My Expectations : 5/10
My Rating : 8/10
I had been looking forward to Alien : Romulus with high expectations for a long time. However, I tempered my expectations down by a lot after watching the boring teaser trailer. Thankfully, the trailer was not an accurate representation of the movie.
Movies in the Alien franchise all had varied themes over the years.
- Ridley Scott’s original was a horror/survival movie.
- James Cameron’s Aliens was a typical Hollywood action movie.
- Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and Alien: Covenant had philosophical undertones. Prometheus is still my favourite movie in the franchise.
- The less said about the remaining movies, the better
Alien : Romulus goes back to the basics and is a horror survival movie. Thankfully, the movie is excellent and doesn’t disappoint.
Spoiler Alert
The movie starts with a Weyland-Yutani ship retrieving the Xenomorph from the first movie from the wreck of the Nostromo.
Cut to present-day, we are introduced to Rain (The female protagonist of this movie) and her android brother Andy who their parents had retrieved from the trash, where he was discarded by the company. He has internal malfunctions, which make him equivalent to an autistic in humans and is prone to sensory overloads. They live in Jackson’s Star mining colony, which is a hellscape they are desperate to escape.
An opportunity to move to another star system appears, but to do that, they need to enter cryogenic sleep and to do that, they need to steal cryo-pods from the derelict twin spacecrafts called Romulus-Remus.
It looks like a simple enough mission as they enter Remus and quickly locate the cryo-pods. However, the cryo-pods are low on fuel and to get more fuel, they need to go deeper into the spacecraft. You know immediately that things are going to go wrong soon.
Long story short, they trigger the thawing of facehuggers that the evil company had been growing, one of whom impregnates one of their crew. The rest of the movie is typical Alien fare with the humans getting picked-off by the Xenomorphs one-by-one.
Worth Mentioning
- It was good to see a clone of Ash, from the original Alien movie, played by a cgi-ed Ian Holm.
- It was good to see a bit more of the Xenomorph life-cycle, especially between the chestburster and full-Xenomorph stage, shedding its organic skin and replacing its cells with polarised silicon.
- I liked the parallel with Aliens where having almost reached their escape craft, the female protagonist goes back all the way to save one more.
- The scene where the ship is in zero-g and they have to float through swirling globs of acid-blood was great.
- The Xeno-human was terrifying in appearance, especially the scene where it is nursing on its dead human mother/host.
- The relatively lesser-known cast acted well.
Overall, I am very happy to have seen that Fede Álvarez didn’t disappoint and made an actually good (and terrifying) movie.