I've been asked a few times about my thoughts on the new Alien: Romulus, and all the movies made post Alien 3, but I never wanted to put them in the blog because this blog is the safe space for people for whom the saga either ended at Alien 3, appreciate the original trilogy much more than whatever came later, or, simply, like in my case, want to engage a vintage "time bubble" in which Alien 3 is the definitive conclusion of the story, and the three Alien films formed a seemingly completed Trilogy. Done and sealed.
So, no place for the other films here I thought, even if I enjoyed some of them (a big IF). But some pointed out to me that I actually did share my thoughts on the movies made after Terminator 2 in my Terminator Trilogy blog when Terminator: Dark Fate was coming out. It's a blog that lives only in a bubble of the 1990s, where there's only The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which was designed and sure to be a definitive conclusion of the saga, and Universal's T2 3D: Battle Across Time. There was one post in which I did review all the...things that came after. So I guess that's a fair point and I CAN devote one and only post that goes outside the bubble. Well, it would be a second one since I already did one post in which I explained why Alien Trilogy is indeed different than the other films, and how Alien: Resurrection threw away everything that I considered essential in the first 3 films.
My initial and current thoughts on the first 3 Alien films I just did HERE, in a post titled "Discovering The Alien Trilogy", and I already explained my disdain for Resurrection and how it made 180 from the original films HERE - a post titled "What Binds The Original Trilogy" which also explores how starting with the 4th film, the Alien lost all of its biomechanical features and Giger's beauty.
So Resurrection is thoroughly covered in the above entrance. As a sequel, I hate it and thought of it as a turning point and a killer of all things that made Alien movies great. I kinda like it as a dated, quirky, late 90's science fiction film, like Deep Blue Sea.
But even thought Alien 3 appeared not to be an end to the saga, I, and every movie fan I knew, thought Resurrection is indeed the end. While Alien 3 indeed ended the story of Ripley, Resurrection introduced an 8th mutant clone looking like Ripley, and seemingly ended so called Ripley 8's brief story as well.
Long 7 years later, when I was much older and living in United States already, Alien Vs Predator AVP was hitting the theaters and I was all for it. The original comic book series was one of my favorite comic books when I was younger, and I've read it countless times. It solidified my fandom of Alien mythology after seeing Alien 3, something I wrote about in more detail in one of the entries mentioned above. Theater was packed and I went to see it with my friends. My opinion on it haven't changed much. To this day, the first half of the movie is by far my favorite entry in Alien mythos post Alien 3. Why? Number one, I love, love the buildup. It reminds me of the first Jurassic Park. We jump around the world, an Archeological team is contacted by a rich man to come join him on an expedition. We then jump to Nepal to see another member recruited. Showing different parts of the world and a team assembled adds scale to the film and builds an anticipation very well, like Jurassic Park, and without showing a thing until 40 minutes in! That is a feat for a scifi film of 2004.
And I love the setting. I love John Carpenter's The Thing, and thanks to that film, I generally love harsh, isolated winter setting. Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is another movie where harsh winter in an isolated place works so well, but Antarctica was my setting of choice. For the same reason, one of my favorite episodes of The X-Files, titled "Ice", is taking place during storm on an outpost in remote areas of Alaska. And AVP, in my opinion, did that setting beautifully. Isolated, dark and windy. The cinematography is really good too, that washed out, chilly blue. The awakening of The Queen was a fantastic scene and imagery, and unfortunately, after the encounter of the first Alien by a character called Verheiden, the movie becomes very video-gamey, or comic booky if you will. And silly in a lot of places. The rest of the movie is plain bad and over the top. But the first half of the film I adore.
It is not a rehash of what came before, yet it retains that same spirit. It's a place with no civilization or help around, and a place that looks like a setting from a horror movie. Which, ultimately it is. Again, The Thing and The Shining proved that an isolated, windy winter environment can be extremely beneficial in a stories like those. It's cold, harsh, unfriendly and brings forward feelings of isolation, helplessness and terror.
The set designs are quite good and never go over the top. The pyramid is believable, and the hieroglyphs and chambers well designed. The colors are saturated, but not ashed. The navy blue hue fits the arctic feel.
The movie also seems to have a very large, epic scale thanks to production value of shooting in Europe
It was a few steps in the right direction - long buildup, good cinematography with some great images. And in another entry, I showed the difference between Resurrection and AVP, showcasing basically the same shot of the same puppet (AVP reused Resurrection suits but recolored them from poop color to black) - AVP brought back darkness and mood to the Alien.
To top it all, Lance Henriksen is a terrific character actor and it's always a thrill to see him in any movie. He was still a big name at the time and also gave the movie some scale.
There were several very talented people working on the movie. John Bruno, who had a long working relationship with James Cameron, and worked with him on every movie except for The Terminator and Aliens. Steve Burg, who worked on The Abyss, Terminator 2:Judgment Day, and later Prometheus, The Martian and Interstellar, designed the Predator ship
Few years later, a sequel to AVP came out, titled AVP:R - Aliens vs Predator: Requiem, and it showed me that I had no idea up until that point what "Terrible" actually looks like. By that point though, none of the movie fans I knew cared to see it and there was no buzz. Judging by the trailer alone, I figured I'll actually wait for it to come out on DVD. It did look terrible and cheap. Teenagers in a small town battling Aliens with Hillbilly teeth? (the designs of the aliens were even worse than the Resurrection's/AVP's. Far worse). No thanks. And I was right. When I eventually broke down and couldn't get myself to skip an Alien movie in theaters and saw it, it was terrible. Teenagers killed Aliens, acting was horrible, designs even worse than in Resurrection and AVP. Just mind blowingly bad. Story has no buildup whatsoever, facehuggers are obviously cheap CGI, the performers in the alien suits move clumsily and their suits wobble, and the whole premise makes no sense, just like anything in the film.
AVP:R had very unlikeable characters. It is aiming for the truck drivers approach, to have regular everyday people that the audience can associate with, but all of those characters seem cliche nevertheless. There is a bullied boy with a bad job who is in love with a girl that has a bully boyfriend who is popular in school. It cannot get anymore cliche than that. The other characters are fairly decent but very generic, like the sheriff and the soldier, while some are purely undefined, like the convict.
There aren't many good aspects of the movie. The idea of hospital setting is one, and the Predalien actually makes for a good B movie monster - he works as a monster from some gory 80s monster flick
The setting is plain wrong and along with direction, cinematography and special effects, reminds us that this movie is a cheap B monster flick set in a small town. This movie could work as a low budget horror in the 80s. While the second half of AVP was a video game, AVPR is all bland looking garbage. It attempts some horror but I don't know if it works when aliens move like uncomfortable people in the suits and parts of their costumes wobble like rubber. The acting, story and the whole look is of a straight to video cheap flick, like 20th sequel to Wrong Turn
Compare the beautiful setting, sets and shots of the first AVP movie
And then, few years later, an unthinkable happens - Ridley Scott returns to the Alien mythology! It was an event anticipated by everyone, even other directors. Both James Cameron and Quentin Tarantino revealed they eagerly awaited it. Reports of H.R. Giger's involvement spread fast, so how much more mind blowing could it get? What could possibly go wrong, huh?
And then the first head scratcher hit - the writer had a great idea to make an Alien movie with no Aliens, just happening in an Alien universe... But that's not it! Let's also make the world of alien unrecognizable, and actually a complete opposite. Let's throw away the look and design aesthetics and lighting style of the original film and just do a clean, sleek aesthetics and strong colors. Let's make all the tech and suits like the 1998 comedy, Lost in Space and 1999's Galaxy Quest. Let's make the movie look like every other generic scifi film in recent years.
Compare the eerie, gritty, real looking look of the original Alien to that of the Prometheus
And then, they decided not to use H.R Giger, and only used his painting for a briefly seen mural in the film! That's it! All the designs were done by other, contemporary designers.
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So what else was there left from the original Alien to throw away? Oh yes, the mysterious, impossible creature, the Space Jockey. Clearly a fossilized skeleton of a being that was fused with cockpit with his belly and even face (!) As if it grew out of it. It reminded me of the painful mutations in The Fly and The Fly 2. And yet, they retconned it. Cheating its design (removing the teeth and the fused belly, making him much smaller) to make it look like a suit, they got rid of the idea of a horrific creature that grew to machine and decided that it was a suit after all housing a guy that looked like Roman statue, an alien scientists who created life using black goo.
In Alien, you can clearly see where the fossilized skeleton overlaps the chair. A unique and bizarre idea of a creature grown for its purpose of piloting. It has no legs either, but a muddy-like bone structure as if the creature was poured into (and over) the chair
The black goo is also used to magically explain anything, since there's little known about it. It creates life, it kills, it mutates. There's no rule to it. It is exactly what Dark Horse Comics came up with in the late 1980's, although in the comic books it was called Royal Jelly, and it was extracted from an Alien Queen - a disgusting and horrific idea which I really liked. The Royal Jelly could mutate into biomech creatures, or it could give strength, or heal terminal illness - it was the same thing as the black goo, but the comics explained that the result of it depended on couple factors, while the black goo is never given any explanation as to why it behaves differently in some cases.
The characters are cliched Hollywood movie types of the 2010s and for me they don't feel like real life people at all. The aesthetics are changed, the look/feel is changed, design sensibilities are changed, every idea form the original changed or retconned. Handful of monsters appear in the movie, and it's a snake and Octopus. Alien fans got a little tease at the very end, seeing an Alien like creature called Deacon, that looked like a Dolphin. I personally hated the character of Halloway, since he was such a spoiled, mean A hole that I could write an entire entry on what a selfish, spoiled a** he was. And David, ugh, I didn't like that character at all. Somehow, a British Android Butler who spoke with a very delicate, very flamboyant style, looked like a fan of Backstreet Boys from the 90's and generally did not seem interesting (to me), didn't sit well with me. I just thought the character is a dragging element of the movie and thought he was very bland despite the obvious attempt at depth, with him feeling bullied by one person and eventually deciding to use his bully as an experiment. One can dedicate entire article to the flaws of Prometheus, and that's not what I wanna do here. Flawed movies can be great and fun just as those that have very few. But everything I loved in the original Alien was gone. Wiped out, completely. The backlit look, the contrasting play of the light and shadows, the fantastic retro look design of the technology, the costume design sensibilities, Giger's designs, the hypersensitivity of the sound design, the mystery of the Space Jockey creature and the Alien himself. The story and movie were dime a dozen and generic and of the time. The characters not only weren't engaging, but for me some were so uninteresting I couldn't wait for the next scene so that I don't have to waste time on them (David). Out of misguided sense of duty, I purchased Prometheus on bluray and in 3D nonetheless, but I haven't watched it in 6 years or so. Ridley Scott said in one interview that the Alien creature was overused and cant be made relevant or scary again, hence not including it in the Alien world. When Alien: Covenant came out, I agreed with him.
Alien: Covenant was Ridley Scott finally including the Alien creature in what was essentially Prometheus 2. To my massive, massive disappointment, the character of David not only returned, and not only was he the main character and focus of the entire film, but now also an entire Alien universe, as he did the unthinkable - it was revealed that David was the one who created Alien species in a cave, filled with wooden bowls and paper drawings. The last remnant of the original Alien, the idea that its some kind of ancient evil from millions of years ago, a very ancient species, was now wiped out as well. Now it was just a genetic experiment made in a cave by a British Butler with speech styled after Sacha Baron's character Bruno. That idea alone, not only crossed out any further Alien entries for me, it ruined an entire mythology for me the whole character. I was done. But as a film itself, oh boy. Covenant looked like dime a dozen cheap Streaming movie. It had some good shots but very lazy environments (fields of grass, caves, wheat fields and generic 2010 spaceship)
Its monsters were painfully obviously CGI, and therefore could not be scary or even taken seriously. And when the Alien finally appears? There's no art in portraying this once elegant but terrifying piece of art. It was walking like an ant all over a ship, right during a day, and as a very bad CGI rendition with CGIish movement.
At least the design finally got very close to the original, albeit still without the biomechanicality. The bit with Walter and David..it was an attempt at showing that not every android is bad, and some will give their lives to save humans, but the way it was done it was neither deep nor profound. Instead, we got a Jackie Chan type of a fight between two androids, and a very obvious plot twist at the end. Again, generic tech design, completely bland landscape, forgettable characters (for the first time in an Alien movie I couldn't remember the characters names) and a cheap horror story of an egomaniac creating genetic experiment at his place, kind of like in straight-to-video Species 3 or Human Centipede and dozen others. And a cliche, 80s horror shower kill? In Alien movie? C'mon.
Awfully generic, dull looking movie and awful retcon of Alien character made me just drop the mythology - I was no longer a follower of it, and after few years I decided to just keep to the trilogy and stay in 1993. While style and look-wise Prometheus had nothing to do with Alien, at least it had a fairly good cinematography for a 2012 movie and did look like sci-fi. Covenant had boring environments and such unremarkable color palettes. And the CGI was incomparably worse, so much worse and the Aliens looked particularly fake.
So news of the next movie, this time not directed but produced by Ridley Scott and his company, was coming around and I didn't care this time around, flor the first time ever I didn't care about another Alien movie. I never even clicked on the articles about it, knew nothing about it, the plot, cast, nothing. It was because of Ridley Scott's Alien and James Cameron's Aliens films that I became interested in art and eventually went to Fine Art School in Europe and later became a designer, but I started questioning whether what I saw in Alien and Blade Runner was a work of a genius artist or simply a byproduct of sets and suits that needed to be covered up stylishly because of their shortcomings.
And the idea that a very flamboyant Alfred created an Alien in a cave ruined the entire mythology and character completely for me. But it wasn't just that, it was those two very generic movies as a whole. I was out. So I didn't even want to see Romulus, especially with Scott attached, who, imo, lost it long time ago and made two of my least favorite Alien movies, Prometheus and Covenant (along with AVPR). And Scott was the producer, so he had a say in every aspect of the film. His company made the movie with Brandywine and Disney.
After nearly a month later I figured oh hell, it's gonna be gone from theaters soon, and I've always been such an Alien diehard and geek since '93, I'll go see it. Since I didn't care for it at first, I actually went in completely spoiler free and... I loved it. I freaking loved it. The look, the characters, the relationship with Andy (and the whole android dilemma really done right). The last act is too Hollywood and too modern and it should just end on the Station though. But yeah, I'm very, very pleasantly surprised.
The characters are great. While Teenagers were already featured in AVP:R, those were the shallow, Hollywood High School type stereotypes - a bully with a hottest cheerleader girl, who then breaks up with the bully because she wants to be with an underdog who's kind of an outlaw ... that type of thing. High School cliches. But Romulus actually has young adults who are resourceful and with tragedies in their lives. Youngsters who all lost their parents and are stuck from childhood to work in a coal mine, and can only dream about a world with a Sun. They have to take care of themselves in a very tough world.
The acting is superb, and the whole concept of androids is really well done and parallels with racism. Andy and Rook are the best polar opposites thay can be, one that is basically a family member caring deeply for his "sister", the other one is a cold, hateful synthetic despising humans. Parallels to rascism is there, in both Rooks behavior, and the difference between Rook and Andy - theyre both synthetics, but theyre completely unlike each other. Which shows not all synthetics are bad and hateful of humans. That is far more meaningful than two androids on the opposite teams doing Jackie Chan fight in Covenant, in my opinion. While Rook is an android who despises people and has a thing for space monsters for some reason, like the god awful character of David, Andy cares for and is a family for Rain and does everything to help. Androids aren't just all bad. Or all good. I think it's done right in this movie, with great performances and actually a fairly touching backstory and relationship. Again, beats two Androids having a chat and then doing Jackie Chan. It was so shallow in Covenant.
The Art is back. I love that the film has its own stylized palette, which is primarily red and orange. And the fact that it uses animatronics, real full sets and miniatures as oppose to CGI does wonders. It feels physical, feels real. I didn't know it at the time I was watching the movie, but I did feel it looks very different and for some reason better than so many of the last entries. The introduction of Rook is moody and actually scary, although it shouldn't be an Ash looking android I think. Which brings me to the callbacks and easter eggs. I'm reading now that there's so many callbacks that it takes away from the story. What callbacks? Is actually including what was introduced in the original films, so essentially a consistency, now consider a callback, rather than finally continuing and incorporating what original movies did? The lettering is back, the retro scifi design sensibility is back. It finally continues the aesthetics of the original films, rather than just introduce new stuff for ego gratification of the new designers and the director. Kudos for that. And the classic movie lines repeated in this films are all natural, except for the "Get Away From Her" line which is indeed out of place.
Compare the tech of the original Alien..
With the tech of Prometheus and Covenant
In Romulus, we're finally back to the tech of the original
The thing is, Romulus is fresh while it hits all the classic beats which we didn't have since 1997 - for all the talk about tired formula, there wasn't a movie about Alien presence/infestation on a ship/station in almost 30 years! Since then, there were 4 Alien movies which didn't have characters stranded on a ship or space station. So, some tired formula. And some things are just classics, and Aliens, space stations and claustrophobic entrapment are the classic iconic beats and we haven't had that in decades. It's so good to see it again, kind of like your favorite classic band going back to the roots, to the first music genre and riffs that made them great in the first place. Romulus chipped away all the baggage of the recent decades that took it into new, convoluted directions that took the mythology further away from what it was and what made those first movies iconic in the first place.
Look at the sets and environments of the Original Alien, a very scifi, paintery-like fantasy imagery.
Romulus is full of shots of this nature.
Romulus also brings back the classic Alien lightning style, that was gone after Aliens. I'm talking about the expressionist backlight
Some excellent shots pay homage and look like they're from Blade Runner
Covenant's dull, disconnected from the original look and plain environments pale in comparison
After the awful presentation of the Alien in Covenant, Romulus finally brings back some moody and stylized lightning to the Alien characters
In contrast with its predecessor, Covenant
Romulus is like a very good, old Dark Horse Comic mini series, or a great video game like Alien: Isolation.
In the early to mid 1990s, Dark Horse Comics had some fantastic short stories in Alien universe. And they didn't require some grand, multi issue story. All you needed was a great set of good characters with very interesting relationships and backstory, and make them encounter Aliens on some desolated spaceship, space station, outpost or planet. While it was the "same old", it NEVER got or felt old because of human stories within it. Some very simple stories were great as well, like Advent/Terminus, even thought they were so often about characters simply encountering a structure that was infested with Aliens.
Dark Horse Comics never needed to reinvent the wheel just to do something "new". Every single story for decades felt new and fresh. Because Aliens were a background element to a human story, and it's the human story and characters that made every story different. And you can have all kinds of different TYPES of stories with Aliens. Whether it's a intimate story about an isolated medieval-type village that sacrifices newborns to an Alien that stalks the nearby woods, or straight up shootem up with Marines on some infected outpost, or an eerie horror story about some unlucky team of very fleshed out characters who stumble upon some old ship or dead space station which is infected with Aliens, or some Grand story arc with religious undertones - it always felt fresh because of the characters and the story, even if the SETTING was similar or the same in some of them. They felt completely different. And that's what Romulus did - it's a story about a group of characters stumbling upon a floating dead Space Station with aliens on it. Simple, but compelling, beautifully designed, and engaging. Because even if that setup was done before, it was never done with THOSE specific characters, and it that style. It's always the human story that was the focus and meat of it all.
While Romulus doesn't FEEL like a movie sequel to the original trilogy (like all the post Alien 3 movies), mainly because, well, the style of movies is different nowadays, it does have the right look and it does feel like a great graphic novel or Game sequel. A very good one.
Turns out Alien could be scary and relevant again. And it's so good to see a design so close to the original for the first time since Aliens (the dome was off but what was underneath was on the original, and the bodies were identical, see HERE), and to see the actual original Alien onscreen, even if just as a corpse, sculpted by the best of the best, Legacy Effects, formerly known as Stan Winston Studios, wasa treat as well.