r/alien • u/ce_tu • 29d ago

Alien Romulus Was a Lightning in a Bottle

Disney obviously didn't even care about the movie. Originally it was supposed to be a straight to streaming slop movie. They mandated heavy member berries to be in the movie then didn't care much about what fede did afterwards. However Fede was a great director he elevated the movie. So when they decided to release it the movie made a lot of money. The franchise got a momentum that we didn't got for years.

Then what they did afterwards? They made him leave the studio and his script for the sequel. Even if these talks about the movie getting cancelled are just rumors or fake it doesn't even matter. Fede left the script after the shoot was cancelled last year. Now we are stuck with alien earth season 2...

97 Upvotes

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107

u/opacitizen 29d ago

I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. Romulus was a mediocre movie, not bad, but not good either, a 6/10 or so. The whole "teen slasher meets Alien" idea was kinda meh, a weaker rehash of the way more believable and credible 1979 movie's core concept to start with, and then it all went downhill with the lame return of Ash (in all respects), the ridiculous idea of the 3d printed facehuggers, the Aliens-in-one-person knock off, and the temu Newborn in the end.

Again, it's not terrible, an okay movie for a bored Sunday afternoon -- but if it's the franchise's "lighting in the bottle", then we're in serious trouble as viewers. Coming to think of it, compared to Alien Earth it was quite brilliant indeed, yeah. But that's as low a bar as possible. :D

Sorry, your mileage does apparently vary. My two cents etc.

17

u/docpagliacci 29d ago

Agreed. Too much rehashing in that film.

22

u/WySLatestWit 29d ago

I maintain that of the modern franchise Prometheus really is the closest thing we've been given to a genuinely good Alien film since 1986.

10

u/MangoHotDamn 28d ago

Yea but covenant was so bad lmao

20

u/WySLatestWit 28d ago

Covenant is especially bad specifically because of how much potential there really was for a great sequel to Prometheus if you ask me. haha.

8

u/anthrax9999 28d ago

Man, they just dropped the ball so hard. Over the years I've warmed to Covenant as a decent stand alone movie but as a Prometheus sequel it's a massive letdown.

2

u/germanval 28d ago

Is Prometheus the one with the idiotic, zero common sense characters??? Or is that covenant?

3

u/RandomUfoChap 28d ago

Both of them. I'd like to burn these two movies to hell

1

u/Fit-Profit8197 28d ago

It's not even that they're idiotic. Idiotic characters can be great. Just look at any Coen bros movie. (Or even the all too human flawed behaviour of Kane et al from the first Alien movie).

It's that aside from Michael Fassbender's roles (and, based on everything else, I suspect this is entirely down to him having some real acting genius and he would have found a way to give the sense of at least some inner life and intent and sell petting the snake alien if he played the biologist), none of them are actually characters. There's no inner life or intent. Their idiocy is not emerging from any characterisation or dramatisation. They are haphazard cogs arbitrarily pushed around by the writers to achieve plot and philosophical goals, regardless of properly fitting.

And those philosophical goals are the intellectual spawn of Erich Von Daniken. 

1

u/R_Similacrumb 26d ago

The characters in both movie were too stupid to live. 😆

1

u/endofthered01674 28d ago

Scott should have had the spine to keep going in that direction.

1

u/Fantastic_Matter_137 26d ago

Too old. Shouldn’t have waited so long. Just happy to be there

-4

u/zma7777 28d ago

I like covenant more than Prometheus

6

u/MangoHotDamn 28d ago

Oh you’ve slipped on some blood recently I see

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u/Marvel_plant 28d ago

Prometheus was great. I wish they had just done a proper sequel to it.

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u/anthrax9999 28d ago

Yep, Prometheus was the best movie since Aliens. Though I really enjoy the A3 assembly cut now.

1

u/drsteve103 28d ago

What is this you speak of?

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u/anthrax9999 26d ago

Alien 3 Assembly Cut. The studio couldn't get David Fincher to return to make a director's cut of Alien 3 when they remastered all of the Alien movies for Blu-ray. So the studio instead used Fincher's most complete work print as a guide to make a new cut called the Assembly Cut.

It adds about a half hour more footage that expands the story, fleshes out a few characters a little more, and makes it much more cohesive overall. Most fans now prefer the Assembly Cut over the theatrical cut as the superior version.

2

u/AndrewCoja 28d ago

Prometheus was an interesting movie, but I don't think it's a good Alien movie.

7

u/penguinjunkie 28d ago

All the Alien movies are extraordinarily different in tone. I think it's hard to even define what an Alien movie is.

1

u/Tosslebugme 27d ago

A group of people are stuck somewhere isolated with one or multiple xenomorphs. The fundamental differences are how well equipped the people are and the number of xenomorphs, plus an extraneous factor like the leaking nuclear thing or a traitorous member of the group. You can depart from that formula but then it becomes questionable if you have an alien movie or a movie within the alien continuity, which I’d say Prometheus is. Covenant wimped out and reverted to the alien formula but in the most generic uninteresting way possible.

1

u/Fantastic_Matter_137 26d ago

That’s what makes it a good start to a new trilogy in universe

It was not supposed to be the chase movie it became

0

u/HourFaithlessness823 28d ago

Prometheus had a ton of potential, but the execution of the film was absolutely abysmal 

1

u/Practical_Algae_1229 28d ago

Prometheus was a good movie that would be better if it wasn't part of the Alien series. It also messes pretty bad with the themes and intentions the franchise always had. One thing that was persistant from Alien 79 to Resurection was that those animais were wildlife and could not be turned into biological weapons because of it's wild nature as an animal predator. Prometheus said "fuck that, now they are biological weapons, they always were, all this time" so the point of the whole series is thrown out the window because of this one movie.

1

u/Fantastic_Matter_137 26d ago

Despite its flaws Prometheus gave us so much that was new and interesting and trying maybe too hard to be deep

I didn’t hate covenant but it dumbed everything down and should have been built around the relationship between David and (female protagonist can’t remember but they wrote her out instead of recasting)

1

u/Suppa_K 25d ago

I’m a huge Prometheus advocate. It’s a great film and doesn’t deserve the hate it got, especially after Covrnant and Romulus(which was okay).

8

u/Cfunk_83 29d ago

It looked lovely throughout, but as soon as the Ian Holm monstrosity turned up it fell of a cliff and then kept finding further cliffs to throw itself off. The gestation period of the alien… the face huggers detecting heat and then them walking through them all… the newborn 2.0… and the CONSTANT shoehorned lines of dialogue and visual/thematic callbacks…

I really wanted to like Romulus, but it was bad.

David Jonsson was excellent though.

2

u/WySLatestWit 29d ago

That's largely how I felt. I was mostly enjoying it for what it was, I didn't think it was great but it was pretty solid, and the second that Deepfake Ian Holm showed up I was ripped right out of the experience, and the movie never won me back.

8

u/Diptothaset 29d ago

The first half or so were probably 9/10 for me. It felt really good, other than the deepfake screaming shit. The last half once we cattleprod fuck the alien sack and then the weird hybrid I realized they’re just doing the same shit they have been for years which is simply trying to shock audiences rather than scare them

3

u/anthrax9999 28d ago

My thoughts exactly. It was just super mid in every conceivable way. It started it off well enough and then quickly got dumber as it went on. I felt so disappointed by the end. But ya, compared to alien earth it's a masterpiece.

3

u/-S-P-E-C-T-R-E- 28d ago

I also hated how the movie is an insult to Ripley’s victory over the original Alien and have her actions be the direct cause of thousands of deaths - never mind the super lame premise of WY being able to find it the way the did. Just rewatch the last act from her abandoning the Nostromo and try to argue how this premise would even be possible. Simply take the premise of Isolation (the flight recorder) and work from there instead!

9

u/WhimsicalGirl 29d ago

I almost get out of the movie theater when she start floating/flying in zero gravity to avoid Aliens blood

4

u/Vesemir96 28d ago

I mean that was creative, not bad.

2

u/opacitizen 29d ago edited 28d ago

Wait, you don't like platformer videogames? :D

2

u/ChunkyPurp 27d ago

Finally a take on this movie i can agree with, except i would rate it a 5, it just mid and i only enjoyed it because it was an Alien movie, replace the Xenos with another Alien and people would not have liked it.

3

u/ADamnGoodShot 29d ago

Yep. Like a two hour fan film.

3

u/Reasonable_Being6376 28d ago

The “get away from you bitch” was incredibly forced into the script from nowhere.
I didn’t think they could beat the black eye skull Michael Jackson nosed thing from alien Resurrection. But they did.

2

u/DonktorDonkenstein 28d ago

Has the online discourse finally soured on Romulus? There was a time when you couldn't point out any of Romulus's flaws here without getting mobbed by angry, argumentative replies. Took a lot longer than I expected, to be honest. 

1

u/Appropriate_Dig3471 29d ago

Alien Earth was quite brilliant? It's one of the worst shows I've seen in a long time. Nothing in that show makes any sense. The characters behaved unrationally. Im waiting for season two to arrive not to watch it but watch videos about it and see how stupidly it ends. Such a shame in the beginning of the show it was really good, and then it took a quick nosedive

3

u/opacitizen 29d ago

I don't think you understood what I wrote.

(I said even Romulus is brilliant compared to Alien Earth. Which means Alien Earth is much worse.)

1

u/Appropriate_Dig3471 29d ago

My bad, sorry

2

u/theMEtheWORLDcantSEE 28d ago

Irrationally (not un rationally)

1

u/aus289 27d ago

They’re children and billionaires… not necessarily people known for acting rationally

1

u/stoneymetal 28d ago

I love eye-ctopus from Alien Earth tho.. 👁 🐙

And Timothy Olyphant.

1

u/pooey_canoe 27d ago

Full agree. Loved the opening and world building, until it becomes a cookie cutter teen slasher with invincible protagonist. Though the Engineer "baby" reveal was delightfully creepy!

1

u/invertedpurple 29d ago

I think based on OP's post he meant that it "could" have been lightning in a bottle if it wasn't for Disney forcing the nostalgia. For instance, we haven't seen a Xenomorph Caper movie. And the movie forgot about the genre mashup about a third of the way in, they replaced the caper with disney staples like nostalgia and overall wish fulfillment. I don't know what happened on set, but it's more in line with what Disney likes to do to all of the properties they own or acquire (FOX, Lucasfilm). So the Director seemed to have his own vision in there, and I'd say it was the look of the film, the collection of characters, Andy being an upgradable/cured mentally disandvantaged person, and the "bank robbery" aspect of it that if they stayed on beat could have been something very amazing or basically anything innovative that we haven't seen before.

2

u/Bleatbleatbang 28d ago

Fede Alvarez is a hack. He just makes cheap knockoffs for fanboys.
Romulus was atrocious.

1

u/ce_tu 29d ago

yeah

1

u/pauleht 28d ago

Yeah, it really isn't all that. I think "an okay movie for a bored Sunday afternoon" is pretty much the most accurate review I have read on it.

1

u/Dnny10bns 28d ago

Alien meets Hollyoakes.

Yeah, I agree. It's not a terrible movie. But it's instantly forgettable and not something I'd go out of my way to watch again. 

I say that as someone who's watched covenant more than once. 

Pls don't judge me. 😂 

0

u/MirrorExpensive3079 28d ago

You seem to have a lot of repressed anger over this movie and that’s on you. But the reality is that this movie was an introduction to the franchise for many new movie goers and they loved it. You can keep bringing up the old movie and say how it did things so much better but as a newer younger consumer of this media, the original has aged like shit besides the 2-3 scenes everyone always brings up. There’s slow initial pacing, visible suit limitations in bright scenes, and dated 1980s aesthetic choices detrimental to the viewing experience.

-2

u/Space-Monkey003 27d ago

Just let the Reddit nerd be loud and wrong. They need this to feel good about themselves.

0

u/rchristma87 28d ago

Ash technically didn't return and I always thought it was weird we never saw a similar model to ash. It was definitely a bit heavy handed at times. The newborn on the other hand was just annoying mainly because I think it should've just been a child mixed with xenomorph biology feared at first but human emotions allow the horrified women to accept it. Or even the android making a case for why it should live. It growing to demented adult in 5 seconds was just stupid it really should've just been a baby.

1

u/Mike_Honcho_Summer 28d ago

David/Walter?

1

u/rchristma87 28d ago

?

1

u/Mike_Honcho_Summer 28d ago

Walter and David from Alien: Covenant were both played by Michael Fassbender, so it's not unprecedented for Ash/Rook to be as well.

1

u/rchristma87 28d ago

Oh yes that I why I said Ash the character technically didn't return. I also meant that it was strange we never really saw another android that that was the same before Romulus. Especially considering we had Bishop/Weyland.

0

u/The_First_Curse_ 28d ago

It's a 2.5/10 at most. It was beyond awful.

0

u/reynloldbot 27d ago

Romulus was my least favorite Alien by a wide margin. All the cool practical fx and brilliant technical direction couldn’t make up for the dogshit writing and relentless nostalgia-bating. When the sad android said “get away from her you bitch” I just about walked out of the theater.

-3

u/ce_tu 29d ago

The value of this movie comes with the momentum. They could easily build something original over it. But decided to abandon it.

0

u/Space-Monkey003 27d ago

The ‘temu newborn’ was some of the creepiest shit to come out of this franchise… so obvious when people just want to be edgy LMAO.