesome set-pieces along the way, as well as some highly unlikely moments very much in the vein of the more recent Alien movies, Romulus has a solid pulse - until the last act.

It fails to really up the ante for the last twenty or so minutes, content to not only be inspired, but rather copy elements from the previous films, all executed in a workmanlike fashion. It's a shame, because a hair-raising finale elevated Prometheus for me, but here the conclusion is a let-down - in spite of said amazing space vistas.

All in all though, a satisfying addition to the face hugger empire from Fede Alvarez, whetting my appetite for the upcoming TV series, Alien: Earth.

Quentin Dupieux's movie opening this year's Cannes is a movie about a movie about...a movie? This is all typical Dupieux, questioning our reality in clever ways, and I think everything comes together rather well here.

We follow two pairs of actors heading towards a meeting at a diner, with each breaking character and the fourth wall ever more often, generating layers of reality that are usually at odds with one another. Questions are asked overtly and implicitly: does anything matter, how do we construct our reality and what about a dash of almost present-day futurism?

And to top it all off, the movie ends on one of the more meta fourth wall breaks I've ever seen, a bit of a mind-scratcher that cleverly frames the syntax of movie-making.

I think the ultimate claim of LDA is that the one undeniable real thing is what we feel. Not in "feelings are facts" kind of way, but rather in the effect we can have on other people, whether seen on unseen, quantifiable or not. 7.