Tag: xenomorph

Double-U’s Double-Take: Alien Romulus

A spoiler-lite mini movie re-review.

Leave it to “Alien 2” director-cum-marine biologist James Cameron to tell it like it is: “The trolls will have it that nobody gives a shit … then they see the movie again and go, ‘Oh, okay, excuse me, let me just shut the fuck up right now.’ ”

He was, of course, referencing his first “Avatar”. Some will say that Avatar’s purpose was/is entertainment and, yes, millions of people can’t be wrong. But I’ve reluctantly seen the first film three times, and re-watching it twice over didn’t make me value what Cameron had accomplished any more: it just made me numb to it. I can’t appreciate the pretty picture if it serves a vapid purpose.

While Cameron has the privilege of an unlimited budget & complete creative control, the “Alien” franchise has consistently reinvented itself over the decades, accented by shrinking returns under different directors who, largely, have all have brought something new to the table – but to no lasting conformist appeal.

I have now digested “Alien 7” twice. I used to think seeing any movie more than once at full-price was a sign of constancy (“The Island“) – now I’ve apparently entered the life phase of keeping my mouth shut while I tolerate an afternoon with my curmudgeonly dad and he says he wants to see something.

My greatest detachment this second spell came from how we are seven movies in to this series – not including the various spin-offs – and producers still haven’t indulged audiences with a more thorough study of the xenomorph social structure, or how they go about plastering all that sticky gunk to the walls. Director Fede Alvarez’s team introduces cocooning, but how the Hell was it forged in the span of a few minutes? I would have even taken a cheesy shot of the baby xenomorph spitting black goo at the wall and just have the whole thing appear out of nowhere. A slimy new bit of set-dec of its own accord is not compelling anymore – not in this series.

Rather than existing as its own entity within the ‘Alien cinematic universe’, Romulus is Alvarez pulling a de Sade, using his own blood to scribble all the things he loved about the films that came before onto toilet paper, and all the ways he thought he could make them better.

Click here for the original review.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. Despite trying to go in with no expectations this time around, I still couldn’t help hypothesizing alternate scenarios to the reanimation of Ian Holm: couldn’t they have used Lance Henriksen instead? Wouldn’t Bishop have been the ‘hot, new’ synthetic, going off Romulus’ place in the series chronology? Wouldn’t Henriksen – who’s made a career playing literally anyone in anything – have jumped at the opportunity to approach the role from a more maniacal angle, such as his own Weiland from “AVP”? Could you help picturing the ‘Dream Team’ of Fassbender & Henriksen instead of Jonsson & Not-Holm, or did you even care? Let me know in the comments!

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Dub’s Take: Alien Romulus (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

1 out of 5

The trailer for “Alien 7” supplied plenty of expectations: that it would be another hackneyed interpretation of a beloved franchise’s Greatest Hits from “Evil Dead 2013” director Fede Alvarez (News Flash: it is); that it would have yet another underdeveloped White female character as the lead – unrelated to the others – who grows from meek to mighty by the credits (it does); and that it would favour fan service & exponential antecedence (not just one Facehugger, but a bushel!) over action scenes that last longer than a finger snap, and taking narrative risks like predecessors “Prometheus” & “Covenant” (you betcha).

But never in my wildest dreams could I have predicted what Fede did here with the teased returning (and deceased) legacy actor, brought back with the help of computers (and I’m sure a healthy donation to their late estate) only to serve as a literal talking head, “Futurama”-style. Even after running through all the major players from all six prior Alien movies in my head to guess who it could have been, I never considered the one it ended up being.

However, the real sin of this decision – aside from its contemptuousness – is that, without knocking David Jonsson’s turn as resident ‘synthetic’ Andy, Alvarez missed a huge opportunity in not bringing back Michael Fassbender’s David. The ‘black goo’ from Covenant plays such a crucial part of the story here that this one casting change could have given fans a cross-generational interpolation of both eras of the franchise, as well as a proper placeholder for the true “Covenant” sequel we never got.

Optimism-bias aside, I found Romulus boring. It’s such a pastiche of the prior films that it has no identity of its own, even copying its finale from “Resurrection”. Cailee Spaeny’s heroine Rain is another identical sibling to Katherine Waterston & Noomi Rapace, and just as superficial. New ideas – such as the cocoon sack and Facehugger evasion tactics – are invalidated by the movie’s nonsensical timeline (when did it make the cocoon?) and continuity cock-ups (the Facehugger swarm disappears from one shot to another). And the best summation of the film’s lack of action is that there’s an entire sequence inspired by the Sentry Gun from the inferior, meandering Special Edition of “Aliens”.

Romulus is short on thrills and heavy on dead, reanimated actors. Forget John Krasinski’s Rogers ad: AI will be replacing all y’all soon enough.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Were you baptized into Alien series snobbery by one of your parents, too? Do you hold out hope for Noah Hawley’s upcoming Alien TV series, even though I thought his “Fargo” show fizzled-out with that time-jump halfway through its first season? Have you also seen the first Alien film an excessive amount of times that you never want to see it again? Let us know in the comments, why don’cha?

Posted on by wd 0