Alien Romulus (2024)

SPOILERS BELOW

Turns out hurrying between remixes of moments from six previous movies makes your story utterly uninvolving - I didn't care about the characters, wasn't scared by the various monsters, could only vaguely follow where everyone was and which ship was crashing into what at any given moment. It looked fine, in that they ripped off the first one well enough and spent enough money on the CG for nothing to look tacky (except the uncanny valley of Rook - what a terrible, pointless choice to make instead of just getting a good new actor in), but it's not like it was anywhere close to the iconic, inventive, horrifying beautiful imagery of the first and to a certain extent second movie. At least 3 & 4 had their own vibes. Alverez seems content to just lift shots and moments from the rest of the franchise - that side-on shot of the alien and Ripley from 3, Ripley wide-eyed and head tilted back behind a perspiration-covered space helmet, Hicks showing Ripley how to use a pulse rifle, a weird albino hybrid thing getting sucked out of a hole in the side of the ship until it gets shredded, on and on it goes.

And there's this weird dissonance of not wanting to do anything new with the franchise at all and yet simultaneously disintegrating its integrity - now you only need five minutes of facehugging, another five minutes of gestation to chestburster and then another five minutes to full-grown alien; you can walk past facehuggers and they won't attack you if you stay calm, but when they do attack you they will be so shit at it that dozens of them aren't really a threat; the black stuff from Prometheus is extractable so we can just throw a weird vaguely related monster in whenever we want; the human characters no longer get taken out for half the movie because a carry case fell on their head, say - they can now fall thirty feet onto solid metal and shake it off (no genetic engineering here, just the Flubberisation of action movies). Also some minor nerdy irritations like breaking the alphabetical order of synthetics' names with Rook, and deciding that the blue laser field from Alien is actually something the xenomorphs generate somehow (and here for no particular reason that I could tell). Kudos to them for sticking their neck out and explicitly showing the pupal stage between chestburster and fully-grown, but the size and complexity of it felt a little silly to me - again, rushing to get to the next thing made it less effective. They could have slowed the whole thing down and made the chestburster an active threat as it's caught in close quarters with them and trying to get more food wherever it can so it's got enough energy to build up its cocoon. That could have been up there with the 'holy shit, facehuggers can run around and jump?!' moment of Aliens, and no other movie in the franchise has done it yet, but no, they needed to keep moving so they could get to their mash-up of the Newborn and the Prometheus dudes.

It reminds me of the later Indiana Jones movies - Crystal Skull was a bad Indiana Jones movie but it was an Indiana Jones movie, that was also trying out new stuff; Dial Of Destiny just felt like any 2010s action movie with a passable synthesis of all the past Indy movies stretched over the top of it. Same with this versus 3, 4, even Prometheus. (I think Covenant starts as one and then has the other bolted on as the third act.) Like, if Dial Of Destiny or Romulus were a video game I'd be like "yeah, they did really well to emulate the movies' vibes", but for a new movie in the series it's just not enough.

Also, just some really bad basic writing. Like, fuck me, yet another recent movie that thinks 'tells dad jokes' is a rounded personality. The first three lines of dialogue in this Alien movie are shit puns. "How should I show that this other character gets on with them? I know, I'll make him tell shit jokes too!" COPY-PASTING TWEETS IS NOT WRITING, YOU ARE ALL BAD AND LAZY AND SHOULD NEVER BE ALLOWED TO WRITE A MOVIE AGAIN. Watching modern blockbusters has the same energy as listening to a wedding speech and realising ten seconds in that they just googled 'funny wedding speech' and printed the first result. And then the usual crappy exposition like someone referring to their brother as "my brother" rather than by his name. Or the moment where one person says "we don't have enough cryo power, this will only last us for three years" and another replies "We need enough for nine years!", which everyone in that room knows and the audience does not need to because they got all they needed from the first line. And the dialogue is not free from the clunking fan service, copying lines verbatim from Ash, Bishop, Ripley. You could kind of justify synthetics saying the exact same things, though it still feels tacky, but when someone is shouting "get away from her you bitch" in a context that doesn't really make much sense, it's hugely cringey.

Verdict: Rubbish.