Alien: Romulus

Been a while...

Plot:
A group if childhood friends dreaming of a better life away from Weyland-Yutani, decide to steal cryo-pods from a long abandoned space station called "Romulus and Remus".
Upon entering the station, their nightmares come true, as it's infested with Xenomorphs, and the group must run, hide and fight for survival.
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Review:
Sigh.
So much missed, and so much promise that was never delivered.

After the debacle of Prometheus and Covenant, Romulus gave us so many promises that were then broken by the editing room and studio interference.

See, the movie looks beautiful.
Aesthetically, it's everything an Alien movie should be.
It's dark, grimy, has actual sets... no holographic stuff as seen in Prometheus and Covenant, and goes back to feeling like an actual, palpable thing that actually has substance.
But that, sadly, is where the real substance of the movie starts and ends.

See, we're greeted to a bog-standard movie, that lifts all the other plot points, scenes, dialogue, storylines, and everything in between, from all of the other Alien movies that came before it.

And this isn't just references... it's made up of entire plots and dialogue from the other movies.
The movie reminded me Ghostbusters: Afterlife, The Force Awakens, The Thing (2011), and the first two Jurassic World movies.

What makes Romulus stand out though from those other remakes, is the movie takes it upon itself to reference movies that canonically, haven't happened yet.
It's based after Prometheus, Covenant and Alien... but before Aliens... and yet somehow it references Aliens, Alien 3 and Resurrection.

And for some reason, some of the soundbite references are nonsensical too... like the Xenomorph squeal when Dallas in Alien is captured/killed is referenced when a laser goes off.
And for some reason, every, single, piece, of, machinery, makes the exact same noise as the landing gear from the Dropship in Aliens.
It's really odd.

So basically... the entire movie is essentially Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007).
It takes all different pieces of everything that came before it, cherry picks what it wants, and jams it into a 2 hour run-time... at least though Halloween (2007) had the balls to call itself a remake.

Another thing the movie does, is essentially retcons Ripley's victory in Alien.
You thought Alien 3 stamped on Aliens... this movie stamps on Alien... because, spoiler alert, the Xenomorph from Alien, survived.
Ripley now, has never had a victory.
Ever.

Because of Romulus.
And the title also doesn't make sense, because the ship/station is called "Romulus And Remus".

The other problem is inside of the 3rd act where the filmmakers ran out of plots to steal and had to resort to the Newborn from Resurrection... which was essentially reused once before already at the end of Prometheus.
The 3d act also sees our Final Girl, who has never held a rifle before let alone fired one, floating in zero-gravity, and taking out an entire nest of Xenomorphs single handedly.
Which just felt odd after seeing what just one Xeno can do to entire crews of humans, and Aliens showed us what they can do as a colony.

I won't get into the acting... other than:
We have a terrible looking CGI Deepfake of Sir Ian Holm.
Two of the male leads have annoying British accents... and I'm British and found it annoying.
Our Final Girl in Cailee Spaeny sounds drunk sometimes.
And everyone else is cannon fodder.

David Jonsson as the imaginatively named "Andy" is a standout performance though.
He plays in essence, two different roles depending on what program is controlling him.