LOS ANGELES — A new movie about a group of marines in space battling aliens has reinvented the genre by not casting actress Michelle Rodriguez.
“We really wanted to do something different with Aperture Rising, and the way we came up with was to remove the key feature that all movies in this genre are centered around: casting Michelle Rodriguez as a gruff space marine who dies 50 minutes into the movie,” said director Jimmy Conner. “It was scary even trying to write the script with that in mind — what does that kind of movie even look like? Would it be too avant-garde for audiences? What would Michelle Rodriguez do with the free time? These are questions we’ve hopefully answered with our film, but even now, I can’t say for sure.”
“And don’t get me wrong,” he added. “We’re still gonna have a tough, white-tanktop-wearing woman space marine in the movie. She’s just played by someone other than Michelle Rodriguez. Let’s not get crazy here! Viewers still need to have a somewhat more masculine woman character who is less important than a somewhat more feminine woman character, so they know who the love interest is. Or else, what are we even doing?”
Despite the exciting new venture, viewers at early test screenings of the film reportedly found it confusing.
“I don’t understand,” said one viewer. “Where was Michelle Rodriguez?”
I found it difficult to follow the plot. There were a lot of aliens and shooting and stuff like that,” said another viewer. “Maybe if there was a cool, tough character in the film — a woman, maybe — who kind of talked in a New York accent, and said not really jokes, but like, funny little complaints about what was going on, I’d have something to latch onto.”
“I thought Michelle Rodriguez was good in the film. I like her,” said a third viewer. “She wasn’t in it? Oh. Well I fell asleep for a little bit, so maybe that was part of my dream.”
At press time, panicked producers who financed Aperture Rising had hired a VFX team to hastily CGI Michelle Rodriguez into the film before its release date in three weeks.
