Well, I had a fair bit to grumble about with Romulus and that video more or less covers it! I actually liked the zero-g blasting scene, the floaty air-is-acid bit… less so. It felt inventive though.
Overall I enjoyed it, particularly the production on what I’m told was a pretty low budget. It looked fantastic. What really tanked it for me were the astonishingly cringe callbacks and some predictable Alien plotting. Aliens: Dark Descent did lots of callbacks and they were awful there as well. Stop it, please. The movie was a lot more interesting to me when it was a low-key slow burn heist centred around the harsh reality under Wey-Yu but I suppose that’s not really an Alien movie then…
I’m surprised to hear so many folk putting this above Alien 3 though!
Why exactly was the station abandoned as-is? Remember how much they obsess over a single specimen in Alien, and the testing or whatever went on in Aliens - yet here we have a station loaded with facehuggers, and the all-important Prometheus goo, and yet no one has been sent to retrieve any of it? That contradicts my entire perception of WY, considering the lengths they go to to secure far smaller sample and specimen sizes.
It’s in a trajectory to be destroyed by the planet’s rings in a matter of hours and W-Y secret ops people are undoubtedly months or years away considering the speed of Alien universe space travel. There’s no reason for them to be at a random mining colony. And there’s nothing suggesting anyone survived on the station. I don’t know that it’s a ridiculous concern but I don’t think it’s a glaring hole by any means.
Well, it’s supposed to have been up there for a while, and I somehow doubt that if they research the holy goo, that they wouldn’t have redundancies, such as placing the station within “reach” in case of emergency. I’d like to try and make it make sense, but it kind of doesn’t. If it weren’t for the goo (I wonder if that was in the script from the beginning) I honestly wouldn’t mind, but given that it is supposedly such an incredible asset, it wouldn’t make sense to not have contingencies. But when I’m thinking this much about flaws, I think the movie lost me more than I realized.
You have way, way more faith in W-Y’s decision making around safety and redundancy than is warranted by the lore IMO. :P
And my recollection is that they just recently pinged this station ending up in planetary orbit - remember they initially think it’s a ship. The implication seems to be that it’s been drifting, derelict. Would W-Y try to recover it if they were aware of it going dark? I think yes. Would they notice or connect with it in time? I think it’s perfectly plausible they wouldn’t.
So I saw this in the theater over the weekend, and I have to admit that overall my general feeling is disappointment. I didn’t hate the movie, it definitely looked amazing, acting was good, and it had the vibe down. But it just kinda felt like a greatest hits version of Alien, didn’t really give me much I hadn’t seen before. I always appreciated that, weird as Prometheus and to a lesser extent Covenant were, I appreciated their big swings. This felt safer, I felt like I saw what was coming a mile away. It’s cool that the overall opinion seems to be positive it just didn’t fully work for me.
Went to the theatre to see this yesterday with Lady Bismarck and I thought it was flawed, but good and I’m glad I saw it somewhere where the bass of spaceship engines could rattle the popcorn out of the container.
It has about two too many endings and the hybrid baby alien thing at the end was just bad design, but I think the major issue is just endemic to where we are in the 21st century - it’s hard for a modern movie to have any patience.
We get some attempt to recreate the wake up table from Alien with an interior scene where our collection of 20-somethings talk about how their various parents died and there is some build once they’re onboard the Romulus, but I would have liked more time on the planet to see the life being squeezed out of our cast and more time snowballing to the action that let the facehuggers free. Also, the incubation period for Navarro was incredibly short.
It also falls foul of the popular trap where one [thing] is scary, therefore 25 [things] will be 25 times more scary!
Outside of that, I liked Rain and Andy (and Andy) and it says something that there were six characters on the hauler and I remember the names of five of them (sorry, jerk guy).
It won’t stay with me the way Alien/s did, but I don’t think it ever had a chance to.
For me, that’s exactly why I liked this so much. As much as I love some parts of Prometheus and Covenant, those big swings caught nothing but air and ultimately just planted an already wobbly and beleaguered franchise firmly in the gutter.
It was just… nice to finally see something that was solidly made, that respected the setting more than anything past Aliens ever really cared to attempt, and that I ultimately don’t have to make quite so many excuses for. I’ll agree that it might not have actually added much to the Aliens universe/lore, but mostly I felt it succeeded in getting it back on its feet and dusting itself off. Mostly.
Raise your hand if what you find compelling about the Alien series is the rape metaphor and pregnancy body horror. It’s as if some dudebros thought “if we have to have a female protag, how can we not do rape and pregnancy and in the most meatheaded way possible.” The xenomorph is a cool monster and these women are cool action heroes. We really really really don’t need that shit.
I don’t understand the question. At least some part of the horror of the xenomorph is its life cycle, which is essentially rape and forced impregnation. Plus much of its imagery is based on H.R. Giger’s work, for which I think the phrase “psycho-sexual shit” was probably invented.
Right, and yay, the rape and pregnancy horror subtext carried the first film with the unsubtle irony of having a woman be the protagonist. And then motherhood horror in the second film. OK, we get it. But kick Gieger to the curb and just have cool monsters already. Infection is a much much more effective metaphor for the horror of these creatures, and analogizing them to a social insect-like intelligence was enough to lift them away from the psycho-sexual stuff. Leaning into that gave us the dumb ending of Alien 3, dumb whole movie of Alien 4, dumb whole movie of Prometheus and dumb ending of Romulus. Give it up already film-makers. It doesn’t work. The xenomorph is an extremely resilient predator with a social hive structure, acid for blood, and a parasitic reproductive cycle. And then throw in the retro-futuristic aesthetic, oddly sympathetic synthetic humans, rapacious corporations, dismal living conditions, and danger and isolation of derelict spacecraft. That’s enough! We don’t need weird alien-human hybrids and the tortuous plot-lines and throwaway characters necessary to get us there.
Like seriously cut off the final third of this film and spend more time in the beginning doing character development. The young red-shirts were clearly paired up, but never introduced as such and we don’t find out about the pairings until the men are making dumb irrational decisions to save their women. Give us an action scene in the W-Y mines that better establishes the characters and shows how they got the information about the salvage in the first place and how they own a spacecraft.
I think it just feels more obvious because there are more young hot women involved here. There was a lot more explicit stuff like that in those terrible Alien v Predator films.
I think you’re just keying on that it feels like a much older, outdated trope. Slasher flicks of the 80s always had a “punishment” for female sexuality thing - the hot girl that has sex or gets naked will inevitably be killed by the killer/monster/whatever. This doesn’t seem to have been a trope in the Alien franchise.
Yeah? Like, that’s is what gave Alien its impact. You have what on its structural level a haunted house story, but every inch of the design of it is about genitals and pregnancy, and the pivotal moment is a man giving birth to a rape-baby that looks like a penis. Sexual violence is all over the subtext of Alien. Ash tries to kill Ripley by slamming a rolled-up porno mag into Ripley’s mouth for christ’s sake.
Anyway, aside what’s inherent about the alien and its design, I actually don’t think Romulus trades in much of that.
The myth about Romulus and Remus is about two brothers fighting for glory, one killing the other and going on to found Rome and gain that glory. Rain starts off willing to sacrifice Andy to go to whatever the promised land was called. Andy gets subsumed by the company and becomes willing to sacrifice Rain. Rain then faces the choice to definitely leave Andy behind, and cant do it.
Meanwhile, Kay infects herself with the Company Approved™ black goo, gives birth to a human adapted to the stars, and it’s a monster that goes on to devour its mother. Rain has to fight the darkest version of what she was contemplating. And then she wins, and the movie was really about why love is better all along.
Seriously, it’s probably the cuddliest movie in the series. I could accept arguments for Aliens, but none other.
Well Bjorn refused to leave his sibling Navarro behind either. And Tyler refused to leave Kay. Those situations didn’t end well. I kind of think that Romulus & Remus were chosen simply because the myth features the unsettling image of the suckling she-wolf and it’s a somewhat unsubtle reference to the Raised by Wolves TV show.
Yes, absolutely. And it totally worked for that film. But the biology of the xenomorph didn’t require that they continue leaning into that imagery. The alien is more like a parasite or an infectious disease than a penis. But then Cameron was like “hmmm what’s another feature of female existence we can horror-ize? I know, motherhood!” And thus Ripley & Newt and the alien queen and “Get away from her, you bitch.” And a thousand college sophomores scuttle away to write thesis papers about these metaphors. And that’s fine too; it works…
But then, like, there’s no need to do more of that. There are loads of zombie movies where the zombies are basically the same kind of monster and the interesting dramas play out between the human characters rather than through revelations about the nature of the zombies. Make more haunted house movies like that with the xenomorph as a foil. Horror movies do best with a narrow scope. We don’t need an alien-human hybrid in every film (or at all!) We don’t need egg cases with vaginas. Or any pregnant characters, particularly if their sole character trait is “pregnant.”
But if they really want to expand the scope of the universe, show us the horror of the mining colonies. The colonial marines in Aliens were clearly prepared for extermination of alien lifeforms (a bughunt), so show us more of that? What is the ecology of the xenomorphs? Surely W-Y isn’t the only corp in that world. Show us some political intrigue? How about a planetary rebellion that leverages the xenomorphs against the company somehow and it all goes wrong?
Definitely. I mean, I didn’t come across the Alien films because I was browsing a list of Rape & Pregnancy Body Horror in Cinema on Wikipedia, but it’s fundamental to the franchise, and a huge part of what makes it so effective.
My take on Aliens Romulus, I didn’t hate it, but the young early 20-something cast seeking a better life fell flat for me. The action was good, but it feels like they are trying to recycle low-scale crew verse aliens.
When we already have Aliens verse marines and aliens versus colony. If the stakes arent at least that high, it feels like a cop out. Though i was surprised by how much the movie matched the feel of Aliens: Dark Descent in vibe for the colony we saw, so i guess that was good
