The Alien/Predator/Aliens vs. Predator Thread

[Kanedas Bike]

Romulus is a good movie, it very much leaned into Alien in feel and tone, going back to it's roots of sci-fi horror vs. other entries in the series that were more action oriented. For anyone concerned that the trailers showed too much, there were still plenty of surprises to be had.

There are a lot of callbacks, they range from "hey! that's cool" to "oh, for f#cks sake" but none of them ruin the movie.

My only real gripe is

Spoiler

How much of the final act leans into Prometheus and Covenant, the big clue should have been how involved Ridley Scott was. I feel like he hijacked parts of this movie to bring some measure of closure to the terrible Prometheus/Covenant storyline. 

I'd rank the movies in this order -

Aliens

Alien

Alien: Romulus

Alien: Resurrection (hated the stupid hybrid, wasn't bothered by clone Ripley but this gets points for not being the movie that killed Hicks and Newt)

Alien 3 

Alien: Covenant

Prometheus (beautifully shot film, populated by the some of the stupidest characters ever put on screen)

-b.

[Black Valkyrie]

 

It was a good movie, a homage to the original movie with a little mix. 

 

[kajnrig]

Don't we have a dedicated Romulus thread? No? I must be crazy, then.

Anyway, saw it, enjoyed it. I saw the director's credits included Evil Dead, which had me worried because the most recent one was kind of meh, but it turns out it was the earlier 2013 reboot, which I really liked.

As a non-fan of the franchise, I didn't get caught up in recognizing (and judging) many of the callbacks, and I enjoyed the few that I did. It was smart about remixing ideas from previous films while maintaining its own identity instead of just being disjointed winks and nods toward the camera. I especially enjoyed

Spoiler

there being more than one Xenomorph.

I know that's been like, a thing about the franchise since its early days, and it was done smartly here.

I don't mind the Prometheus/Covenant references. I don't know if I like the lore that they bring to the Alien universe per se, but I'm not married to rejecting them, either. As someone who hasn't seen Alien 3 or 4... or even most of 2, now I think about it... I find the Prometheus/Covenant lore at least somewhat more interesting than whatever those films did. Clone with genetic memory because Ripley Xenomorph baby plus Queen DNA in lava? What?

I think I just kind of don't care too strongly either way. But regardless, again, it went about it smartly. I, a super casual, had a fun time with the movie.

 

They go ham with the sex imagery. I know that's also a staple of the franchise, something something sexual violence metaphor, but they really go ham with it this time. Things that look like an engorged penis REALLY look like an engorged penis, and whatever doesn't looks like an engorged vagina instead. Just... everything alien is either a wang-wang or a hoo-hah.

Edited August 18 by kajnrig

[Big s]

12 minutes ago, kajnrig said:

They go ham with the sex imagery. I know that's also a staple of the franchise, something something sexual violence metaphor, but they really go ham with it this time. Things that look like an engorged penis REALLY look like an engorged penis, and whatever doesn't looks like an engorged vagina instead. Just... everything alien is either a wang-wang or a hoo-hah.

That’s mostly due to the creepy pervy vision of H.R. Giger. His artwork is very detailed and extremely pervy. And if you ever get to see a making of on how the original sculpt was made for the alien from the original movie, it’s pretty creepy. The guy used vehicle parts and animal flesh and meat.

Honestly, the guy could probably get a horror movie based on his life

[Raikkonen]

On 8/17/2024 at 5:02 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

In what way is that a spoiler?  It's a bloody interquel set between Alien and Aliens. 🤣

Spoiler

It's in context with the flow of comments of twist + new hybrid being at the end alla resurrections and etc. 

 

[Raikkonen]

So everyone else that's seen is fine with the smack in your face opening plothole of... 

Spoiler

... struggling teenagers with their ship who work as poor labourers on a mining planet owned by a "evil" and "powerful" company, detect the signal of the Romulas which belongs to the same company and harbours their expensive project which it's existence relays on, yet the "powerful" company didn't detect the Romulas signal, nor detect the teenagers going to the Romulus. 

And that's just the opening premise of the story. 

 

Edited August 18 by Raikkonen

[Hikuro]

I saw it last night, I'll probably see it again. I'd probably rank it closely with Alien, but still enjoy Aliens way more. 
 

[Kanedas Bike]

6 hours ago, Raikkonen said:

So everyone else that's seen is fine with the smack in your face opening plothole of... 

  Reveal hidden contents

... struggling teenagers with their ship who work as poor labourers on a mining planet owned by a "evil" and "powerful" company, detect the signal of the Romulas which belongs to the same company and harbours their expensive project which it's existence relays on, yet the "powerful" company didn't detect the Romulas signal, nor detect the teenagers going to the Romulus. 

And that's just the opening premise of the story. 

 

Yes.

 

Spoiler

Based on well established "lore" from movies, comics, books and other media around how Weyland-Yutani behaves it's just as likely that they'd written the station off as a loss, as it would have been that a team had already been dispatched to try and recover whatever research that they could. And with the original timeline of Romulus-Remus crashing into the planet's rings in 36 hours, even if the corporation knew where the station was, they wouldn't have had time to do anything about it.

In either event, it wasn't a plot point that needed to be covered since the story didn't incorporate any other WY antagonists beyond Not-Ash aka Rook.

 

-b.

[kajnrig]

I wouldn't even consider it a plot hole, really, more a reasonable suspension of disbelief. That said, it does feel like the kind of innocuous handwave that CinemaSins would !DING! the movie for...

EDIT: 

Also, I had myself a good chuckle when the credits came up and the lead actress just happens to be named Cailee Spaeny.

Edited August 18 by kajnrig

[MKT]

Went to watch it on a whim yesterday on the back of generally good early sentiments of it. Before this, I've only ever watched the first teaser trailer that came out months ago, and at that time it felt a bit wearying like its beating another tired old horse, with the visuals looking like it was made more for streaming rather than with a big-screen experience in mind.

Came out pleasantly surprised that the flick is so much better than what the teaser suggested. I think the visuals looked exactly right, with good effects and mood setting throughout its runtime. A problem I notice more often with cinemas post pandemic is that the equipment may be behind on their maintenance schedules, and movies with dark and limited light settings like this demand good projection calibration in their brightness settings, so I was thankful there were no issues on this aspect in the hall I was in.

I'm only catching up with detailed reviews now, and there have been some criticisms on its story in that it recycles a lot of old ideas. I think it depends on how much of a fan one is of the originals, and when was the last time we watched it. It has been many, many years since I watched the originals, so although there were homages that I recognize, I didn't think it was too much on the nose. Sometimes, franchises do need this after years of straying into the wilderness - to remind what makes the originals great but in a different take, with enough scenes that makes it stand on its own. This is why I thought SW Episode 7 was pretty enjoyable when it came out, which in turn reminds me exactly of how Macross Frontier homaging its older brethren at that time.  

There have been other titles more recently that lean into nostalgia like Ghostbusters Afterlife & Prey, but I think Romulus is a better movie from this standpoint. I'm hearing terms like 'back to horror' being thrown about, but at this point most of us are pretty familiar with the xenomorphs that it is not scary anymore. The movie does have thick suspense & some inventive scenes though. 

[Pontus]

I'm reminded of 2 quotes after seeing the movie last night and now considering what to post here...

"A horror movie with jump scares is like a comedian walking into the audience, tickling everyone, then claiming they're funny because everyone laughed."

The jump scares in other alien films at least have quick building movement and genuine scare factor.  This movie had unscary bs instant frame flip jump scares that were cheap and felt more like a video game or b movie.

And, "If you can't say anything nice..."  Well, I'll just say I liked Prometheus better.   My face hurts and my arm is tired from facepalms and wtf gesturing.

I'll give you a bonus quote, "Buy the premise, buy the bit."  I didn't buy the premise.  

But hey, there's another alien toy to buy!  (Spoilers in the product pics at this link)

[Raikkonen]

1 hour ago, Kanedas Bike said:

Yes.

 

  Hide contents

Based on well established "lore" from movies, comics, books and other media around how Weyland-Yutani behaves it's just as likely that they'd written the station off as a loss, as it would have been that a team had already been dispatched to try and recover whatever research that they could. And with the original timeline of Romulus-Remus crashing into the planet's rings in 36 hours, even if the corporation knew where the station was, they wouldn't have had time to do anything about it.

In either event, it wasn't a plot point that needed to be covered since the story didn't incorporate any other WY antagonists beyond Not-Ash aka Rook.

 

-b.

LOL... you kidding me? 🤣🤣🤣 

Spoiler

POOR TEENAGERS, get the Romulus signal on the company's mining planet, and head off on their ship, the poor mining teenagers, but the company didn't get the signal, nor anyone else near there a system owned by the company, nor does the company detect the kids going to it. 

 

22 minutes ago, Pontus said:

I'm reminded of 2 quotes after seeing the movie last night and now considering what to post here...

"A horror movie with jump scares is like a comedian walking into the audience, tickling everyone, then claiming they're funny because everyone laughed."

The jump scares in other alien films at least have quick building movement and genuine scare factor.  This movie had unscary bs instant frame flip jump scares that were cheap and felt more like a video game or b movie.

And, "If you can't say anything nice..."  Well, I'll just say I liked Prometheus better.   My face hurts and my arm is tired from facepalms and wtf gesturing.

I'll give you a bonus quote, "Buy the premise, buy the bit."  I didn't buy the premise.  

But hey, there's another alien toy to buy!  (Spoilers in the product pics at this link)

Yup. And yup. I've become a firm believer that good visuals switch off modern brains to the rest of a film's content. 

[Kanedas Bike]

54 minutes ago, Raikkonen said:

LOL... you kidding me? 🤣🤣🤣 

  Reveal hidden contents

POOR TEENAGERS, get the Romulus signal on the company's mining planet, and head off on their ship, the poor mining teenagers, but the company didn't get the signal, nor anyone else near there a system owned by the company, nor does the company detect the kids going to it. 

 

No, I am not kidding you, did I add a laugh emoji or a "lol"?

If it's a bridge too far you, then fair enough but it certainly was not for me, and again seems pretty on-par for how "the company" has been portrayed for years, across multiple mediums. 🤷‍♂️

-b.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, Raikkonen said:

So everyone else that's seen is fine with the smack in your face opening plothole of... 

  Hide contents

... struggling teenagers with their ship who work as poor labourers on a mining planet owned by a "evil" and "powerful" company, detect the signal of the Romulas which belongs to the same company and harbours their expensive project which it's existence relays on, yet the "powerful" company didn't detect the Romulas signal, nor detect the teenagers going to the Romulus. 

And that's just the opening premise of the story. 

Mate, that's not a plot hole... anyone who's worked a white collar job at a major corporation knows that that's a perfectly believable example of corporate bureaucracy in action.

If it weren't for NDAs, there are SO MANY examples I could share just from my own work experience.

Weyland-Yutani is a megacorporation.  It's an even bigger, even more openly amoral, version of the multinationals we have today.  Like any other large corporation, employees are going to be encouraged to stay in their lane and mind their own responsibilities and let their fellow employees get on with theirs.  Odds are someone, likely multiple someones, at Weyland-Yutani are aware of the signal but it's either outside their department so they don't care, they've referred it up the chain of command in the direction of someone with the authority to Do Something about it but it hasn't reached them yet through the many intervening layers of management, the team responsible got reorganized and don't know who owns it now, the team responsible is busy with another crisis and have said they'll get to it later, the message got misrouted to the wrong department and deleted as spam, some mid-level functionary passed it along and it got forgotten in the to-do pile, I could go on.  And on.  And on.  For hours.  Literally.  And that's not even considering possibilities like it being some executive's pet project that the rest of the company is in the dark about.

To give a detail-stripped real world example, an issue that was filed back in July finally reached my desk last Friday at like 2pm.  In the intervening time while the request had been kicked around different levels of management and areas of responsibility with each team saying it wasn't their issue, its severity exploded from a polite request for assistance in a non-specific near-future timeframe to an immediate and critical need for support to prevent a complete halting of development work.

 

 

@Kanedas Bike is also dead-on correct about WY's past presentation.  This is an amoral corporation that is not particularly bothered by large-scale capital losses in the name of their goals.  In Alien, they were willing to sacrifice the Nostromo, its crew, and its massive cargo (a refinery and 20 million tons of ore) just to get their hands on an alien specimen.  In Aliens, they either built the colony on LV-426 specifically to attract an alien or sacrificed it and all of its related resources to get one.  In Alien 3, they shutter an entire city-sized working refinery and forge complex and sell its equipment for scrap because its caretaker population of twenty-two prisoners and three administrators died.  In Prometheus, Weyland Industries's owner puts his company into borderline bankruptcy to find the mission to LV-223 based largely on Shaw's quackery.  In Alien: Isolation, they buy the entire space station Sevastopol from a competitor and sacrifice its entire crew and the crew of the WY freighter Torrens in the hopes of getting their hands on a specimen.  

 

1 hour ago, Raikkonen said:

I've become a firm believer that good visuals switch off modern brains to the rest of a film's content. 

As much as I'd like to call this out as a bit of pretentious film snobbery... it's actually a pretty fair observation about splatter horror as a whole.

The original Alien was psychological horror, but every movie in the franchise thereafter has been more of a splatter horror movie.  People don't come to splatter horror movies for good storytelling.  They come for the spectacle.  For the grotesquerie.  They're here for the visual effects.  Good splatter horror is mindless entertainment, the horror version of a pratfall comedy.  The Human characters are incidental.  Almost props.  The audience is there for the monster, which had better be gross and frightening and visually impressive, and how messily it disassembles the incidental Human cast before Generic Last Character A "defeats" it.

Edited August 18 by Seto Kaiba

[M'Kyuun]

I was excited for this film having only seen a trailer or two and not spoiling it for myself beyond that. I'm a longtime fan of Alien and consider Aliens to be one of the few sequels in the history of film to 'better' its original film. Empire Strikes Back is another, but I digress. I also liked many of the historical elements of Prometheus as well as the character of David 8 whose machinations fall well shy of Asimovian standards.  I barely remember Covenant, which tells you how much of an impact it made on me. Scott's films were beautiful to look at, but elements of story and many of the characters just lacked appeal (except Noomi Rapace, whose presence and performance is nearly always memorable) Of the other Alien sequels, Alien 3 resonated with me for its story, characters and setting and for introducing the Xenomorph's ability to take on the attributes of whatever creature it impregnates, in this case a dog. That Fincher killed off Hicks and Newt right at the start, two characters who deserved more stories in the Alien universe, is his greatest disservice to the franchise.

So Romulus looked like it had promise.

Spoiler

Quickly though, I became disenchanted with the British fellows, especially the one who hated Andy (short for Android?), who turned out to be the most interesting and likeable character in the entire film. Rain was the typical action film heroine, but unlike Sigourney Weaver's Ripley, not much personality beyond an inherent goodness really came through. The pregnant chick was an effective McGuffin to intro a new admittedly creepy version of the Xenomorph whose likeness to the Engineers from Scott's Prequels was doubtlessly purposeful. However, her stereotypical 'dumb chick' schtick when trying to operate a door panel was irritating and I was glad when the Alien whisked her off. Of course, her illogical choice to shoot up with an unknown vial of black stuff provided justification for the film to introduce her not-so-sweet little tyke/ later protagonist of the film after the demise of Rook/ not-Ash, whose CG young likeness of Ian Holm oft fell into the uncanny valley, at least to me. In the last third of the film when Rain was trying to rid herself of Dumb Chick Jr., the needlessly complicated video-game-esque necessity to pull four levers to release the cargo, and hopefully Jr with it, felt frustratingly overwrought; one would think in the future where androids, A.I. and space travel are commonplace ships would have a much simpler way of getting rid of cargo loads, but apparently the drama of the situation is lost when you can simply push a button or just ask the ship's A.I. to do it. Addressing the homages to films past, I caught a couple (obviously, "Get away from her, you bitch" was going to make it in there somewhere, and it did). While I can appreciate the homages, to me it felt a bit too derivative. I get the sense that the director and writers are fanboys and wanted to put all these things in there from previous films, but there was little to no subtlety to how they went about it. It seemed a bit forced, a bit shoehorned in there just to be there. I know I didn't catch all of them, but the ones I did had all the appeal of Andy's dad jokes, more cringey than enjoyable. Overall, I think I was expecting a different sort of film and perhaps, having already seen it and armed with that expectation, I'll enjoy it more on further viewings, but my overall impression was of a highly derivative film full of forgettable, even unlikeable, characters, with a couple exceptions: Andy and Rook, who despite the CG uncanniness otherwise did a pretty good job of projecting Ash's calm creepiness from the OG film.  

 

[Seto Kaiba]

Since my plans for this weekend fell through due to contractor stupidity, I'm headed to see Alien: Romulus tonight.

I'm not sure what it says about the film that, at the time I bought my ticket online a few minutes ago, I was literally the only person attending this showing. 🤔

[kajnrig]

46 minutes ago, M'Kyuun said:

Why Andy

It's very blink and you'll miss it, but Rook refers to him as an ND-somethingsomething model. Probably also because android, yes.

...I think? Are they androids? Robots? Cyborgs? Androids are humanoid robots, or humans with robotic augmentations?

29 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I'm not sure what it says about the film that, at the time I bought my ticket online a few minutes ago, I was literally the only person attending this showing. 

I wouldn't put too much thought in it. The theater I went to was surprisingly full, and the screen right next to us, screening an earlier showtime, had like a handful of seats taken. Reception seems to be split, too, with some fans, critics, and general audiences alike all seemingly evenly-dispersed along the like it-hate it spectrum.

[Seto Kaiba]

5 minutes ago, kajnrig said:

...I think? Are they androids? Robots? Cyborgs? Androids are humanoid robots, or humans with robotic augmentations?

Androids/Synths in Alien are humanoid robots.  They're made to look Human in order to better integrate into the Human workforce.

Alien: Isolation featured a good example of why in the form of the Seegson Systems "Working Joe": a low-cost android for menial labor that was a true native of the uncanny valley with its chalk-white rubber skin and near-featureless CPR dummy face.

The xenos typically ignore them because they're inorganic.

[Hikuro]

In a number of the novels, WY really doesn't care about safety of its employees on black budget projects. I mean one of the stories had a lab trying to prolong or cure the incubation time after impregnation and the lab was on a planetoid tearing itself apart.
And then another lab on a space station that was so close to a sun that if anything got out to the wrong side of the station would be cooked in seconds and used that as a means of destroying Xeno's by opening up the viewing windows of their cages. 
Both those labs were totally destroyed by the end of the novels, well actually the planetoid one was mid way thru, but still. 

Point is, Weyland Yutani goes cheap infact the majority of the Alien universe is setup  that it's all about cost cutting and profit hoarding right down to independent contractors. 
But if ya gotta nitpick a basic alien universe story calling it a plot hole when it's how a number of films go, then lets see you write something? 

[Seto Kaiba]

OK, so I just got back from Alien: Romulus... and I will say this much for it.

There are only three things about this that the studio didn't get right:

• The final monster's design.
• The Ian Holm deepfake.
• The entire goddamn story.

Overall, Alien: Romulus excels in every technical aspect.  The visual design is superb.  The sound design is fantastic.  The practical effects are wonderful.  The digital effects are on the whole very impressive.  Set design is great.  Prop design is solid.  It's a very pretty film... when the lighting permits you to see it, anyway.

It's unfortunate that the two times the visual effects department let the film down were so prominent.  

Spoiler

Rook, the heavily dismembered and acid-burned Hyperdyne Systems Model 120-A/2 "artificial person" who served as Romulus station's chief science officer, is played by Daniel Betts with the assistance of a laughably bad deepfake of Ian Holm c.1978.  It's so badly done that it clearly doesn't even line up with the prop's head half the time, making it look Rook's face is just sort of hanging out the vicinity of his skull instead of actually attached to it.  It looks so incredibly fake it kills immersion every time the camera turns to him.

"The Offspring" - a moniker I am getting no end of amusement out of - is even worse.  

Spoiler

It's a literal and figurative enfant terrible... the child of one of the dumbass Weyland-Yutani wage slaves who was mutated by Rook's black goo-based human evolution serum that its mother took in an attempt to save her own life after being wounded by a xenomorph.  It goes from a very early fetal stage to being born to growing to a massive pro basketball-ready size in like six minutes, and then it goes on a brief rampage before being jettisoned into the planet's ring system.

It's the movie's final and ultimate monster, and it's... well... it's not scary.  It's not intimidating.  It's just a really tall, really spindly dude.  When it first appeared, my honest-to-goodness first thought was that it looked uncannily like Doug Jones without his usual heavy prosthetic makeup.  If you count the random sci-fi gubbins on its back and its elongated fingers and toes it's basically just a Neomorph from Covenant with an Engineer face stuck on it.  It's played by Robert Bobroczky, a Romanian basketball player who played for Rochester University here in MI.  It's a shame this was his acting debut, because the monster he plays looks cheap and stupid in a film with otherwise incredible visuals.

 

Those two very prominent effects failures that undermined an otherwise visually stunning movie aside, the only point that really merits complaint is the story.

Alien: Romulus is not an idiot plot... but it is a plot absolutely infested with idiots.

The stories of Alien and Aliens worked as well as they did, in no small part, because the crew of the Nostromo and the marines of the Sulaco were professionals who did almost everything right... but it still wasn't enough to stop them from becoming Purina xenomorph chow.  Even Alien 3 had its main cast give off the general sense that they were doing everything they could to remain alive once they learned Ripley's story was true.

Alien: Romulus is much closer to the story of Prometheus or Alien: Covenant in that regard.  The young crew of the freighter Corbelan IV suffer from severe cases of horror movie secondary cast member syndrome and as a result seemingly do everything they can to ensure that they die horribly, stupidly, or both.  Rain and Andy, as guests aboard the ship, manage to be exceptions to this and are the only thing standing between the movie and "idiot plot" status.  It may be marginally more explicable as these are dumb wagies who ferry raw materials from the surface to orbit rather than top scientists or veteran long haul space truckers, but they still display every "too dumb to live" trope you'd expect from horror movie non-survivors.  It makes the movie painfully predictable.

The most tedious part of Alien: Romulus is that it seems to be trying to tie up every plot thread it can into a neat little bow like the writers were afraid Fox would never approve another film after this one.

Spoiler

So it turns out Weyland-Yutani received the final transmission from the Nostromo's escape pod many years before the pod itself was actually located.  They went and found Big Chap, who had cocooned itself to survive in space, and then revived it for study.

They managed to study it for a while and even reverse-engineer the black goo from Prometheus and Alien: Covenant from it, which they used to try to develop a serum that'd trigger human evolution to make humanity more suitable for space colonization.  They try to claim this is what Peter Weyland was really after in Prometheus.  It also confirms that David did not create the xenomorphs like the writers of the Alien: Covenant movie wanted to establish, which is fine because that claim didn't track with the timeline on things anyway.  It also seems to establish that the settlement of Hadley's Hope on LV-426 was set up specifically to incite a xenomorph attack, since the company was not aware of where they were, until Ripley apparently pointed out the coordinates to the ship... setting up the events of Aliens and Alien 3.  

Predictably the serum doesn't actually work, though Rook (a synth of the same model as Ash) spends a good chunk of the film coercing Andy into saving it and ensuring it gets to the company for further research, which we know won't go anywhere because the first successful Human-Xenomorph hybrid was Ripley-8 several hundreds years later. 

The visual design is one massive callback to Alien: Isolation, with several interfaces seen in the movie being lifted DIRECTLY from the game. 

 

Really, they could've saved a lot of trouble and nonsense and just made a movie adaptation of Alien: Isolation.  It would've been a lot better and could've reused basically all of the same visuals.

Spoiler

Romulus/Remus Station is basically just a much smaller version of Sevastopol station from Isolation.  It shares a similar design, the interior design is a complete lift of the design from the games, and it even meets the same fate falling into a planet after a collision with a ship causes its orbit to decay.  All that's really missing are the surviving crew members holed up in various areas assuming there's some kind of serial killer roaming around because they haven't actually seen the alien and the creepy uncanny valley Working Joe androids.

There's even an alien hive in the lower levels just like in Isolation.  

That the final alien even makes its way onto the ship they came in on and murders the crew before being flushed into space is the same as Isolation.  

 

All in all, I hate to say it... but I was kind of bored throughout.  Alien: Romulus wants to be a horror movie, but it telegraphs its scares so blatantly with slavish adherance to formula that even startling the audience is frankly a bit beyond what it's capable of.  It has some gore, but not much and frankly it's not excessive or showy with it unlike some other titles in the franchise.  The crew of the Corbelan IV are obnoxious and unlikeable and killing them off provokes exactly zero pathos because they are constantly displaying their Too Dumb To Live status to the point that it's almost a mercy when the consequences of their actions catch up to them.  Rain and Andy are a bit more likeable, but their relationship is never given enough time to properly develop so her risk-everything levels of attachment to this obsolete android just feel suicidal.

The showing I attended had around a dozen people in a theater designed for over a hundred, and around half of those walked out before the film was over... whether that was from the lateness of the hour or just boredom I do not know.

Edited August 19 by Seto Kaiba

[Graham]

It's not perfect, but I have to say I really enjoyed Alien Romulus. It's definitely my 3rd favorite Alien movie, after of course Alien and Aliens.

I've watched it twice at the theatre, the first time in IMAX. In fact, I'm considering to watch it a third time, again in IMAX.

[CoryHolmes]

On 8/18/2024 at 2:12 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

 

Alien: Isolation featured a good example of why in the form of the Seegson Systems "Working Joe": a low-cost android for menial labor that was a true native of the uncanny valley with its chalk-white rubber skin and near-featureless CPR dummy face.

 

"GOT YOU."

 

Brr, almost as creepy and scary as the Alien breathing down my neck.  That is one *terrifying* game and as much as I enjoyed it, I'm not ready for a second playthrough...

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, CoryHolmes said:

Brr, almost as creepy and scary as the Alien breathing down my neck.  That is one *terrifying* game and as much as I enjoyed it, I'm not ready for a second playthrough...

Alien: Romulus's director, Fede Alvarez, is also quite the fan of Alien: Isolation and credits it as a major influence on the movie.

IMO, Alien: Isolation understood the assignment far better than any other attempt to continue the Alien storyline and nothing the franchise has yet produced can rival it for sheer claustrophobic horror.  It's not just the xenomorph passive-aggressively hunting you all around Sevastopol ready to murder you the second you let your guard down, it's the literal isolation on Sevastopol station enforced by the homicidal paranoia of the Human survivors who shoot anyone they don't recognize on sight and the uncanny valley limitations of Sevastopol's Working Joe androids who repeat their limited interaction dialogs offering assistance, information, and safety advisories as they methodically pursue you intent on your death.  

Alvarez supposedly tried to use Alien: Isolation as a guide to making the xenomorph scary again for Alien: Romulus and I'd say he partly succeeded.

Romulus's main xenomorph, the "Scorched" xenomorph, shows a lot more of the patient sadism that Big Chap in the original movie was known for.  He's never far from the main cast, visible in the background of several shots, but he's also patient enough to put off striking until he can maximize his prey's fear.  It's a big reversal from the titles after Aliens where the xenomorph increasingly devolved into a mindlessly aggressive animal.  The only thing Alvarez really did wrong with the xenos was he gave the protagonists guns that could kill a xeno, which greatly diminishes the threat they pose.  Isolation gave Amanda Ripley guns, but because they were low-powered weapons made for police work aboard a space station they could kill an android or a human but were too weak to do more than annoy a xenomorph, which preserved the tension.

[Dangard Ace]

Saw it Sunday on IMAX.  Loved it.  Could've lived without the "secret" final boss at the end.  Definitely in third on my Alien list.

[sh9000]

Nerf Pulse Rifle repaint.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

That's actually really impressive.

I was considering 3D printing one, but if results like that can be got just by modifying the NERF one... 

[TangledThorns]

Just saw ALIEN: Romulus. Total crap. Take a drink every time you saw fan service and you would die from alcohol poisoning within the first half-hour. I didn't think it was possible but somehow the director put all 4 ALIEN movies, the two Prometheus films, and the ISOLATION game through a blender to make this garbage. Many of the scenes made me think, "seriously?"

Seriously disappointed. Was not scared nor thrilled and was tempted to walk out of the movie.

Also didn't care for any of the human characters. WTF?! This seems like a common theme in media these days, no idea why.

I drove home from the theater realizing there will never be a good ALIEN film that is at least equal to the first 2 films nor the same for a game like Isolation.

 

Edited August 21 by TangledThorns

[CoryHolmes]

On 8/21/2024 at 12:40 PM, Dangard Ace said:

Saw it Sunday on IMAX.  Loved it.  Could've lived without the "secret" final boss at the end.  Definitely in third on my Alien list.

Agreed on all counts.

[Seto Kaiba]

On 8/21/2024 at 6:40 PM, TangledThorns said:

Just saw ALIEN: Romulus. Total crap. Take a drink every time you saw fan service and you would die from alcohol poisoning within the first half-hour. I didn't think it was possible but somehow the director put all 4 ALIEN movies, the two Prometheus films, and the ISOLATION game through a blender to make this garbage. Many of the scenes made me think, "seriously?"

Eh... I'd disagree with calling it total crap.  It's visually a very impressive film barring one or two effects failures, but as you pointed out it's basically flying on fanservice and generic horror tropes.

Not an entirely surprising outcome, given that Fede Alvarez is a huge Alien fan and particularly a fan of Isolation.  He seems to have gotten carried away trying to create some kind of Grand Unifying Theory of Alien and forgotten he's meant to be telling a story.

 

On 8/21/2024 at 6:40 PM, TangledThorns said:

Seriously disappointed. Was not scared nor thrilled and was tempted to walk out of the movie.

Also didn't care for any of the human characters. WTF?! This seems like a common theme in media these days, no idea why.

Under the vintage Alien veneer, Alien: Romulus is a pretty blatantly by-the-numbers monster horror movie that doesn't really have anything in terms of surprises.  

It's enjoyable enough if you just want a summer popcorn flick, but any horror aficionado or Alien fan is going to find it incredibly predictable to the extent that it can barely startle never mind scare because even the jumpscares are telegraphed with a wink-wink-nudge-nudge-rememeber-this-from-a-previous-movie sort of setup.

The characters just behave like standard-issue Horror Movie Dumb Teenagers™️, which makes it pretty hard to like them when they seem to be doing their utmost to ensure they become monster chow.

 

On 8/21/2024 at 6:40 PM, TangledThorns said:

I drove home from the theater realizing there will never be a good ALIEN film that is at least equal to the first 2 films nor the same for a game like Isolation.

I keep hoping, but I can definitely understand the disappointment.  

This could've been a lot better if Alvarez could've reined in his fanboy tendencies.

[TangledThorns]

How could they not make any of the human characters likeable and why so few? Even the convicts and criminals in ALIEN3, Resurrection and AVP films were interesting.

If they wanted to do fan service that didn't look like fan service then they should have made a movie based on ISOLATION. Don't understand why they couldn't do that. Legal matters I guess?

Another idea that was in comic book and other media form decades ago was a prequel to ALIENS with Hadley's Hope, that could have been interesting too.

It would be nice to see a 3rd David/Prometheus film for a conclusion but know we won't see it.

Romulus did a great job in making me go into nerd rage and it also succeeded at being the bottom of the list of ALIEN films (yes, its worse than AVP: Requiem imho) so congrats to them on that! 

 

Edited August 23 by TangledThorns

[Seto Kaiba]

5 hours ago, TangledThorns said:

How could they not make any of the human characters likeable and why so few? Even the convicts and criminals in ALIEN3, Resurrection and AVP films were interesting.

Honestly, that's just how modern horror writing is.  It's become a bit lazy, with the attitude that the audience is only really going to care about the obvious final guy/girl and so they don't have to bother properly developing any of the monster bait.

As to why the cast is so small, that's at least justified in the story itself.

Spoiler

Jackson's Star is a tiny and miserable Weyland-Yutani mining colony and the company's trying every dirty trick in the book to maintain the size of the workforce there.  They arbitrarily bump up work quotas to prevent people from leaving when their contracts expire, and the company ships that low level employees who might be flight risks have access to are light freighters too small to carry more than a few people offworld and have been stripped of their cryopods specifically to prevent anyone from trying to flee the system by stealing one.  That's why the crew of the Corbelan IV try to board what they initially thought was a derelict W-Y ship in order to steal an EEV with cryopods to permit them to steal the ship and flee the system.

As old and busted as she was, the Nostromo in the original film was essentially the deep space equivalent of a long haul bulk carrier and was manned by a trusted crew of relatively well-paid professionals.  The ship's crew is structured like that of a freighter... there's a Captain (Dallas), an Executive Officer (Kane), a communications officer (Ripley), a navigator (Lambert), a medic/"science officer" (Ash), and two engineers (Parker and Brett).

The Corbelan IV, by comparison, is something more like the space equivalent of a semi truck.  It can be outfitted for longer trips, but it's mainly used for short distance trips hauling cargo between a storage facility and higher capacity freight hauler presumably similar to the Nostromo.  The ship doesn't seem to have an official division of labor, apart from Navarro being the pilot.  Tyler and Bjorn are presumably there to do the heavy lifting.  The other three crew members are all related too, Kay is Tyler's sister and Bjorn is Kay and Tyler's cousin.  (Made worse, and more stereotypically trucker-ish, in that Fede Alvarez confirmed the father of Kay's child is her cousin Bjorn... cue deep-space banjo noises.)  These aren't highly trained space pilots... these are basically high school dropouts doing the space equivalent of a minimum wage manual labor gig trying to run away by stealing a company truck.

 

5 hours ago, TangledThorns said:

If they wanted to do fan service that didn't look like fan service then they should have made a movie based on ISOLATION. Don't understand why they couldn't do that. Legal matters I guess?

That's definitely a question that bears answering by the director... why didn't they just make a film adaptation of Isolation, which would've been MUCH better.

 

5 hours ago, TangledThorns said:

It would be nice to see a 3rd David/Prometheus film for a conclusion but know we won't see it.

It's probably for the best that we never get that... Prometheus and Alien: Covenant had most of the same problems as Romulus (vis a vis the Too Dumb To Live cast), but in much less justifiable ways and the whole attempt to retcon David into being the creator of the xenomorphs was a terrible idea that never worked because of the timeline involved.

 

5 hours ago, TangledThorns said:

Romulus did a great job in making me go into nerd rage however it succeeded at being the bottom of the list of ALIEN films (yes, its worse than Requiem imho) so congrats to them on that! 

It just left me bored, but compared to some of the awful writing in past installments I'd still put it above Prometheus, Covenant, Resurrection and the AVPs at the very least... and possibly above Alien 3.

[TangledThorns]

Finally saw PREY on Hulu. Well made film. Equal to Predator and Predators. However the Predator in Prey was the most derp though, he pretty much YOLO'd till the end. lol

[sh9000]

https://store.regmovies.com/products/alien-romulus-specimen-popcorn-container-limited-edition-regal-exclusive

[Hikuro]

If it's still available this weekend I'll preorder.

[electric indigo]

See if you can spot her favorite scene.