Alien: Romulus

October 17, 2024

Finally watched Alien: Romulus. For me there was a lot to like and a lot to dislike. There will be a lot of spoilers in here, but the movie has been out for a while so I’m assuming most people who’d be bothered by them will have already seen it.

I’ll start with the positive:

• I liked the Renaissance space station and the Romulus/Remus sections etc. Cool world building.
• On that note I really liked the mining colony and all the stuff about Andy. The overall setup and premise for this was really good.
• I liked the addition of the cocoon to the Alien’s life cycle.
• They used the word “xenomorph” in a way that I consider to be correct. ie it’s not the name of the species, it’s a word that means “alien lifeform” and Rook refers to this particular species as Xenomorph XX121. I will die on this hill, the Alien’s name is not John Xenomorph.
• Andy getting the personality of Rook, or rather a company science officer, from the chip was cool.
• The zero gravity acid blood sequence was cool!

And now the stuff I disliked:

• The life cycle of the Alien continues to be compressed and I’m not a fan. I know the originals also have issues with this and I suppose it actually makes more sense for the “chest burster” to grow very quickly because the “drone” does, but I just don’t like that it’s only like 5 minutes from face hug to chest burst. In the original it was at least hours and potentially days that Kane was in stasis until the face hugger died. And then he was awake and moving around for a while after that. I know it’s a narrative device used to build tension and that it’s redundant in later films because we know what’s going to happen - it’s not a surprise - but it’s now very inconsistent. And some will say (and have said online) that “this is a different variation because they extracted the black goo from the Alien and engineered them” but now you’re making me dislike this movie even more.
• On that note, I saw them retrieve the Alien and it was presumably in a cocooned state. Cool. But if they only had the alien, where did they get the face huggers? And if the answer has anything to do with the Prometheus goo then I’m out, because we’ve seen many time on screen that the goo is too unpredictable for that to make sense. It’s always a weird random variation, like that thing at the end of the movie. So my question stands: where did the face huggers come from in this movie? We aren’t told, which is fine, except it raises questions about the sequels. If THAT variation of Alien is only on LV-426 then it follows that those face huggers are also only on that planet. But in Aliens the company doesn’t have them yet, even if they know about them. Anyway, it’s probably not worth spending the time trying to tease all this out because I don’t think it will actually ever make perfect sense. And I hate this variation nonsense. The Alien was better when it was just species of Alien from space, not this weird goo created thing. I love Prometheus but I’m realising I loved it as a standalone, Alien themed fan fiction, and not actually part of the direct storyline. Whenever Prometheus actually bumps directly into Alien it’s bad. See Alien: Covenant, which I rewatched a little while ago and forgot to post my thoughts. I’ll dig them up and link to them.
• Deep fake Ian Holm. Good Lord. When they first showed the synthetic on the ground I thought “oh neat, it looks like Ash but they’re just gonna let you figure that out.” Nope. They wake it up and it’s honestly the scariest thing in the movie. I’m genuniely surprised by how much they chose to show it, they just kept coming back to it and don’t know why they didn’t just use the voice on the comms or something, they must know how bad it looked. A very odd decision.

Overall I enjoyed the first half of the movie a lot more than the second half, but the more I think about the movie the less I like it. Too many things that don’t make sense to me.