Tag Archives: Weyland-Yutani

Movies

Predator: Badlands

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Predator: Badlands Theatrical Poster

My Expectations : 7/10
My Rating : 7/10

Having seen the trailer for Predator: Badlands, I was not too excited to watch the movie. However, there was no way I could miss it, so I took the day off and went to watch it.

The Movie

The movie starts at Yautja Prime, the home planet of the Yautja. They are shown as a martial clan with strict honour codes.

Dek, is the runt of his clan whose father wants him culled. He goes to Genna to kill the Kalisk and bring its head back as a trophy to prove his worth and earn his cloak.

Once there, he “makes friends” with Thia, half of a Weyland-Yutani synthetic. They have interesting camaraderie. Dek tries to brute-force his way through each problem, whereas Thia teaches him to work with the planet instead of fighting it.

Along the way, everyone learns that the real villain is not the Kalisk, but “corporate greed”. Eventually, Dek proves himself as worthy of being a Yautja & avenges the death of his brother, making new friends along the way.

My Thoughts

I always thought of the Yautjas as mysterious creatures who we rarely saw, always hiding in the shadows. Knowing little about them made their lore more interesting. This movie shatters all of that and brings us up close and personal with them. It was shocking to see one of them being slapped in the face by a cute monkey-like creature. There are multiple comic moments involving the Yautja. He even shares jokes and tender moments with the other characters.

That being said, the action sequences are really cool. It was cool to see Dek (deprived from his high-tech weapons) use the planet’s flora and fauna against the Weyland-Yutani synths, not unlike Dutch from the first movie. He also uses the Weyland-Yutani pulse rifles against them. The fight scene with the 2 halves of Thia fighting simultaneously was also cool. There’s even a loader fight scene for good measure.

This movie is also the first Predator or Alien movie without a single human character.

Overall, a good action movie, but not how I wanted to see the Predators.

Movies

Alien : Romulus

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Alien : Romulus

My Expectations : 5/10
My Rating : 8/10

Alien: Romulus (2024) on IMDb

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

  1. It was good to see a clone of Ash, from the original Alien movie, played by a cgi-ed  Ian Holm.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. The scene where the ship is in zero-g and they have to float through swirling globs of acid-blood was great.
  5. The Xeno-human was terrifying in appearance, especially the scene where it is nursing on its dead human mother/host.
  6. 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.