As an avid fan of the first four Alien movies, I found a lot to like about Alien: Romulus, but I also felt that it fell short towards the end.
On a technical level it's a great film. I loved the practical effects and the amazing sets they built. They felt real and lived in with a tactile quality that is so often missing from movies today. I was also pleasantly surprised by the acting from a cast that I have not seen before in anything else.
Alien: Romulus does an admirable job introducing us to its main characters, and for the most part it gives us a good enough reason to care about what happens to them. From there we get sent on a suspenseful journey that slowly builds into a horrific nightmare. There are some truly memorable horror scenes that may become as iconic for the franchise as Ripley's face-to-face with the Xenomorph in Alien 3, or her dock-loader moment in Aliens.
Unfortunately, the script veers off into fan-service about two thirds through. Instead of introducing their own memorable lines, we're treated to repeats of iconic lines from prior Alien movies. We also get parts of the plot from several of the previous entries. With just a third of the movie left, we're introduced to a bunch of new storylines that seemingly try to tie Romulus to every other Alien film that came before it. The result is a bit of a messy ending, that left me wishing the editor had just left the last 30 to 40 minutes on the cutting room floor. It was a little jarring because everything up to that point had been tightly focused.
To sum up my review, I found Romulus to be an enjoyable watch with some truly unsettling horror moments, but it felt like overly indulgent fan-service and lack of more stringent editing kept us from getting what could have been a truly great Alien movie.
On a technical level it's a great film. I loved the practical effects and the amazing sets they built. They felt real and lived in with a tactile quality that is so often missing from movies today. I was also pleasantly surprised by the acting from a cast that I have not seen before in anything else.
Alien: Romulus does an admirable job introducing us to its main characters, and for the most part it gives us a good enough reason to care about what happens to them. From there we get sent on a suspenseful journey that slowly builds into a horrific nightmare. There are some truly memorable horror scenes that may become as iconic for the franchise as Ripley's face-to-face with the Xenomorph in Alien 3, or her dock-loader moment in Aliens.
Unfortunately, the script veers off into fan-service about two thirds through. Instead of introducing their own memorable lines, we're treated to repeats of iconic lines from prior Alien movies. We also get parts of the plot from several of the previous entries. With just a third of the movie left, we're introduced to a bunch of new storylines that seemingly try to tie Romulus to every other Alien film that came before it. The result is a bit of a messy ending, that left me wishing the editor had just left the last 30 to 40 minutes on the cutting room floor. It was a little jarring because everything up to that point had been tightly focused.
To sum up my review, I found Romulus to be an enjoyable watch with some truly unsettling horror moments, but it felt like overly indulgent fan-service and lack of more stringent editing kept us from getting what could have been a truly great Alien movie.
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