Alien: Romulus – Review
I have been an Alien fan since, well since the first Alien movie. I have watched each of the movies in the series and that brings me to the latest, Alien: Romulus.
While I like the premise of the movies, the timeline is confusing. There are a couple of prequels and Romulus actually fits in between Alien (the first movie) and Aliens (the second movie). I am actually rewatching the movies in their narrative chronological order rather than their release order.
The challenge of the Aliens movies is that they all have the same premise. Humans come into contact with the aliens. An alien baby is implanted in a human, killing them, and the baby quickly grows to take out the rest of the crew, except for one. Oh, and there is a synthetic being involved in some way.
And yet somehow, it still works.
I enjoyed Alien: Romulus, even though it does closely follow this plan. Everything happens the way you would expect, except for a few twists.
The crew that encounters the aliens are younger than we normally encounter. They are trying to escape the enslaved existence on a mining planet. Their only hope is to get some cryostasis equipment from an abandoned space station so they can travel to a far away planet where they can be free.
Unfortunately for them, and this is not really a spoiler, there are some of the aliens that implant the baby aliens into humans. You can imagine where it goes from there.
Like I said, there are some twists and this is not just Alien remade with better technology. One of the good things about the movie is the main character Rain and her relationship with Andy, a synthetic reprogrammed by her father, and someone she considers her brother.
In fact, Andy is the best part of the movie. I cannot give details because they would be spoilers. David Jonsson does an excellent job of portraying the different sides of Andy. Plus, Andy tells endless Dad Jokes, many of which I have told myself. I felt seen.
There is another twist, this one another form of the aliens that we have not seen before. Very disturbing and terrify, I won’t say anymore.
I also liked the appearance of the kind of synthetic we have seen in the older movies. It was a nice tie-in to what has come before.
I appreciated how they tried to make everything look like the technology from the original movies. This is always a challenge when you revisit an era of sci fi franchise forty years after the originals.
To be honest, I thought they would have given up on Alien movies years back. I never expected it to go beyond a trilogy. But Alien: Romulus shows that there is still some life in the Alien franchise.
