Alien: Romulus (2024)
In space, no one can hear you
Can’t have a new movie in some of my favorite franchises without putting it on here right! Yep, to complete our Pokemon set, we get to delve into the newest flick that dropped just this week - it’s been a good month for releases between this and the newer Beetlejuice movie, if for nothing else but my nostalgia. We got our laughs out of the way last week, and too much laughing can cause some serious cramps, and that’s a horrific feature of the body. Speaking of body horror, scream all you want in space - it’s time for Alien: Romulus.
In space, we find big rock-looking stuff. When corporations open up big rock-looking stuff in space, we find extraterrestrial life. As we all know - the only thing to follow that is everything going wrong. Let’s be honest though, the big corporations can mess things up all on their own - got a shortage of workers because they keep dying to new diseases and horrible work conditions? Better just update the other workers contracts to over double the hours due before they can take time off! Our main character just found that out the hard way - but one of her friends has an idea to help get them off planet - they just pinged a derelict ship in orbit, and it’s probably got the cryo pods that they’ll need to make a trip to a new life in a new system. They need her, or more specifically her artificial person “brother”, to get in there and take them though, so a little convincing later and they are all off for some scavenging. Want to guess how long it takes for things to go wrong? Between inter-personal relations and things getting too hot to handle, not very - now everyone is fighting for their life as they try to escape this bug-infested station with a bunch of little fellows that are all too happy to find a face to hug.
They took a fun turn here that I honestly wasn’t all too sure about when I had first heard about it - most these actors are folks that are newer names folks might not have heard. Then they twist it further and make them all effectively young adults who feel little more than kids chasing after a dream. It opens up some avenues of younger, less capable characters but carries with it the risk of having acting jobs that don’t deliver as much oomph as they could. I’ll tell ya, I’m pretty satisfied. They do a pretty good job of emoting their butts off while still feeling like there characters aren’t really all-knowing or super old. It thankfully doesn’t go the route of just slathering it in misunderstood lingo and mannerisms that makes you think of that one Buscemi meme - you know the one, the “Hello fellow children” one. That said, there’s fine moments that the actors pull off that help remind you these are younger folks - like being intrigued by the medical scanner. Yes, there are maybe a moment here or there that fall a little more flat than others, but there always is or the superb parts would never really stand out. The main synth actor does a stellar job, and easily spends a good deal of the time as your favorite character even if by the nature of his character the actor ends up having to play into the less emotion of synthetics.
The characters themselves don’t quite fair as well as the actors performing them. Our main, and to some degree our synthetic main, get a bit to play with but it’s far more of a roller coaster ride than it is an intricate piece of one persons formative years. Still, we get enough about most of them to know how we feel about them or how they are tied to each other, and some do go on a bit of a journey across the movie even if their time is a little limited. Funnily enough, even the xenomorphs get a decent bit of characterization this time around, feeling a bit like someone wanted to really infer things through them this time around. For example, when me and my one buddy watched this in theaters, we both came out of one scene where the facehuggers get distracted by a trick one of the heroes plays on them feeling like the ones that got tricked were really miffed off about it, as opposed to it just feeling like it was a “point a point b” kind of mindless drive. That’s a pretty interesting thing to pull off, considering it’s basically the equivalent of someone mashing Thing from the Adams Family together with some private parts and giving it a tail.
Teenage wasteland
The effects here are pretty beautiful as well. Plenty of exterior space shots to ooh and ah about, plenty of gnarly kills and acid melt surfaces. Costumes and (to me) most importantly the technology levels all feel appropriate for the franchise and when it’s set in it. Those who’ve read it might remember one of my biggest complaints with the Prometheus duo was that it didn’t feel like it belonged at all in presentation. Here, it looks like it’s in universe, and it all feel and seems right as it should. That said, it hasn’t thrown out everything for copy paste either - thanks to some science science-ing when it probably shouldn’t have, we get to experience some modified xenos, ones that look similar but do have slight variations to them. Let’s be real, one of everyone’s favorite things about the xenos in this franchise is how varied they can be thanks to hosts and stuff like that, so anytime we get something that isn’t just carbon-copies it’s nice - although as we know of pretty much every fandom, we also don’t want it radically different either.
Audio is well done as well. Line deliveries are good, sound effects are good, and it’s all balanced nicely. It also does that thing I love when movies do where they cut out all the ambient support music for effect, or make space sounds super muffled or gone as well. Much like the effects, a lot of sounds are recognizable but not totally identical, which is a bonus. When the music does turn on, it’s pretty moody and ambient and does what it sets out to - but I admit I don’t recall any of it as per my usual modus operandi. It’s got some good call-back lines to the other movies, but also has one of my favorite other things - puns. A lot of puns. So many puns. Seems the main’s pops programmed a ton of them into her synthetic brother - although the movie doesn’t really use them at super inappropriate times either., which shows a great amount of control. You won’t be in the middle of this grotesquely horrible dark moment and then all of a sudden get a pun slapping you in the face like a wet fish!
I do have some stuff to talk about here that I think has come up in discussions sometimes. There’s a bunch of callbacks in this movie - be it setups, lines, details, whatever level of it there is at the times it’s happening. Sometimes, people really don’t like that, other times everyone has a good time and points at the screen and yells “they said the thing!” It’s going to be something that changes from person to person, but also movie to movie. For example, Prey gave us the “if it bleed we can kill it” line - something that’s a throw back to the first Predator movie. Maybe you hated that and felt like it didn’t belong, maybe it brought the nostalgia flooding right in - part of it is going to be how out of place it feels in timing and delivery. Here, I don’t mind those things, they don’t cause me any real detraction from what I’m seeing or hearing - but it’s a thing that happens. Sometimes, it can be appreciated but still questioned - like anytime a movie uses deepfakes or other tech to “bring someone back from the dead.” Sometimes, like with Tarkin in Star Wars it just really doesn’t look right and you question - “why not just get someone else?” Some of us even question that when it does in fact look good - why not, especially if the role doesn’t necessitate it be a specific character, do we feel so adamant about having that be used instead of getting it to be someone else? All of these are things we can debate about movies as a whole, but even here we get a little of that to come up, and you don’t have to a thinking person to really have your foot on one side of the line or the other. Other things for the more thoughtful types would be plenty of classics - don’t trust the corpos who are just out to make money, don’t use memory sticks you don’t know where they’ve been and what they’ll do, be careful of your emotions and what they’ll make you do, and try not to abandon folks just because it suits you. Be nice to you AI synth friend, just because they are manufactured and calculating doesn’t mean they aren’t people too!
Baby armageddon
I like this movie. It’s probably a solid top 3 in my list (actually probably slot 3) for the franchise (including if you add the AvP crossovers in there). It has exactly what you want out of the movie while providing some updates and fresh looks without going too overboard or overbearing with it’s own philosophy. You can get deep into the events that are happening if you want, but you can also just watch it as a spooky space movie with a body count and some body horror. It’s put together well, has plenty of practical effects, and uses it’s setting and it’s characters to do some interesting things that although maybe not earth-shattering are still really fun to see. If you like the earlier parts of the franchise, definitely check it out.