There's been a lot of hype around this new "Alien: Romulus" movie. I wanted to like it more than I did, but I must admit that it ended up disappointing me.
The look of the movie is really nice. It begins in a dirty mining-colony. On the Alien timeline we are between the events in the first "Alien" [1979] and the second "Aliens" [1986] movie. Weyland-Yutani is certainly busy "building better worlds" at the expense of the human workers who are basically being worked as slaves.
Our group of protagonists find a way to leave the dirty planet and travel to another world that is in fact better. They have located what turns out to be an abandoned space station orbiting the mining planet. Aboard the space station are life support equipment that will make it possible to make the long space travel while being in cryo-sleep.
The space station looks really great with old dirty and worn equipment and it has a look that is very true to the first Alien movie. What they don't know is what we have already guessed, Weyland-Yutani were using the space station for nasty experiments and soon all hell breaks loose - and with hell I mean Xenomorphs galore. So far so good. Prepare for a lot of flashing yellow lights.
The group of young actors play their characters well enough, some are easy to like, some are not. Cailee Spaeny is the best of the lot and she is great as the character Rain.
The movie pays a lot of homage to - or in other words it steals from - the older Alien movies. It almost feels like a greatest hits of Alien(s) moments. We get the sneaky androids, the evil Weyland-Yutani company, the goo of life ("Prometheus"), and even quotes like "Get away from her, you bitch". It all sounds promising enough but at some point it just begins to fall apart.
First of all, the timeline for the Alien lifecycle is beyond fucked up, and it happens at a pace that makes no sense. That would be much easier to forgive in a first-person shooter video game or an Alien vs. Predator movie, but not in a real Alien movie. It just feels totally wrong. The Facehuggers hunt in packs like rabid dogs instead of being sneaky little devils lurking in the shadows. They just seem a bit too well organized and aggressive for my taste in Facehuggers.
The first half of the movie has a fine pace but then it kind of drags. The mouse and cat game on the space station feels drawn out and gets tired. The movie started much better than it ended. I, for one, don't hate "Alien(4): Resurrection" [1997]. In fact I like it a lot and I think it handled the human + alien mix much better than this new movie did.
I think the new movie fucks up badly in some of the last scenes. It just gets ridiculous. This is really sad when you consider how well the movie was doing in its first half. It should also be mentioned that some parts of the movie are rather dark. Not as dark as impossible-to-see-anything "Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem" [2007], but certainly too dark for my liking.
All in all, "Alien: Romulus" was a disappointment to me. I had expected something that stayed true to the Alien universe from beginning to end. The ending is quite open, so a sequel could easily become a reality, if other people like the movie better than I did. Personally I'd much rather have the last part of Ridley Scott's "Prometheus" [2012] / "Alien: Covenant" [2017] prequel trilogy. Surely, the prequels weren't perfect movies, but they were full of great ideas and they were much more interesting movies than this new Alien movie is.
Here's my personal Alien movies ranking - best to worst:
- Alien [1979]
- Aliens [1986]
- Alien (4): Resurrection [1997]
- Prometheus [2012]
- Alien vs. Predator [2004]
- Alien 3 [1992]
- Alien: Covenant [2017]
- Alien: Romulus [2024]
- Aliens vs. Predator (AVP2): Requiem [2007]
Rating: 
Movie Title: Alien: Romulus
Director: Fede Alvarez
This Release: 2024
RunTime: 119
Actors: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, Aileen Wu
Movie Format: Cinema
Content Type: Movie Review
Language: 
Updated: 2024-08-17 15:44
Created: 2024-08-15 08:10
