Alien: Romulus

Feb 123 min read

In space, no-one can hear... you say that this is actually pretty good.

Cailee Spaeny as Rain and David Jonsson as Andy - from Alien: Romulus

Reminder for reviews: I'm only really going to talk about what stood out to me, so anything I don't bring up is most likely just fine.

If an issue isn't bad enough to detract from the experience, then that's a good thing - just like something not standing out as being noteworthy doesn't necessarily make it a bad thing.

It's perfectly fine for a thing to serve its purpose and nothing more.

MOVIES

- Alien: Romulus plot summary: While scavenging the deep ends of a derelict space station, a group of young space colonists come face to face with the most terrifying life form in the universe. (IMDb)

- I'd heard mixed things about Alien: Romulus in terms of quality before watching it, so it was fairly easy to keep an open mind while watching without an overriding opinion potentially altering how I saw it.

- I also knew nothing about the plot other than it being an Alien movie, so having a rough idea that some people would unexpectedly find themselves confronting violent, toothy beasts at some point.

- And that's pretty much what I got, and fairly well done at that, which makes some of the criticisms not really make sense.

- There's been a lot said about how this movie borrows a lot from the other films in the series and my reaction to that is: obviously, why wouldn't it?

- It's set in the same continuity as the other movies, as well as the game Alien: Isolation, with synthetic people, off-world colonies, lots of sci-fi machinery and Weyland-Yutani as the big bad corporation of the setting.

- As a result, I couldn't have cared less about the connections to the rest of the franchise and appreciated that it actually slots in rather neatly actually.

- It's a good-looking film too for the most part, although some of the VFX work isn't great which is more likely due to what was achievable with a far more limited budget than Prometheus or Alien: Covenant received.

- The score was fairly forgettable though, although I did appreciate the reprise of the Prometheus theme just as much as I enjoyed its use in Covenant.

- The biggest problem for me were the characters and how little I cared for most of them, particularly enjoying Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and Navarro (Aileen Wu) getting what they deserved in my opinion.

- Isabela Merced has a great scream, but her 'character' felt more like a plot device to create a new monster rather than anyone to care about.

- Cailee Spaeny is okay as Rain, but her character is fairly archetypal and her performance doesn't really do much to make her more interesting either.

- The standout of the cast for me was David Jonsson as Andy in what I learned was just his second film and yet feeling far more natural a big screen performer than anyone else.

- There's also a character resurrected through CGI from a previous movie that I won't spoil, although I will say it was an ambitious idea that didn't quite work for me with how it ended up looking.

- What was great were the aliens and especially the face-huggers, the latter of which provided by far the most enjoyable scenes.

- Seriously, if it had been just face-huggers and no adult xenomorph had shown up, I wouldn't have minded that one bit.

- Beyond that, there's very little to say other than this is a really solidly-made Alien movie that pretty much does what you'd expect an Alien movie to do and does it fairly well.

- Alien: Romulus doesn't come close to matching the highs of the first two films, but neither does it have the lows of most of the other films in the franchise and is an enjoyable experience overall. [7/10]

GAMES

- I still haven't started Little Misfortune, but really want to do so soon.

- I still haven't finished off either of my latest playthroughs of Baldur's Gate 3 or Mass Effect 3, but I'm in no rush to get through them either.

- I have been playing a lot of Banished instead of completing other games, which has involved restarting a lot of times until I remembered how everything worked properly.