Alien Romulus - Game Over, Man! Game Over!

I think it's fair to say that the alien franchise hasn't exactly gone from strength to strength over the years yeah it opened strong with one of the greatest horror movies of all time followed by an action-packed sequel that retained the tension and horror while up in the stakes and pacing then it all started to go down hill with a grim mean- Spirit third installment that spoiled everyone's fun and a weird tacky cash grab fourth movie that we don't talk about now after trying and failing twice to cross over with The Predator franchise we were subjected

to a pair of overblown overhyped prequels that tried to answer questions nobody wanted to ask and proved that film directors don't always get better with age and honestly that really felt like the end every possible Avenue had been explored every permutation of the original concept had been tried and the poor old Xenomorphs had finally been defeated by the one enemy that even they couldn't overcome corporate greed but hey when you're a creatively and morally bankrupt Studio that's paid an obscene amount of money for 20th Century Fox and all the IPS under their Banner you're going

to find a way to dig just a little deeper which brings me neatly along to alien Romulus ditching the pretentious high-minded philosophy of the Prometheus movies the trailers instead promised a more strip down Back to Basics approach to the alien franchise a smaller budget practical effects and a return to the Retro futuristic production design of the earlier movies so far so good but does it actually deliver well watch an alien Prometheus feels like two very different movies awkwardly bolied together the first one is a tight well-paced sci-fi thriller with a simple premise great production design

a small cast of characters an intriguing mystery and some excellent performances by talented actors in short it's a simple but effective foundation for what could have been a decent alien movie the problems begin when setup has to give way to execution and the tension gets squandered by the predictable horror tropes of dumb characters making dumb decisions protracted Chase scenes Shameless key jangling and repurpose dialogue and by the end all sense of logic and consequences goes completely out the window and the film devolves into mindless action and Goofy attempts at body horror now I suspect I'm

going to take a lot of flak for saying this because for some reason everyone [ __ ] loves this movie but what the hell I am become Drinker the destroyer of Dreams anyway grab your pulse rifle and motion tracker and let's begin shall we so Romulus is set about 20 years after the events of the original alien and it kicks off with a wh and utani ship recovering the original xenomorph from the wreckage of the Nostromo now I'm pretty sure that the Nostromo was vaporized by not one but three thermonuclear [Music] explosions and the xenomorph

was blasted out into space from Ripley's Escape pod so the chances of actually finding it two decades later are about equal to finding an attractive woman at a Warhammer convention but man it sure is cool to see stuff from the original movie am I right keep that little writing philosophy in mind because it'll be important later anyway the real action picks up with our main character rain who works as a laborer on a mining Planet run by the company she lives with a decommissioned Android named Andy who acts as a kind of adopted brother for

her anyway she's not exactly thrilled to be trapped on a planet where it's dark 24 hours a day and the life expectancy hovers somewhere around medieval Europe honestly love try living in Scotland it seems like a picnic by comparison but when her contract gets extended due to labor shortages it's pretty obvious that the company is never actually going to let her leave that's when she's contacted by her ex-boyfriend Tyler with news that a deric space station has been detected orbiting the planet Tyler and his Carew plan to head up there in a cargo hauler steal

some cryopods and use them to travel to a much nicer Planet a few light years away the catch is that they need Andy's help because he's the only one who can interface with the station's computer before you can ask questions like why is nobody else investigating this space station or wouldn't wh and utani have sent out their own recovery team for it rain and the others are on their way they make it on board and discover that the station isn't derelict at all in fact it was some kind of classified research facility experimenting on the

xenomorph and well it went about as well as you might expect the other problem is that its orbit is decaying so they only have a few hours to find what they need get back to their ship and get the hell out of there not bad a small group of characters with a clear objective a ticking clock a dangerous threat to contend with and some interpersonal tension to ratchet up the drama not exactly revolutionary but a decent foundation for a neat little alien Adventure unfortunately this is where the script starts to go off the rails one

of the crew gets infected by a face hugger and tries to escape on the cargo hauler but oh no the chest burster kills her just as they're lifting off you know I'm pretty sure that the whole process from face hugger to chess burster is supposed to take a couple of days but now it's basically instantaneous for the sake of plot convenience and oh no the cargo huler crashes into the station and causes a big explosion that pushes it off orbit and then comes to rest completely intact in a hanger on the other side of the

station wow that was a lucky chain of events lucky it didn't just tumble off into space or get completely destroyed like the drop ship from Aliens remember that remember how it triggered an overload in the atmosphere processor so the characters had to find a way to escape the writers of this script certainly do and while I'm on that subject that's not the only idea that they borrowed from other movies remember the pulse rifles remember Ash remember the Alien Hive remember the laser Mist remember the black goo what was that black goo remember the alien Skeletor

baby remember the fourth act Stinger remember this line I prefer the ter artificial person myself or this line but you have my this or this line get away from her you [ __ ] I've heard enough of this I'm asking you to pull the plug honestly I could probably spend about 2 hours listing all the stuff this film shamelessly steals from other movies in the franchise but for the sake of brevity I'll move on so the main objective now is for the gang to hike across the station avoid the aliens recover the cargo huler and

Escape before the whole place goes boom Oh yeah and Andy's been upgraded with a new operating system so he's like super Andy now but can they still trust him or is he now a servant of the company what's the true purpose behind the research here and will any of them make it out alive now I don't want to go all in the negativity right off the bat there are things in Romulus that are really appreciated so let's go through them first the cinematography production design props costumes and soundtrack are all excellent they've successfully replicated the

look and feel of the original movie and I appreciated the opening segment on the mining Colony that gives us an actual window into what it's like for normal people working on a wh and utani worlds I like the early hints that humans are struggling with deep space colonization hence the attempts to mix them with alien DNA to make them Stronger Yeah the payoff doesn't make much sense when you realize the solution is to turn all of humanity into horrifyingly deformed monsters or the fact that they already have perfect workers in the form of Androids who

never get tired or sick or have to be paid but whatever I like the fact that this project was done on a pretty modest budget of 80 million without sacrificing quality or scope proven that you don't need hundreds of millions of dollars to deliver a top-notch visual experience it uses a lot of practical effects there's some decent Gore and body horror and the production probably saved a ton of of money by not hiring any bigname actors on that subject the cast all do a reasonable job I say reasonable rather than great because they're nowhere near

as memorable as the crew of the Nostromo for example partly because the decision to cast a bunch of 20-some robs them of some much needed gravitas and partly because the script doesn't tell us a whole lot about them despite the amount of time we actually spend with them in Alien I felt like I knew the crew pretty well within like the first 15 minutes but by the end of Romulus I struggle to name a single character or what the personality was like because they all have the same background played by actors of roughly the same

age the only exception to all of this is David Johnson who does a superb job playing two completely different versions of the same character in Andy it's great stuff and he really captures the innocent vulnerability of a being that's trying his best to fit in without really understanding the people around him kayy spy is fine as rain I guess she doesn't have sigoni Weaver's intensity and Charisma or numi rac's physicality but she gets the job done without too much fuss rain's likable enough and her relationship with Andy is a nice Twist on the usual Dynamics

we see in films like this even if it doesn't come close to the emotional impact of Ripley and new the actors are fine the director's good and the production is excellent the only real problem is the script especially the third act which throws so much ridiculous [ __ ] at you that it honestly feels like it was lifted from a completely different movie before you know it characters will be flying up and down elevator shafts fighting aliens while the gravity goes Haywire or shooting a swarm of them with a pulse rifle and acting surprised when

acid blood goes flying everywhere or injecting themselves with the black goo for no reason so that they can give birth to an alien baby that instantly transforms into a 10t tall human xenomorph engineer hybrid for yet another climactic Showdown the script just never lets up it doesn't know when to quit and instead of being exhilarating it just becomes kind of tedious and exhausting by the end all that carefully crafty tension and World building just goes out of the window in a confusing melor of what I can best describe as JJ ABR brand of Rapid Fire

stupidity just keep hitting the audience with more idiotic stuff that makes zero sense but looks really good so they never have time to stop and think about it before the next dumb thing comes along basically Romulus has got a strong opening a slightly shaky middle and a finale that screws the pooch so hard that the pooch is going to be in therapy for the rest of its natural life it's not exactly a terrible movie but it's definitely not great either and what's frustrating is all the right elements were there to deliver something so much better

than what we got and what's weird is that people seem to be going nuts over this film it's had a huge opening weekend and if you believe the chatter are online it's the greatest thing since Sigourney Weaver picked up a pulse rifle to people who think that way I would politely suggest they go back and rewatch the first two aliens movies really think about how they worked how they handle their characters and relationships and escalate the tension and Stakes while staying fairly believable and then come back and tell me what you really think about Romulus

somehow I don't think you'll be quite so positive anyway that's all I've got for today go away now