It’s a solid movie but it’s felt like a cover song. Don’t watch alien or aliens beforehand, as otherwise you just be picking the movie apart from all the fan service to riffing of shots and lines
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Started off cool
until
deepfake mcbilbo pooped in my eye and ear holes and they started lazily repeating quotes from better movies.
“Get away from her you bitch?” That doesn’t even map!
I liked the set design and a few shots, but Disney just shits out the derivative IP-content.
Had potential, but came off like a lot of suit demands.
Watch Raised By Wolves instead for a Ridley Scott inspired fix.
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…my connection with the whole alien franchise starts at the crossing of late childhood and earliest teenage years…
watching alien one from a vhs tape on a big tv in the early 80ies, at a classmates home, still way too young to watch it on big screen…it was my very first home viewing vhs experience, i almost shit my pants, and it predefined pretty much all my love for scifi flics and what this genre must deliver in production design, mood density and storytelling forever…
and oops, i must admit, now in reflection, i have never seen one alien movie on big screen, truu cinema style…always just via home “entertainment”…only exeption was prometheus…
shame on me…
good to know, it’s all more back to that “used future” lookalike again…seems even disney can’t kill that vibe in total…
have not seen romulus yet…don’t mind of any spoilers…
up to now, finchers first shitshow in the making, alien3, remains my favourite, apart from the original of course…
Have to agree on that one, especially the assembly cut. My only gripe with that one is that they switched out the dog for a dead ox so the whole burial/chestbursting sequence loses alot of its emotional impact.
Aliens is a great teen action movie, but that’s not what Alien should be in my opinion. Much like Alien Resurrection is a fun monster movie — but not an Alien movie. Cameron radically cheapened the aliens by essentially turning them into overgrown insects and cannon fodder.
…and don’t get me started on that fucking Queen. 
I wish egg morphing could be reinstated as the new canon in their life cycle but I’m against retconning so I suppose it’s fine if we have both.
But I digress - this thread is about Romulus after all so I’ll copy my thoughts over from the Movie recommendations topic.
The first 20-30 minutes made me piss my pants in excitement at almost every turn before it turns into a derivative fanfilm.
Production wise it’s top tier and the cast is really solid. The plot is simple but effective enough to get things going - just don’t think about it too long or it’ll start to crack. I’ll see it again once it hits home markets but I left the theater feeling really disappointed, especially considering the superb first act.
Also, I felt obliged to share a photo of me and H.R Giger at his house back in 2009. Best goddamn day of my life, still to this day.
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holyshit! 
would love to hear what you guys were talking about!
Drunk rant in draft I didn’t send last night
Pacing as the film progressed was too quick for horror. The facehugger room temp thing disrupts canon as how did the original know where to jump immediately…?
Why didn’t we get to see the mouse mutation result!? That could’ve been fresher than the offspring thing (and why did that look like an engineer…).
Also why didn’t the company send in some artificial to collect their asset as soon as the station was compromised? There was a company planet right next to it… but instead some kids managed to leave atmosphere and get there first.
As for the bitch line, I can see how Andy was bullied with that word, but it was too much to regurgitate a defining cinematic quote in that way. Rook also uses a direct ash quote a few times. Think phoebe Waller bridge would’ve been more interesting.
Aliens lacked the intelligence and deviance established in the first film.
It had atmosphere and potential from the start and could’ve done something interesting without any references to the original films.
Andy was the best thing about it, and rook mentioning they’re a tiny part of a bigger picture.
Tv series needs to do something great with the ai and bio tech evolution of humanity.
Look at the amazing form of this design. The xeno was always abit androgynous to me. When a female is impregnated was always hoping to see a more gender weighted body shape. Gigers amazing hyper sexualisation seems to be have been diluted. The vulva cocoon was a fresh design but seemed to end there.
The offsprings bubbling baby acid pod I couldn’t buy into. Seemed like narrative device to burn through the hull.
It’s interesting that some people love it. Maybe a divisive film is a good sign…
This movie is mediocre at best if you haven’t watched Alien and Aliens and it’s a total garbage if you have.
2/10
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Lots of divergent opinions here, Aliens (the long version though) is by far my favorite of the franchise 
, but yeah opinions 
What I enjoyed in romulus is that it doesn’t, in my mind, betray the alien universe. Some things could have been done with more subtlety, yes but as a movie that takes place inside this given universe it feels OK.
I have been entertained for two hours and never felt the plot was moving forward because heroes were doing stupid things (hi prometheus, hi covenant) so, it’s more than I expected.
One thing though, the main character, rain (aside from having a similar name and face as the star wars reboot hero, which feels odd) remain passive a bit too long for my taste, (with Andy stealing the show here) to the point that I asked myself if the real main character would be someone else during the movie.
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I’m a bit of an Alien nerd - films, comics, I love the lore. So I had to see Romulus in the cinema.
Overall I really enjoyed it, especially as I saw it with friends, some of whom are easily scared and jump out of their seats at stuff I barely bat an eyelid to. Really good audience response overall and a fairly packed showing.
I loved the visuals (mostly), the atmosphere, and some of the set pieces (such as the floaty zero-gravity alien acid blood obstacle course).
I didn’t like Rook one bit - disappointingly poor plastic Bilbo looked even more dead than the poor Ian Holm whose likeness was used throughout the film. I appreciate his family advised it’s what he would have wanted, but the technology used to bring him to life was not fit for purpose. He’s an eyesore and I hope a remaster is released with improved Rook. Even if they do though, it won’t explain why there’s more than one ‘Ash’ model, seeing as he was a covert one designed to fool everyone into thinking he was human, and the name Rook make no sense as this was long before Bishop and the other models of that chess namesake.
I liked that Big Chap made an appearance, albeit as a corpse strung from the roof of the control room. I loved seeing the facehuggers in their artificial pods in the lab. Facehugger action in general was top-notch, with seas of knobbly pink legs giving people sleepless nights for days to come.
Speaking of facehuggers, they really borked the gestation timeframe - that thing was barely on her face for a couple of minutes before the proboscis was so rudely removed, yet an egg was implanted. Granted, the chestburster was under-developed, but if it can get that far in minutes, why do they take hours to gestate in all the previous films?
As for the wall-gina, I’m yet to formulate my thoughts on this, other than they seem to have become confused by the Alien lifecycle. Facehuggers don’t go into wall-ginas to develop into drones, they simply rapidly grow.
The main character looked way too young to be a scientist for Weyland-Yutani. I appreciate the actor is 26 but she looks about 16 in the film. Maybe I’m getting old, but it just didn’t ring true.
Andy was lovely - he stole the film. Excellent actor. I wish they’d kept Rook inside his head and allowed him to channel his inner evil instead.
That bit where the xeno saved Rain from a splatty death at the bottom of the elevator shaft was unintentionally funny - it was dumb, not least because at this point a xeno breathing and salivating menacingly in your face is akin to a baddie’s monologue in any other film, but because it’s so unlikely that a xeno would save your life just to take it. Are they spiteful like humans, or cold and cunning like animals?
The final showdown was expected - it’s a trope for the cast to be endangered just as they’re about to escape. It’s like an end boss in a videogame. This particularly end boss was the ugliest yet. I quite liked him.
Overall I think this is my fourth favourite Alien film - Alien, Aliens and Alien 3 are my personal best in that order, but it’s better than Alien Resurrection.
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God damn that’s creepy.
best post in this thread IMO. that’s a great memory
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Exactly my thoughts, some really dumb writing in there.
We spoke briefly about his upcoming art exhibition in Finland at the time, Ernst Fuchs, lots of Alien (obviously!), and how when he was hanging out with Dali, that it was Dali’s idea to try and build an alien suit to put on a dog for Alien 3, which was then ultimately scrapped a few days into filming because it looked too goofy. 
He was charming and very funny. His cat Mökki (spelling?) was a real fearless sweetheart too.
He was nice enough to offer me a photo (I had brought my 1955 Ikoflex camera) in his master chair and signed a copy of his art book before I had to book it back to the airport and head home to Sweden. (see attached photo)
I was there in Zurich together with a man called Dennis Lowe which whom I made an acquaintance on an Alien forum many years ago. Dennis had worked on miniature sculptures and set design for Alien, Empire Strikes Back and Dark Crystal (amongst others) and he offered me a chance to interview Giger for his multi-part documentary on the makers behind Alien so he could focus more on the technical aspects of lighting and filming, as this was a one man operation for him.
Truly an honor.
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The cat in the photo!!!
Unreal…
Very cool
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My take on this is that it saved her because part of the xenomorph instinct/purpose is to gather hosts to create more xenomorphs
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Just out the cinema, loved it. Felt like proper Alien stuff.
The nod to the original typography with glyph parts fading in/out had me set up right to enjoy the rest. Can’t find a pic online but I’m sure you know what I mean.
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I’ll take betrayal and good writing over loyalty to IP and less decent writing 
But people want CGI shit not to pay writers, I guess?
Seriously, they did some stuff well, but it gave way to retread / reboot and most callbacks in recent times just remind me of movies I could be re-watching.
On that note the greedy idiots “AI remastered” aliens and that blu ray looks like dogshit, detail absolutely annihilated by some intern and Topaz AI upscaler on the wrong settings.
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That is an interesting idea, I guess it could have taken her away to be cocooned in the lair to be facehugged. That’s now my head-canon, thank you!
I’ve heard bad things about that ‘remaster’ being a very lazy algorithmic upscaling attempt… Another issue to this is, I don’t want perfectly crystal clear visuals on Aliens, it’s got to be a bit grainy for a suitably gritty tone. It’s like adding crackle to digitally perfect audio tracks, we don’t like silky smooth perfection, the gaps need filling in with noise. Real life is full of imperfections and I think our brains are put off when everything is flawless.
I gave Romulus every chance I could (avoiding reviews and trailers etc.) but there was just something not quite right about it. Visually it was great but it was really brought nothing new to the table in terms of an interesting plot or character development.
It struck me as being like a Stranger Things x Alien collab but with a cheesy ‘classic’ Hollywood soundtrack instead of synths. I definitely felt like a grumpy old man when I started getting annoyed by the characters ages, but they were basically teenagers!
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The soundtrack was definitely a throwback. I kinda wished they had leaned into it and done the 80’s style credits where they show the actor name/character name and have a brief clip of the actor mugging for the camera. That would have been perfect
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