Beetlejuice Beetlejuice doesn’t replace or replicate what came before; it adds to it. What could other legacy sequels learn from Tim Burton’s horror-comedy?
Warning: Heavy spoilers ahead for Alien: Romulus.
The two long-awaited franchise instalments which found their way into cinemas in the last month, on the surface, have plenty in common. Alien: Romulus and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice both serve as sequels to films from the last century. They both take lashings of inspiration from the horror genre. They even (on a purely technical level, thanks to David Jonsson’s robotic fascination with dad jokes) have a certain fondness for a good pun.
But both films seem to treat their relationship with their predecessors rather differently. While plenty of Alien: Romulus feels brilliantly original, and the film perhaps comes closest to recapturing the feeling of Alien and Aliens out of all the franchise’s instalments since, it’s come under plenty of fire for some nods to what’s come before that feel a little more on-the-nose.
In the dramatic climax of a late-film action sequence, for example, Jonsson’s Andy overrides his new programming to save the life of Cailee Spaeny’s Rain. Big gun in hand, and with a particularly nasty gribly pasted into an elevator shaft, his moment of triumph is marked not with a quip, but a callback to the franchise’s most famous line: “Get away from her… you bitch”.
More egregious by far, however, is the return of Ian Holm’s face. The actor, who passed away in 2020, appears in the film as a malfunctioning android identical to his character, Ash, from the original Alien. With permission from (and, Variety understands, compensation to) the actor’s estate, a combination of complicated VFX work and AI tools were used to bring Holm’s likeness (and voice, with some extra help from actor Daniel Betts) to life.
In-universe, as we’ve noted previously, neither of these things makes a lick of sense. Unfortunately, both have been the elements of the film still circling around my head long after the cool anti-gravity set pieces and whatever the hell the alien-baby-engineer thing was have faded into the background. As a result, Romulus, despite coming a relatively normal seven years after the series’ last instalment, Alien: Covenant, seems far more interested in the “legacy” half of the modern franchise film equation than the “sequel” bit. Rather than adding to what came before, it feels quite happy to lift wholesale from what came before.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, despite its title, has little interest in repeating the notes of Tim Burton’s trademark ghost-comedy. Tonally, of course, we get more of the same – gross-out prosthetics, a macabre sense of humour and Michael Keaton doing a silly voice. But as far as individual moments are concerned, it’s a film completely uninterested in repeating itself. You’ll find no AI-created cast members or out-of-context catchphrases here (anything Beetlejuice himself says doesn’t really count, because he is absolutely the sort of stripey-suited poltergeist that would have an annoying catchphrase).
Because though it’s been a whole 36 years since the first loosening of The Juice, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice seems more like a direct sequel than plenty of similar efforts in the last decade. The return to Connecticut genuinely feels like a chance to explore a rich seam of Burton-esque imagination more than an attempt to milk nostalgia for corporate cash (that the film looks set to earn everyone involved a heap of money is somewhat incidental, even if it is evidently the main reason the film exists).
In fact, the closest it comes to self-indulgent repetition is a choir of schoolchildren singing a funeral version of Day-O which, crucially, has absolutely no impact on the plot. It’s a throwaway gag that, if an audience doesn’t understand, shouldn’t bother them for more than a couple of seconds. It adds to the rest of the film, rather than replacing something important.
Here, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is in good company. Top Gun: Maverick, despite opening with a shot-for-shot recreation of the original title sequence, spends the rest of the time reckoning with the past, rather than repeating it. Maverick’s early repetition of “Talk to me, Goose” works specifically because his character is fixated on the past – the phrase makes complete sense within the context of the story the film is telling. It adds to its meaning, rather than trying to replicate it.
Most interestingly, Blade Runner 2049 weaponises its meta nods in the form of a recreation of Sean Young’s Rachael. The computer-generated model that faces Harrison Ford’s Deckard looks uncanny because, in real-life as well as the film, it’s a computer-generated model. It demonstrates a use of face-replacement technology that’s both completely essential to its place in the plot, and fleeting enough to avoid the moral ickiness that Holm’s likeness conjures.
In both of those cases, Maverick and 2049 undoubtedly share similar aesthetics and themes as their predecessors, but choose to add, not repeat. They, like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, don’t seek to give us more of the same thing – they give us more things like it. They’re not just good legacy sequels, then. They’re great sequels full stop.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is in cinemas now.
