Alien: Romulus (2024)
I had heard decent things about this as it should be a sort of return to form for the franchise. Maybe I am just incapable of appreciating mainstream blockbusters now, but I was mostly disappointed. With some notable good parts.
First of, the intro tries to mimic 2001 in style and sound. Bold, but it doesn’t work when you can’t live up to even a small percentage of that reference. Secondly, the whole premise with escaping the mining planet wasn’t very convincing. I am not buying this group of random people just have access to a spaceship they unhindered can take off with and the whole setup becomes completely irrelevant after 15 minutes. Of course the plot needs some reason for them to enter that station not knowing what is there, but it could have been handled better I think.
There is a varied cast of characters, but I practically don’t care about any of them and we barely get any character development or background either. So I am not emotionally invested at all once they get killed off one by one.
The only one with an interesting story is the synthetic Andy. He actually has an interesting character progression throughout the film, that opens the always interesting dilemmas of artificial life and how it should be weighed against biological life. Rain is fine, but being so much a copy of Ripley makes her uninteresting. It tries to sits somewhere in between Alien and Aliens but lacks the anxiety of the first one, and the spectacle isn’t nearly as exciting as the second one.
Rating: 2