Alien: Romulus
*“Run.”
*
Let’s get this shit out of the Way, I love Isabela Merced to death, and she’s one of my favorite actors, and she was by far the best part of the movie, for the short time she was in it.
Alien: Romulus was one of my most anticipated films of the year, right next to Longlegs, yet how the marketing being misleading for Longlegs worked, here, it didn’t.
The fast paced Xenomorph action and constant screaming with insane space action type of movie the trailers promoted, is really a slow burn about what it means to be human, while also acknowledging how special life is. The Xenomorphs aren’t even the main threat here, it’s the Facehuggers, and I actually adore that change, and the balls it takes to make it.
Fede Álvarez in my opinion is an icon of horror cinema, and is one of the greatest directors working in the Genre today, his ability to create dread and terror while keeping you fully engaged and emotionally invested, is unmatched by anyone, and the direction he takes with the film, is wonderful. And really returns the franchise back to its horror roots, I’ve never really enjoyed an alien movie since the first, (yeah, I don’t really love Aliens, sue me) but this one really rocks.
But I lean more into the negative side for a lot of this than I do positive.
The first 15 minutes of the movie, are exactly what you’d expect and hope they’d be, with fun characters, fantastic writing, and gorgeous cinematography, but after that, the movie takes a huge nose dive until the last hour, when everything finally gets cut loose.
And in between the last hour and first 15 minutes, is a horrendous 45 minutes that is just a huge slog-fest, that had me constantly looking at the time to see how much was left,
I was excited about nearly everything in this film being practical, and it was absolutely awesome! To a point… For some reason the fact that every set was practical with almost no color grading changes and lighting changes, it started to look fake after a while. Which got really disappointing, until the last 20 minutes, where they used mist and fun blue lighting and finally started up with proper color grading. That’s when it started to look fantastic again.
Overall, Alien: Romulus, was a stellar new alien movie, that takes the franchise in an exciting new direction, with a great cast of characters, (excluding one of the British dudes, who was a total disaster of a character) that retreads too much, and goes on for a little too long.