By CONNOR KEATING
Tiger Media Network
“Alien Romulus” is the latest film in the “Alien” franchise. Both the original “Alien” and its sequel “Aliens” are some of my favorite movies of all time, featuring unique and cool creatures, likable casts of characters, great soundtracks, and amazing atmospheres. Unfortunately, most of the sequels don’t do the same. So how does “Alien Romulus” stack up?
The film follows a group of teens who want off of a miserable Weyland Yutani mining planet that won’t let them leave. However, a derelict space station with cryopods just entered their planet’s orbit, so they decide to break into the space station and steal the pods to get to a planet outside of Weyland Yutani control, but of course, the space station is derelict for a reason…
It’s hard to talk about this film without spoiling it, and since this is a brand-new film I’m going to give you a spoiler warning right here, right now. If you want to read a brief overview of my thoughts, skip to the last paragraph. You’ve been warned!
The first act of the film is actually pretty good. It does a great job of establishing how miserable life on this mining planet is and how horrible of a company the characters work for is. It also does a good job of establishing the characters, the main two being Rain, our main heroine, and her android brother Andy, who’s definitely the best character in the film. The rest of the cast is okay. They all have the same motivation of getting off the planet. One of them is pregnant, one of them is a pseudo-love interest for Rain, one hates androids because of a mining accident, and they’re all pretty much just Xenomorph incubators, but they get the job done. So yeah, for the first chunk of the film everything is going great, it’s creepy, there’s an intense action sequence with a bunch of facehuggers, and then the moment the film kind of sorta brings back a character from the original movie, it’s all downhill from there.
So basically, the characters find an android that has been split in half named Rook who, for no good reason, looks exactly like Ash from the original “Alien” and is pulled off with some of the worst CGI I have ever seen that makes “Dog With A Blog” look like a groundbreaking achievement in facial animation. From this point onwards, the characters constantly repeat one liners from the older movies and entire sequences and repackaged for this film.
Every once in a while, though, there is a glimmer of someone working on this who wanted to make a real movie. There’s a scene where the characters find a Xenomorph cocoon that’s basically the in-between from Chestburster to Xenomorph, that’s cool to see. They upgrade Andy with a chip from Rook that makes him super smart, but also kinda turns him evil, but not cartoonishly evil, more so that his objective is to secure a sample of what the station was working on, which turns out to be the black goo from “Prometheus” which is lame, but it makes Andy really interesting and helps make things more intense as you never know if he’ll suddenly betray our characters. I also dig the guns in this movie and the way they work. Of course though, this leads to a lot of scenes and lines taken from “Aliens”, and there are some cool action sequences with the Xenomorphs chasing our characters.
It’s a very interesting film because it does some things well, but the constant callbacks and out of place one-liners really take you out of the film, and to cap it all off is a flat-out stupid climax that’s, of course, referencing the original “Alien” the whole way through, but also “Alien Resurrection”… why anyone would want to make a homage to that movie is beyond me.
Basically, the pregnant chick injects herself with the black goo that’s supposed to have healing properties, but it ends up turning her baby into a half-human half Xenomorph monster that looks really stupid. I actually laughed when it showed up on screen. The whole climax becomes very silly because it’s almost identical to the original, but with a really stupid-looking monster.
While “Alien Romulus” does a lot well, once it hits the second act, the film starts to fall off hard. The fan service here became extremely excessive, and the climax is very silly. This could have been a great movie, and it does have some great moments, but as a whole, it’s a pretty mediocre mess. I give this film six “Plot summaries of ‘Alien’ (1979)” out of ten.
Connor Keating is a senior at Fort Hays State University, studying Natural Resources. Connor is an old-school movie fan, particularly Japanese monster movies, and is an avid DVD collector.
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