The new Alien sequel is out and I loved it.
It’s a visually stunning film. I was reminded of when I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in terms of groundbreaking outer-space vistas. It’s something to behold on the biggest screen possible. And I don’t usually repeat view movies, but this one I’m looking forward to seeing again.
This film is the most worthy successor to James Cameron style action filmmaking. The scale and action set pieces are epic. And somehow, it’s equally a great follow-up to the original Alien in terms of mood. That original sense of dread is here unrelenting.
Though it’s bigger and wilder in many ways, Romulus somehow manages to fit within the universe perfectly. It feels like the Alien world, complete with those clunky CRT based monitors and loud terminals (that really shouldn’t be making noise while characters dance on the screen, but don’t we love it?!).
Tread lightly, there are some spoilers ahead.
The risk of a sequel like this is of course to jump the shark. I’m thinking of other big franchise sequel factories like: Jurrassic Park/World, Terminator, Star Wars. Those all suffered from too much fan service, which ends up feeling like the studio greenlit a popular fanfic chapter of the movie. On the one hand, us superfans all want to see what it would look like if our hero did X with Y, but is that just pandering? Or how cool would it be if they bring back character Z from the last one?
Spoiler stuff below! (click to reveal)
And that basically happened with resurrecting Ian Holm as an Ash model synthetic human named Rook. At first, I got real uncanny valley revolt, as with most Grand Moff Tarkin‘s return in the otherwise excellent Rogue One. And yet I can forgive Romulus here, as the character is pivotal to the plot, and his condition in the film somewhat explains the janky mouth / voice syncing problems.
There are also some amazing new imaginative sequences with zero-gravity and alien blood, along with an X-ray gun to screen the hapless humans for alien embryos.
Impressively, this movie does some heavy retconning of Prometheus’ mess, adequately explaining the black ooze.
The whole finale was insane, making it a true worthy Alien movie chapter. I’ll leave it at that.
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