New Thing #2: Alien: Romulus

Not a great way to kick off the new year.

SPOILERS FOR ALIEN: ROMULUS AHEAD

I went into Alien: Romulus with fairly low expectations, and the first hour was OK, but man, the back half of the movie seems like it is trying to get exponentially worse with every scene. The entire last section with Kay and her baby could have been cut out altogether, and the film would be no worse.

When it comes to Alien (or Predator) movies, I feel like Hollywood needs to remember the old acronym K.I.S.S - “Keep it simple, Stupid!” These films don’t need to do too much to be entertaining. If you’re heading into the back half of a film and need a long expository scene to explain a plot development, you’re doing it wrong.

I also feel like this film makes the cardinal sin of confusing the two first Alien movies. Romulus seems like it wants to be a horror movie but then it adds tons of aliens, which worked in Aliens because that was an action film. In my opinion, there isn’t a single scene in this film that is better because there are multiple aliens involved. If they had just one or maybe two or three, it would have been scarier. Even the zero-G acid blood scene would be better if they played with just a little blood, but we show our hero struggling to move rather than watching her easily bounce around for most of it.

Hollywood needs to learn from every parent who has spent hundreds of dollars on presents only to have their children end up playing with the empty box that the toys came in. Sometimes, simpler things that leave room for the imagination are more entertaining.

Also, one of my pet peeves is Just because you can do it with CGI doesn’t mean you should. For me, the entire final forty or so minutes of the film was so reliant on CGI that it just wasn’t scary at all. I was mostly hoping the film would end already. Similarly, I get that they wanted a callback but just cast a new actor in the Ian Holm role. (Oh, and the “Get away from her, you bitch” callback might be the corniest callback of all-time.)

Anyway, I’ve got Nickel Boys and September 5 coming up in the next couple of days so hopefully my 2025 film list will start getting some green on there. Next up on the rental queue are: The Substance, Small Things Like These, Conclave, Juror #2, Rumours, Smile 2, Tar, My Old Ass, Cuckoo, and Oddity.