Alien Romulus (2024)
Well.....I've been giving this some thought and I am in two minds, I think I liked parts of it, and then really disliked other parts.
The first half of the movie for me was better. I liked the pace of the build up, the introduction to the setting and the two main characters Rain and Andy. I liked they reverted back to the old theme and style, old industrial set design and the style of technology, etc. References to the old moves the Bar sign for example, but I liked all of that, and actually throughout the entire movie I liked that, at least in terms of setting, the outpost looked great as well.
Although one scene I didn't like was where Rain was trying to book passage out and they doubled her hours or whatever, I don't think they needed that personally. The company has always been sleazy, but quite literally slave drivers, no, sorry that doesn't fit in my opinion, and went a bit too far/over the top (this is a running theme). I get they pushed that part of the story to make it more feasible that they would try and escape, but they could have spun that as more naughty borred teenagers or something.
Otherwise good start.
Here on it starts to get a bit silly.
The chav character being aggressive towards Andy was just waaaay over the top, ok we get it, the guy doesn't like androids but they kept pushing it over and over. His character was awful full stop.
The anti gravity thing, WHY? Absolutely unnecessary. The scene where she turns gravity off so the acid doesn't eat through the hull, then flies through the floating acid was ridiculous, unbelievable, and completely over the top. There was also parts in the lift shaft where they were flying up and down it that just got silly, I half expected some Marvel super hero to pop out at any moment because it was just a joke.
Also there were a few scenes, where the characters, the pregnant girl for example, falls a good, what 10 ft? Seemingly gets up later "oh that hurts a little", and then later falls out of the door of the little spaceship, she'd be completely dead from that fall.
The, if you turn the temperature of the room up, they can't see you lol. Just.......lol.
And the half human half alien alien, that the girl literally births like normal, seriously? Didn't you learn from Alien Ressurection? They just can't help themselves can they? Giger's alien was fine, why do they think they have to try and do one better, or re invent the wheel?
It's stuff like this that just starts to make the whole thing far fetched and unbelievable, and as soon as that starts happening, you stop taking it seriously, and stop caring. In fact if I was to sum up the movie in one line, I would say that it just isn't convincing.
As others have said, outside of the two main characters, the rest were awful, despite the dodgy CGI, even Ash's new character (whatever he was called) put the rest to shame, which is an insult really. I didn't mind that they re-used his line about not lying about their chances, but they have his sympothies. Fine he is an adroid and programmed so it is feasible, but there were several other lines re-used and it just made it cheesy. Andy's "Get away from her you bitch" was just unforgiveable. Firstly, you just stole an epic line from an epic movie, no right to do that. Secondly, that line was used by a female character, to the queen alien, a mother to mother interaction, hence bitch. In Romulus, it was just a drone alien, and Andy was an android so didn't fit in context anyway!
They also got some of the scaling wrong in parts, the outpost. You can see the ship they used to dock with it, and roughly the size of that, and they show you the size of the outpost compared to that, the corridoors they are walking in etc. However later when its crashing into the planet's ring, the thing is seemingly colossal, like 1000 times larger. Infact the whole crashing into the planet ring thing again, just rubbish. I get they wanted to build up a sense of urgency but really?
I've not kept up with the modern Aliens movies admittedly, I dont think I have seen Covenant, I've seen Prometheous, thought that was an absolute turd, this is at least better than that one. This is on par with Ressurection maybe, maybe a little better, I'd give the first half a 7 out of 10, the second half a 3 out of 10, so I guess....
5/10
