Alien Romulus

When I heard this was to be set between the first two movies, I wondered how the hell that was going to work. So here's the setup: The company sends a ship to gather some space junk from the Nostromo wreckage. Guess what kind of space junk they find?

But we're not dealing with them. We're dealing with a group of young people on a mining colony planet, and like most young people, they don't want to work. They form a plan to steal some cryo tubes from the wreckage of the ship that went out to get the wreckage from the Nostromo, and... are you still following me?

With the help of a special-ed android, they infiltrate the ship, and then it all goes to shit for them. It's not a bad setup, but it took me a moment to wrap my head around what was going on. Then I got even more confused when I saw a damaged android that looked and dressed like Ash from the original film. Eventually, we confirm that it's a different synthetic that merely looks like him.

This movie relies a lot on nostalgia and doing the same thing over and over again. The atmosphere is good, though, and it has some cool scenes. They do some cool stuff with the facehuggers and the acid, and I liked that ringed planet setting. The movie acknowledges Prometheus pretty readily, and it also homages Alien: Resurrection with a weird hybrid type, who's really stupid and gross.

One part I thought was stupid is how they try to guilt trip the android for not opening the door to save what's-her-face, even though doing so would have guaranteed all of their deaths. I hate that morality shit. It's like that train-track thing where you decide whether to kill the one guy on the tracks or the 5 guys on the tracks, which apparently is a huge moral conundrum for some people.

You'll get a lot of fan service. I read some review say it works best when it's not trying to copy the original so much, and I'd agree. The new ideas were cool, the old ideas are just franchise tropes at this point. Not a great movie, but I don't really hate any of the movies in this series. It's at least better than Covenant.

#Review