ALIEN: ROMULUS is an underwhelming offspring of its greatest, more immaculate predecessors.
After a strong opening of tremendous promise, a grimy, industrialist visual aesthetic, & immersive world building, we are thrown into the next hour full of nostalgic fan service, homages, easter eggs, abysmal CGI resurrections, razor thin characters, a goofy, underwhelming final act, & an overall complete lack of tension, scale, or imagination.
David Johnsson is a massive standout, delivering an interesting & complex performance as the synthetic android Andy. While Cailee Spaeny’s Rain is perfectly fine as another wannabe Ripley action heroine.
The anti-gravity sequence is a standout action sequence from a visual standpoint but it’s far more tense & grand in the trailers than in the actual film. The Facehuggers were genuinely creepy which was appreciated but we needed more Xenomorph horror & terrorization.
You can physically feel Disney’s fingerprints all over this, whispering over the shoulders of Fede Alvarez, who has dedicated his entire career to making gross, ultraviolent horror, to create something safe, inoffensive, & unimaginative. It’s much more straightforward than its perplexingly thematic predecessors but it’s also instantly forgettable, middle of the road, & constantly struggles to find its own identity.
It’s the safest, blandest, most sanitized, most tame installment of the franchise yet.
#AlienRomulus