Alien: Romulus
* Pretty good overall.
* Really great lead (Cailee Spaeny).
* Noticeably lower budget than you'd expect.
* Okay to meh to "bro..." special effects.
* COMICALLY TERRIBLE creature design ruins the finish.
The writer/director, Fede Alvarez, earnestly cares about his young characters and their development. Everything about the human side of his storytelling is pretty well done. He manages the small ensemble well, but Rain and her brother Andy deservingly take center stage, leaving a lot less time to develop the others.
Alvarez falls flat with his new facehugger behaviors. Too much cgi just sitting out in the open not being interesting or occasionally inching toward silly.
The digital Ian Holm is shockingly bad. I think my RTX 4070 will be able to do better AI video renders pretty soon.
I watched it on Disney+; if that was the "improved" version... good lord.
The final creature design is just indescribably bad and, worse, once again shot way too much right out in the open. OBSCURE YOUR F'N SCARY CREATURES, DIRECTORS!!!! Especially if you have an unforgivably bad/stupid creature design.
If you're too young to have seen / known about Alien: Resurrection (holy f that was 1997!! 👀) , it actually makes for a really interesting compare and contrast here.
https://i.nostr.build/JkLilDq1vSmdWdVr.webp
More stylized (deeply Frenchy infused -- for both better and worse -- by Jean-Pierre Jeunet), more confident, much more personality and flair throughout the ensemble (Joss Whedon is the master of creating characters and witty dialog). Darius Khondji is a MASTER cinematographer.
Resurrection is more comic book and brash vs Romulus' more rooted "real people" tone. Also suffers from bad creature design at the end, though Romulus' is so terrible that Resurrection's seems more reasonable in retrospect.
Romulus: more real people, more real moments. It's a pretty good human emotional drama wrapped within a good enough "Alien" movie.
Resurrection: Fails overall because Jeunet is just too Frenchy and, like Paul Verhoeven, I suspect it goes big and dumb because that's what he thinks of Americans. But he's such a good f'n filmmaker. Resurrection's impressive strengths and embarrassing weaknesses make it the more interesting film to study by far.
Haven't seen it, can't imagine why I would. The franchise, like Terminator and most other 20th century franchises that are being endlessly retreaded, is totally played out. Alien: Covenant was the final straw.
If I want to watch an Alien movie, I'll watch the original, 2, or *maybe* Resurrection or Prometheus. Everything else isn't even canon in my books.
The Terminator movies have been mostly meh or terrible, starting with the third one. "Dark Fate" made a pretty good earnest effort that was the best of the bunch. "Salvation" tried to be a more focused character study and I give it points for its ambitions.
Movies in general feel pretty doomed to me. Studios are too scared to do anything too original and so just do endless sequels and reboots.
That being said, the Predator franchise has been the worst of all of them, yet "Prey" managed to be pretty great.
I agree overall, although I was totally underwhelmed by Dark Fate. I hated T3 so much I don't think even saw Salvation, so maybe I'll give that a go.
I agree with your bleak assessment of Hollywood system. There have been some signs of new growth in the last couple of years. I enjoyed M3gan and The Creator. But I suspect the place to look for innovative movie-making now is everywhere else but the US; the Europe, China, India, etc. Basic digital visual effects are so cheap now that I suspect it will have the same effect on movie-making that digital audio had on music production from the early noughties.
