Alien Romulus [Fede Alvarez]

Thanks for review.

I'll definitely go see it.

So I seen this today. It was OK. A bit slow at times. Some good laughs in it. Plenty of tension which is good bug you never really care about the characters which I think is a pity.

I thought it was a little dragged out do and could have easily been 20 minutes shorter. There is plenty of easter eggs and call backs to both Alien and Alien's do which is good.

Went to see it in the Point.

The end was a bit dragged out but overall I thought the Director did the best he could and I enjoyed this a lot.

A very good Alien movie. Can't complain about that.

I really enjoyed this. I would say there was probably one too many call backs to previous movies. It played like a greatest hits of the first four films.

I didn't expect the cast to be so young. I kept waiting for the grown ups to appear. But they were good, especially the lead actress.

Loved the grungy production design. Loved that it took its time to get to the action. Great pace to the second half and some very good set pieces.

Just back from seeing this and I tend to agree with most of the above reviews. It was… 'grand!' It was never going to be comparable to the first two movies but holds its own comfortably within the remaining entrants in the franchise.

My one major complaint was the quality of the screening (or is it the 'look' of the movie itself?). A lot of the time I struggled to make out what was going on. Now I'm fully aware as an 'Alien' movie it was going to be dark and grungy but I'm also of an age to have seen the original 'Alien' and 'Aliens' on their first cinema release and never had an issue with them. My teenage son who accompanied me didn't have any complaints.

So for the two hours I sat there I'm thinking, "you're just an old fart with failing eyesight". Which may very well be true.

I don't frequent the cinema much as I'm quite satisfied with my modest home cinema set-up and happy to stream or wait for home media releases. But this rare cinema outing for me didn't inspire me to return. It just felt like there was a lack of definition or perhaps if the cinema was darker the clarity might have been better. This was the cinema complex in the Pavilions, Swords if that makes any difference.

Perhaps I need to go see the 'Garfield' movie to get a better indication of what a proper cinema experience is like 😁

All in all it’s still good, but I still think Scott’s Prometheus side of the alien-verse had so much potential and it’s something he will regret how they turned out.

Interested to see what Disney's alien TV show they’re doing turns out, onto the next one!

I think using Rook was an acknowledgement from the Director that the 1979 film will be never be bettered.

Its a bit like bringing back Harrison Ford in the Force Awakens.

Anyway, having thought about it a bit more definitely a very good Alien movie for me.

Fairly good movie. The aesthethic, vibe and pace were top notch and overall it really respects the original movie. Characters a bit forgettable and you didn't really give a damn about their fates whatsoever. But not a major gripe, main actress was decent, overall a good movie and worthy of a 7/10 for me.

I have a lot of time for Prometheus, and obviously Alien and Aliens are all time classics, but Romulus might not be that but I would say is very decently better than everything else.

I actually expected it to be a bit more gruesome than it was - had seen it described as gory, intense, etc and anyone who's seen Alvarez's Evil Dead 2013 would know what I'm talking about. Sure, it had violence, but I didn't find it particularly violent and definitely not something I'd describe as gory.

Anyway. Big thumbs up.

I'm a big fan of the Alien films, so I'm always onboard when something new comes around, while not necessarily expecting much in the way of quality.

Reading through the thread here it looks like the consensus is generally positive. I have to say that I don't share that opinion - I think it's serviceable as an average sci-fi action/thriller, but a bit of a travesty as an Alien film.

I think the first 30-40 minutes are pretty good. But the wheels come off big time once faces start getting hugged and the film after that becomes just a succession of slavish re-hashes of recycled moments from the original quadrilogy.

There's absolutely nothing new here. And some of it is so incoherent and pointless: why was there any need to digitally bring that actor back? And, on top of that, please don't do it if you can't pull the effect off convincingly.

I might get flack for this, but, if you include Prometheus and Covenant and count seven "canon" Alien films - I think this is the worst of the lot.

All of the original four were better: 3 & Resurrection, for all their faults, at least possessed a strong unique directorial vision and character and tried to further the lore and the central story of the franchise. Admittedly, Prometheus & Covenant were not great, but I'll give them some credit: there was ambition there. Okay it didn't all work, a lot of it was a mess, but there was an attempt on the part of those movies to wrestle with new ideas, to do something at least vaguely original. They tried, sometimes failed, but, at least they tried.

Romulus has none of that. It has no original ideas and worst of all it becomes so fixated on trying to "play the hits" from previous outings that it actually became, for me, corny and annoying. There's lots of moments in the second half of the movie where it makes no sense for characters to say certain things, other than just for the line to exist as a reference.

I was onboard for the idea of doing a lean and mean back to basics Alien film. But, after watching this, I feel like perhaps the franchise is creatively dead.

They tried a different tack with P & C, with mixed results, so I understand why they went a different route with this. But, they made a pig's ear of this IMO. So much of this movie is witless, pointless, fan service - or rather, what the studio thinks fan service is: call backs, references, rip-offs. At the expense of anything new or exciting. And also, for an Alien film, it's not that threatening or not that scary.

Big disappointment. 

I agree that line felt weird and far too blatant fan service when the rest of the film opts for far more natural references but when the film is as decent as it is, I don't dwell on it too much.

As for the likes of Covenant, I can certainly appreciate it's more ambitious in trying to build a little on that world, but that alone doesn't make up for the many shortfalls and flaws of that movie to me personally.

Romulus felt to me like it genuinely and very naturally belongs in the world of the original trilogy, tonally, visually, everything.

Everything else - Resurrection, AVP, Covenant, to me just really don't, even if they have some moments or entertainment value. I won't go into Prometheus given that was originally designed to be an offshoot but got awkwardly shoe-horned back directly into Alien with Covenant.