Spoilers Alien Romulus reviews and ratings
- Thread starter NCC-73515
- Start date
P before R. I almost crashed my car.
I would probably rate both Prometheus and Covenant as equels to both Romulus and the Director's edition of Alien3.
And I am aware this post will get me in trouble.
Saw this a few days ago when it hit Disney+. Lots of fun, nothing new whatsoever. The ending thing was awesomely gross, but we've seen similar in a lot of films.
Wasn't too enamoured with the resurrection of Ian Holme, especally when he's not even "playing" the same android so it didn't need to be him.
Wasn't too enamoured with the resurrection of Ian Holme, especally when he's not even "playing" the same android so it didn't need to be him.
Bearing in mind I haven't seen AvP Requiem, that looks about right to me. To quote something I wrote on Facebook a few years ago, when my wife and I watched the series as a whole: "As part of our Alien movies rewatch, we watched Alien Resurrection (actually my first time seeing that one) and Prometheus. Two bad, dumb movies, but in different ways. Resurrection was a dumb idea made worse by bad casting, bad direction, bad effects, etc. Prometheus was a visually stunning film wholly and unswervingly committed to its stupidity." Covenant, which wasn't out at the time, carried on Prometheus with a little extra boringness. IMHO, YMMV, as we older Internet users say.
Just be happy they didn't try to get in on "Aliens" by brining Lance Henriksen back as the android.
It's been done in print in a novel titled BISHOP, featuring both cinematic versions. It also features Apone's kid brother. Qute well done, overall.
When I saw this was added to Disney+ I was interested in watching it, despite having never watched most of Alien movies before (I saw Prometheus when it came out and definitely watched some of the first on tv, but I'd definitely never watched them properly.) Then I realised I could just watch them all, finishing with Romulus, since they're all on Disney+ anyway. And it gave me something to do. I decided not to watch the Alien V Predator movies though because I didn't care about them at all and I haven't heard anything good about them. I don't really have anything much interesting to say though: I'm sure everything I'm about to post has already been said in the last 36 years. I imagine my opinions here are pretty basic. But they're still real opinions!
Alien - It's a great movie that toally holds up. What impressed me the most was the economy in the storytelling: there isn't a wasted moment. Every shot, every moment has a purpose. The characters were refreshingly "real" feeling, no stupid quips or unnecessary insertions of backstory. The alien looked good when we saw it. I didn't find it scary, really, but I'm sure I would have done if I'd watched it as a child like I should have.
Aliens - Hey, it's great too! Like everyone's been saying! Famously it switches from horror to action and luckily James Cameron is the exact right person to pull this off. Characters are a lot more "movie character" than the first one but I enjoyed them in an eighties' tough guy kind of way (and I'm sure this movie invented many of those eighties' cliches.) Sigourney Weaver gives a great performance fleshing out Ripley a bit and I enjoyed all her interactions with Newt. We see a lot more of the aliens but they look great and I don't think it's aged much in terms of visuals. Really liked the end surprise with the Queen showing up and the relatively happy ending with Ripley getting over he trauma from the first movie and ending up with a new family.
Alien 3 - So obviously everyone's been complaing about the way they killed off Newt and Hicks (and soon after Bishop) for 33 years now. And I definitely hated that aspect of it! I hated that it just shits on the ending of the previous movie, literally killing poor little Newt just minutes (from her point of view) after her new mother has triumphantly saved her life. BUT, the thing is, all three of the first movies are very different from each other. It's not a trilogy like something like The Lord Of The Rings is: all three movies can stand on their own and exist in their own reality. The ending of Aliens isn't really ruined by this, because you can just imagine Ripley got home and introduced Newt ot Jonesy and they all lived happily ever after, with this being some other reality where things got grim. Because this is very girm. There are some merits here: it looks great (David Fincher might hate the movie but he did a good job with what he had), there's lot of good British actos in there, and Sigourney is great again. It's a shame the compositing on the alien puppet is so bad in the big chase scene though (and that I can't tell all the bald guys apart.) So yeah as a movie on its own this definitely isn't terrible.
Alien: Resurrection - I actually enjoyed this, even though it was very silly. It once again feels completely different from the previous entries in the franchise, and as a late nineties, Joss Whedon-scripted sci-fi movie it's pretty fun? Sigourney is clearly enjoying herself playing a nearly entirely different character and I liked her chemistry with Winona Ryder. Ron Perlman is always good to have in these types of things even if his "lovable sexist" character hasn't aged well. Brad Dourif was perfectly cast a mad scientist. I'M NOT SAYNG THIS WAS A GOOD MOVIE, or anything (the hybrid thing at the end was terrible), but I'd heard so much bad about it that I was expecting worse. And again it feels like a different universe from the others so what harm does it really do.
Prometheus - I remember people getting really weird about this when it came out, with really long explanations as to why the movie was Good Actually and why all the things people didn't like about it were ON PURPOSE (some crazy theory about Weyland hiring dumb scientists as part of his plan...which I don't think the movie suggests at all.) I can understand why and have some smypathy, obviously people were very invested in this film with it being Ridley Scott's return to the universe after 33 years(!) I don't think it's a complete loss either: it looks great, Michael Fassbender gives a brilliant performance, and the scene with Shawn in the medical pod is a great moment of body horror. But I don't buy at all that there's antyhing really deep going on here or that the movie achievces anything greater than the sum of its part. And I fucking hate those two idiot scientists who get lost in the cave even if they are "supposed" to be like that.
Alien: Covenant - This was the one I liked the least. I didn't get much from it at all. It just throws away the more intriguing parts of Prometheus and reduces David to "evil robot who makes monsters." It gets boring in the middle and lacks momentum. It tries to do an Aliens style action bit near the end, then a mini version of Alien once they get back on the ship and neither live up at all to the movies they're emulating. Pretty bad!
Alien: Romulus - I liked it a lot. Cailee Spaeny was a great lead, without her character feeling too much like a copy of Ripley. Her relationship with Andy (David Jonsson was excellent!) was the best part of the movie and really the main reason why it worked. But it also looked great and did both horror and action much better than anything since Aliens. The acid drip death was particularly disturbing. The human/alien hybrid thing at the end was much, much creepier and better than the thing in Resurrection. I do agree with the general feeling that it over-did the nostalgia. I found the artificial Ian Holm distracting and wih they'd just used a different character. The "get away from her, you bitch" bit was comical, but I wish it hadn't come at the climax of a major action moment. But yeah I liked it!
Alien - It's a great movie that toally holds up. What impressed me the most was the economy in the storytelling: there isn't a wasted moment. Every shot, every moment has a purpose. The characters were refreshingly "real" feeling, no stupid quips or unnecessary insertions of backstory. The alien looked good when we saw it. I didn't find it scary, really, but I'm sure I would have done if I'd watched it as a child like I should have.
Aliens - Hey, it's great too! Like everyone's been saying! Famously it switches from horror to action and luckily James Cameron is the exact right person to pull this off. Characters are a lot more "movie character" than the first one but I enjoyed them in an eighties' tough guy kind of way (and I'm sure this movie invented many of those eighties' cliches.) Sigourney Weaver gives a great performance fleshing out Ripley a bit and I enjoyed all her interactions with Newt. We see a lot more of the aliens but they look great and I don't think it's aged much in terms of visuals. Really liked the end surprise with the Queen showing up and the relatively happy ending with Ripley getting over he trauma from the first movie and ending up with a new family.
Alien 3 - So obviously everyone's been complaing about the way they killed off Newt and Hicks (and soon after Bishop) for 33 years now. And I definitely hated that aspect of it! I hated that it just shits on the ending of the previous movie, literally killing poor little Newt just minutes (from her point of view) after her new mother has triumphantly saved her life. BUT, the thing is, all three of the first movies are very different from each other. It's not a trilogy like something like The Lord Of The Rings is: all three movies can stand on their own and exist in their own reality. The ending of Aliens isn't really ruined by this, because you can just imagine Ripley got home and introduced Newt ot Jonesy and they all lived happily ever after, with this being some other reality where things got grim. Because this is very girm. There are some merits here: it looks great (David Fincher might hate the movie but he did a good job with what he had), there's lot of good British actos in there, and Sigourney is great again. It's a shame the compositing on the alien puppet is so bad in the big chase scene though (and that I can't tell all the bald guys apart.) So yeah as a movie on its own this definitely isn't terrible.
Alien: Resurrection - I actually enjoyed this, even though it was very silly. It once again feels completely different from the previous entries in the franchise, and as a late nineties, Joss Whedon-scripted sci-fi movie it's pretty fun? Sigourney is clearly enjoying herself playing a nearly entirely different character and I liked her chemistry with Winona Ryder. Ron Perlman is always good to have in these types of things even if his "lovable sexist" character hasn't aged well. Brad Dourif was perfectly cast a mad scientist. I'M NOT SAYNG THIS WAS A GOOD MOVIE, or anything (the hybrid thing at the end was terrible), but I'd heard so much bad about it that I was expecting worse. And again it feels like a different universe from the others so what harm does it really do.
Prometheus - I remember people getting really weird about this when it came out, with really long explanations as to why the movie was Good Actually and why all the things people didn't like about it were ON PURPOSE (some crazy theory about Weyland hiring dumb scientists as part of his plan...which I don't think the movie suggests at all.) I can understand why and have some smypathy, obviously people were very invested in this film with it being Ridley Scott's return to the universe after 33 years(!) I don't think it's a complete loss either: it looks great, Michael Fassbender gives a brilliant performance, and the scene with Shawn in the medical pod is a great moment of body horror. But I don't buy at all that there's antyhing really deep going on here or that the movie achievces anything greater than the sum of its part. And I fucking hate those two idiot scientists who get lost in the cave even if they are "supposed" to be like that.
Alien: Covenant - This was the one I liked the least. I didn't get much from it at all. It just throws away the more intriguing parts of Prometheus and reduces David to "evil robot who makes monsters." It gets boring in the middle and lacks momentum. It tries to do an Aliens style action bit near the end, then a mini version of Alien once they get back on the ship and neither live up at all to the movies they're emulating. Pretty bad!
Alien: Romulus - I liked it a lot. Cailee Spaeny was a great lead, without her character feeling too much like a copy of Ripley. Her relationship with Andy (David Jonsson was excellent!) was the best part of the movie and really the main reason why it worked. But it also looked great and did both horror and action much better than anything since Aliens. The acid drip death was particularly disturbing. The human/alien hybrid thing at the end was much, much creepier and better than the thing in Resurrection. I do agree with the general feeling that it over-did the nostalgia. I found the artificial Ian Holm distracting and wih they'd just used a different character. The "get away from her, you bitch" bit was comical, but I wish it hadn't come at the climax of a major action moment. But yeah I liked it!
@CaptainWacky re Alien 3, out of interest do you know if you watched the theatrical cut or the assembly cut (which isn't a director's cut per se but is about as close to it as we'll get I think)?
It was definitely the Theatrical Cut, as the Assembly Cut isn't on Disney+.
Pity.
He was only lovable once he kissed Dominique Pinon. Had he taken the honorable Vincent DeSewers approach, he would have died earlier as the ALIEN male leaders tend to do. Anyhow, we must respect the gamut.
So in the last thirty seconds of the movie?
Alien Resurrection, as I've said now for almost twenty years, is pretty much Whedon's rough draft of Firefly. The crew of the Betty is where the crew of the Serenity comes from. And Michael Jan Friedman's Aliens novel Original Sin, which is a sequel to the film, leans into that pretty hard; it reads like it's a Firefly novel.
This has always been sorta obvious. Of course, we could say the Betty's crew is significantly darker, not actually good guys, given that they're blithely selling defenseless humans, but it's not like the Firefly characters are exactly angels themselves.
Something along those lines. Or was it that he didn't write the script, but the screenplay? And that the script was completely different than his ideas?
EDIT TO ADD THIS FROM WIKI:
Screenwriter Joss Whedon was unhappy with the final product, remarking that it closely followed his script but was poorly executed.[51] Conversely, H. R. Giger, designer of the original Alien, was pleased with Resurrection, describing it as an "excellent film", but was disappointed about not being credited.[52] For the 25th anniversary of Alien Resurrection, Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet watched a 35mm print of the film: “I was a little bit concerned to watch my film – maybe I won’t like it?” he says. “No, it was great! I have a lot of shots that I love. For the people who don’t like it, I can say, ‘f*** you!’”[53]
I read the script way back in the day, and while I forget the details* I do remember my overall feeling...it was about the same overall quality as the finished film.
*I do remember the finale desperately trying to be like the Aliens finale though, with Ripley using a harvester to fight the Newborn.
*I do remember the finale desperately trying to be like the Aliens finale though, with Ripley using a harvester to fight the Newborn.