Sci-Fi Alien: Romulus (2024)

[Drizzle]

I got my tickets for tomorrow afternoon so I’ll be the judge if it sucks or not.

But seriously, looking at some of your rankings, it warms my heart to see so many of you recognizing Alien as the superior movie.

I actually came to the realization recently that both of them are 10/10 movies but I prefer Alien. The atmosphere in that movie just creeps me out every time I watch it. As much as I love Aliens I just don't get the same kind of thrill watching it like I do with the first movie.

 

[Spider-Fan]

I actually came to the realization recently that both of them are 10/10 movies but I prefer Alien. The atmosphere in that movie just creeps me out every time I watch it. As much as I love Aliens I just don't get the same kind of thrill watching it like I do with the first movie.

They satisfy different things for me. Alien is my favorite horror film, and Aliens is one of my like 5 favorite sci-fi action films. So for me, they're equal

 

[Shinobi Shaw]

I actually came to the realization recently that both of them are 10/10 movies but I prefer Alien. The atmosphere in that movie just creeps me out every time I watch it. As much as I love Aliens I just don't get the same kind of thrill watching it like I do with the first movie.

Same, bro. Same.

I just love the fact that it’s simply a slasher film in outer space but in such a confined area. It’s such a genius idea.

Goes without saying, Ripley and Parker were the two smartest ones in that movie.

 

[Drizzle]

Same, bro. Same.

I just love the fact that it’s simply a slasher film in outer space but in such a confined area. It’s such a genius idea.

Goes without saying, Ripley and Parker were the two smartest ones in that movie.

Yep, and nobody listened. Ripley didn't want them back on the ship in the first place and Parker's repeated suggestions of freezing Kane fell on deaf ears.

Have you ever read the comic adaptation? It's a whole other scary experience in itself, even after having seen the movie.

 

[henzINNIT]

Saw it. Very nice production, well shot, great practical effects. Will happily watch Cailee Spaeny do anything for a couple of hours and David Jonsson was really great as well.

... but overall it slipped further and further away from me, not bringing anything interesting and new to the table. It gave me the same vibes as Terminator Dark Fate where every choice it made was a riff on something a previous sequel already did. I was hoping for a big swing by the end and came away underwhelmed. I'd chose all of the Weaver films before this I think. Sink or swim those films are all doing something.

 

[Hobgoblin]

I love both Alien and Aliens but comparing them feels like apples and oranges. I think I give Aliens the edge because it has everything.

Alien 9.5/10
Aliens 10/10

 

[Zantera]

The more different opinions I read about the movie and the more I think about it, I do agree that the biggest negatives are the blatant fan service stuff.

Spoiler: Negatives

The deepfake Ash is the biggest one for me. I get why they wanted a similarity to be there, I get the idea of having a same model with the same exterior and I think it could have worked. Maybe use a mask maybe use shadows or lightning to make it stand out less, maybe even have the face be damaged so its easier to hide the imperfections of the look alike. The voice still sounded fine. I think the bad decisions were basically not keeping this android for one scene but making him essentially the baddie who they kept cutting back to a few times and the deepfake just felt a bit off every time.

I also thought the "get away from her you *****" call back was a huge groaning moment and not at all the "wave your fist in the air yelling hell yeah" moment they thought it would be. And I think honestly it would have been super easy to fix. If they had just ended that after he said "Get away from her" (instead of tacking on the you *****) I think it would have had a perfect balance of being a call back but not being an exact call back. It would make sense for something Andy would say but you don't make it an exact reference which takes you out of it as a viewer.

And while not fan service-y I stand by what I said earlier that some characters are a bit badly written. Bjorn especially stands out as the ******* who says and does all the wrong things at the wrong time who nobody realistically would be friends with but it's a cliched stereotype so you gotta put it in there.

The biggest positives for me though were:

Spoiler: Positives

They really nailed the atmosphere on the space station and I almost wish we got more exploration there before things got bad. I kinda hope we get some extra companion piece whether it's a comic or book or something to tell us more in detail about how Romulus/Remulus fell to the Xenomorphs and how the experiments got out of hand.

While Cailee Spaeny will get a lot of the spotlight (and she was great) I do think David Jonsson as Andy was the big standout. We've seen multiple actors play the android by now and with the exception of maybe Winona Ryder, most of them have been iconic and memorable characters. Ian Holm as Ash, Lance Henriksen as Bishop, Michael Fassbender as David. All brilliant in their movies. Yet, David Jonsson does something we haven't seen before in an android character in this universe and I thought he played his part perfectly. He played two different parts basically, vulnerable caring brother with a disability (basically) and ice cold mission comes first, and he swapped between the two like it was the easiest thing in the world.

We've had many movies in this franchise before this yet they came up with clever set pieces and ideas we haven't really gotten before. The facehugger chase sequence, the hallway with facehuggers and matching the room temperature to the body heat (oh god) and the zero gravity acid blood hallway sequence. This felt really exciting as a long time fan because I really missed this type of inventive ideas from the franchise.

 

[Drizzle]

Spoiler: Negatives

I also thought the "get away from her you *****" call back was a huge groaning moment and not at all the "wave your fist in the air yelling hell yeah" moment they thought it would be. And I think honestly it would have been super easy to fix. If they had just ended that after he said "Get away from her" (instead of tacking on the you *****) I think it would have had a perfect balance of being a call back but not being an exact call back. It would make sense for something Andy would say but you don't make it an exact reference which takes you out of it as a viewer.

Spoiler

Yeah that one was an odd choice. It wasn't even a matter of feeling unearned because the original line isn't meant to be an "I'll be back" type of callback. I agree that had he just said "Get away from her" that would have been much better, and for a few seconds the movie actually fooled us into thinking that was it.

 

[Spider-Fan]

Spoiler

Yeah that one was an odd choice. It wasn't even a matter of feeling unearned because the original line isn't meant to be an "I'll be back" type of callback. I agree that had he just said "Get away from her" that would have been much better, and for a few seconds the movie actually fooled us into thinking that was it.

Spoiler

This line made me cringe. Really badly, and is the moment I would say is when I feel the movie starts going off the rails. Cause we get this terrible reference and then the film devolves into a hodge podge of all the original movies in a blender. Down to recreating several exact shots/scenarios. It essentially becomes a fan film in the worst possible way, and it all started for me with that exact moment

 

[Broseph44]

Damn this was awesome, had a great time seeing this today with my girl. Both thoroughly enjoyed it. Love the franchise and I wasn’t disappointed. Definitely can’t wait to add to the collection and do a marathon. Especially watching this between Alien and Aliens.

 

[Drizzle]

Spoiler

This line made me cringe. Really badly, and is the moment I would say is when I feel the movie starts going off the rails. Cause we get this terrible reference and then the film devolves into a hodge podge of all the original movies in a blender. Down to recreating several exact shots/scenarios. It essentially becomes a fan film in the worst possible way, and it all started for me with that exact moment

Spoiler

I didn't like the line, but I didn't mind the ending at all. Tying in the black goo from Prometheus didn't feel forced to me either because since the goo was extracted from the Nostromo Xenomorph that was birthed by Kane via the eggs on LV-426 that presumably originated through the Xeno that hatched from the nearby Space Jockey/Engineer, the newborn looking like an Engineer/Xeno hybrid makes sense to me.

The fact that the creature was disposed of via dumping it out into space is a bit of a different story as far as "been there, done that" but at this point I can't tell if it's derivative or just plain tradition that most of these movies end that way with Alien 3 and Prometheus being the only exceptions.

For what it's worth, I also really like The Force Awakens so plentiful fan service isn't always a dealbreaker.

 

[Spider-Fan]

Spoiler

I didn't like the line, but I didn't mind the ending at all. Tying in the black goo from Prometheus didn't feel forced to me either because since the goo was extracted from the Nostromo Xenomorph that was birthed by Kane via the eggs on LV-426 that presumably originated through the Xeno that hatched from the nearby Space Jockey/Engineer, the newborn looking like an Engineer/Xeno hybrid makes sense to me.

The fact that the creature was disposed of via dumping it out into space is a bit of a different story as far as "been there, done that" but at this point I can't tell if it's derivative or just plain tradition that most of these movies end that way with Alien 3 and Prometheus being the only exceptions.

For what it's worth, I also really like The Force Awakens so plentiful fan service isn't always a dealbreaker.

Spoiler

As with anything, whether the fan service is good or bad depends on execution . In this film, I think it made the movie actively bad. They had been doing original things like that zero g or heat signature sequence, but the ending was just a greatest hits of references and it actively dragged the entire movie down for me. It isn't necessarily tying it to the goo, it's slavishly recreating the ending of all the movies into 1 finale and just losing its own creative voice in the void of fan service. Thats what lost me

 

[Snow Queen]

I figured I wouldn't like this much... pleasantly surprised to have largely enjoyed it. That being said...

Spoiler

Everything they wanted him to do could have been done through other, creative means that didn't require a rather terrible looking CG face.

 

[Zantera]

Another negative I forgot to mention and it's not exclusive to Romulus but I'm not really a fan of the change to the incubation time of the chestburster. In that first movie it felt like hours passed from the facehugger dying to Kane meeting his fate but they've changed that up in the last couple of movies to where it feels like the drive-in express version of getting your chest exploded. Having more time for the incubation adds to the tension in my opinion because you don't know how long they have.

Just throwing out a random idea for a sequel that I think could be cool. Have our protagonist get facehugged. There's a ticking clock towards the end of the movie where the protagonist has to make it to some medical room/equipment that will let them kill the chestburster before it kills them. Have some tension there (like Alien 3 or Resurrection) where it can happen at any time and the protagonist is really fighting time to not die. I feel like that's something we haven't really seen in any of the movies, we pretty much know that anyone who gets a facehugger will die very soon and it could be interesting to subvert that. I think in one of the more recent books there's a herb or something the characters eat that kills the embryo in their stomach. Interesting new ideas like that could be cool in a movie.

 

[Captain Tired]

Another negative I forgot to mention and it's not exclusive to Romulus but I'm not really a fan of the change to the incubation time of the chestburster. In that first movie it felt like hours passed from the facehugger dying to Kane meeting his fate but they've changed that up in the last couple of movies to where it feels like the drive-in express version of getting your chest exploded. Having more time for the incubation adds to the tension in my opinion because you don't know how long they have.

Just throwing out a random idea for a sequel that I think could be cool. Have our protagonist get facehugged. There's a ticking clock towards the end of the movie where the protagonist has to make it to some medical room/equipment that will let them kill the chestburster before it kills them. Have some tension there (like Alien 3 or Resurrection) where it can happen at any time and the protagonist is really fighting time to not die. I feel like that's something we haven't really seen in any of the movies, we pretty much know that anyone who gets a facehugger will die very soon and it could be interesting to subvert that. I think in one of the more recent books there's a herb or something the characters eat that kills the embryo in their stomach. Interesting new ideas like that could be cool in a movie.

Didn't your idea basically already happen to Noomi Rapace in Prometheus? I mean it wasn't a xeno and she didn't kill the thing outright, but she at least got rid of it before it could burst out from her.

 

[BlackFox]

Another negative I forgot to mention and it's not exclusive to Romulus but I'm not really a fan of the change to the incubation time of the chestburster. In that first movie it felt like hours passed from the facehugger dying to Kane meeting his fate but they've changed that up in the last couple of movies to where it feels like the drive-in express version of getting your chest exploded. Having more time for the incubation adds to the tension in my opinion because you don't know how long they have.

Just throwing out a random idea for a sequel that I think could be cool. Have our protagonist get facehugged. There's a ticking clock towards the end of the movie where the protagonist has to make it to some medical room/equipment that will let them kill the chestburster before it kills them. Have some tension there (like Alien 3 or Resurrection) where it can happen at any time and the protagonist is really fighting time to not die. I feel like that's something we haven't really seen in any of the movies, we pretty much know that anyone who gets a facehugger will die very soon and it could be interesting to subvert that. I think in one of the more recent books there's a herb or something the characters eat that kills the embryo in their stomach. Interesting new ideas like that could be cool in a movie.

Yeah this did bother me too, as you say Romulus is not the only culprit of this, but now it seems it takes 24 minutes not 24 hours for a chestburster to be incubated and born and then about 10 minutes to turn into a fully grown and developed Alien adult. I know sometimes films have to speed things up for story telling/tension but its a bit jarring from the originals.

 

[Zantera]

Didn't your idea basically already happen to Noomi Rapace in Prometheus? I mean it wasn't a xeno and she didn't kill the thing outright, but she at least got rid of it before it could burst out from her.

It's sort of a version of that I suppose, but in that case it also feels too sped up because the time from when she gets impregnated to when she gets the squid out is a few minutes? I think it would be cool if this is something that happens like halfway (or earlier) through the movie and the second half is a slow burn ticking clock with other events happening but our main character being under pressure to get the thing out before it grows enough to escape the stomach.

 

[Spider-Fan]

Isn't that just essentially Alien 3?

 

[Broseph44]

There were some excellent cinematography and shots in this. The sound design was also great. The building of tension and suspense was top notch.

Also

Spoiler

I personally thought Rook looked good and worked just fine. But that’s just me. Guess for my eyes it wasn’t really an issue. Was shocked to see him actually but I had been thinking it was gonna be him as well.

 

[Pennywise]

 

[Filmfan93]

Well deserved.

3rd best entry in the franchise which is a feat, considering we didn't really have a great Alien film since 1986.

I really like Prometheus and Covenant, but the former is not an Alien film and the latter does a very blatant course correction and for the worse.

 

[Broseph44]

Excellent performances by Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson.

 

[Sithborg]

Given the $80 million budget, should be on its way to a nice profit, if not a gangbuster win.

Its nice to have Alien and Predator back in decent places.

 

[Punisher_MAX]

I'm rewatching Alien again today lol might also do Aliens.

 

[Joe Von Zombie]

Sorry to be that guy, but I couldn't give a flying rat's monkey **** about Xenomorph incubation time lol.