Alien: Romulus
I know they don't exist, but damn do I hate and fear
those creatures
dir: Fede Alvarez
2024
I have to say I am quite surprised by how entertaining this flick is. I say that because I feel like the two films before it, being Alien: Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, I am pretty sure, were made to leach all hope and life from those watching, and to convince us all we’re total fools for expecting anything good to come of any franchise ever again.
That’s a bit harsh. Let me say instead that there were a lot of ideas in those two Ridley Scott directed films that didn’t sit well with me and just annoyed me, more than anything. They felt like an elaboration on themes that felt unnecessary and unwarranted, and I couldn’t imagine the person who cared about any of it who wasn’t Ridley Scott. Whatever it was that made people battling the xenomorphs in the very first two films enjoyable to watch, was entirely absent for me in films that argued that their origins, actually, were because of a bad robot and a race of albinos with a magical evil liquid that kills things or makes them more evil.
This flick perversely situates itself somewhere in what ends up feeling like the past. It’s set some time between Alien and Aliens, I think, with the deliberate aesthetics to match. And as the setting is a space station divided into two halves, one of those halves matches the aesthetics of Alien, so it looks gritty and industrial (with an orange gel / filter to match, in terms of cinematography), and the other half is blueish, and looks a bit shinier (to match some of the look of the James Cameron helmed Aliens.
In a similar manner, bits and pieces across many of the films are picked up and slotted in to areas, kinda like a jumble of Lego plot points, or a Tetris-like melange where the familiar is woven into a newish pattern. Generally, or when done by hacks, this would strike me as lazy filmmaking. But I genuinely think Fede Alvarez and the screenwriter do what they do adeptly, with known / familiar material, in a similarly competent manner like they did with Evil Dead Rise. It’s using established elements well but not slavishly adhering to scenes and shots like too much variance would be blasphemy.
And again, just like in Evil Dead Rise, there is practically no mercy shown to anyone. You think “surely they won’t kill…”, and they’re like “of course we’ll kill them, we’re looking forward to it”.
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