Review Tuesday: Alien: Romulus (2024)

 

 

ALIEN

ROMULUS

A group of company miners trying to get off planet choose the wrong space station to loot. 

To be honest, the ALIEN franchise has been disappointing for a while so I really had little interest in this movie. It's supposed to fall between ALIEN and ALIENS in the timeline, and the commercials and trailers showed dozens of facehuggers in some facility, so how can this be? In ALIENS they had never seen these things before, so how can there be a space station full of them? Nah, something doesn't line up and I wasn't planning on finding out. 

However, Mr Nailsin on Youtube gave a good spoiler-free review saying that it's the best ALIEN sequel after ALIENS. That isn't saying much but he intrigued me. When my best friend said she wanted to see it for movie night, I was all in. 

 

So this movie gives you more of that gritty feel from the original movie. Similar music also helps set the tone. A group of young miners commandeer a ship to hit up a space station in orbit, the Remus / Romulus, that's been decommissioned and is in a degrading orbit with a collision course with the planet's rings. The plan is get on, steal cryo-fuel, and head off to another colony. Unfortunately, claiming the fuel unleashed the face-huggers kept in storage on this station. Mayhem ensues. 

I would say that, yes, after ALIENS this is probably the best sequel in the franchise. Again, that's not saying music. The film is polished. The special effects are great. The plot is fine. But this thing is bogged down with a bunch of timeline issues. I will get into those in the spoiler section below. After initially watching this I called it OKAY, but after I really sat and thought about it I started to like it less and less. That's the ALIEN fan in my wondering why they can't make an ALIEN movie without serious continuity errors in it...

...

SPOILERS

...

BEYOND THIS POINT

...

...

...

 

This movie takes place 20 years after the events of ALIEN and 37 years before ALIENS.

 

The tragedy on the space station was caused by Ripley's alien. The company somehow knew where the NOSTROMO self-destructed and in the dense debris field of its wreckage they find Ripley's alien in some sort of chrysalis. This was the scene that bugged me the most. Ripley spent over 70 years in cryo-sleep before the company found her, but the company found the wreckage of the NOSTROMO and knew to look for the ALIEN at that spot? We SAW the ship blow up in a huge nuclear blast with shock-waves that rocked the NARCISSUS even at a great distance. Am I wrong to assume that the shock-waves would carry the fragments of the ship to the far reaches of the galaxy? How did all the bits end up clustered like it was a Lego model that was dropped on the floor. AND how did the ALIEN end up IN that wreckage? The Narcissus traveled a good distance before Ripley blew the beast out of the airlock and then out of the engine, and we saw it coming apart. How did it survive??? 

 

The poor CGI of this movie's treacherous Ashe-like android Rook is distracting. It NEVER looks good or convincing. 

 

Rook says that they were looking for the alien ever since it killed the crew of the Nostromo, except for one, until 170 days prior when they found it. How did they know about what happened and where to look?

Why does Andy need to be rebooted SO OFTEN???

Rook explains that the Alien awakes and wrecks the station. Okay. How did they make the facehuggers???

  

The accents on some of the cast is almost undecipherable.

 

How did the offspring know how to speak English?

There are just so many questions this movie creates and continuity errors that it ruined my experience. The more I thought about it, the less I liked it.