>>71025Finally watched Alien: Romulus. But before watching it, I went back and watched all the Alien movies. I'm a huge fan of the original and can pretty much quote the entire thing from memory. It took me a week to watch them all. Here are my unsolicited opinions on each.
Alien (1979) — Almost a perfect horror film imo. The plot is nothing to write home about, but the set design, the alien design, and the atmosphere are perfect. It's one of the most hauntingly beautiful labyrinths to ever grace the silver screen. The amount of detail in every inch of the Nostromo and LV-426 is amazing. The idea of having blue-collar characters made the whole thing work. One of my favorite movies of all time.
Aliens (1986) — A generally fun, competently made, but ultimately dumb blockbuster movie. Compared to the original, it's a downgrade on every level. The characters are flat, samey, and uninteresting. Obvious bad guy doing bad guy things. The design of the ship and interiors is functional, but not nearly as beautiful or interesting as in the first movie. It's not a bad movie, but it pales in comparison to the original. The "perfect organism" is also shown to be completely pathetic, stupid, squishy things.
Alien 3 (1992) — If Aliens is a competently made movie with boring ideas, Alien 3 is a movie with some good ideas but clunky execution. The characters are interesting for the most part, and the dialogue is way better compared to the second movie, but it's mostly the formula of the first movie: a monster killing the cast one by one while everybody else runs around inside a sci-fi labyrinth in despair. It doesn't really add anything to the universe either. Still, it has some cool ideas in there.
Alien Resurrection (1997) — Awful, shitty characters that have nothing interesting to say. Ripley is basically a new character played by the same actor, and the new character is shit. It's full of goofy moments and idiotic plot points that make no sense. The special effects and set design are mostly OK, but the dialogue and plot are garbage. Characters have to constantly drop exposition dumps just to make sense of whatever is going on. The only interesting character in there is Gediman. They really drove Ripley into a corner with this one. No wonder they pretty much dropped the whole thing and started making movies set in other points of the timeline.
Prometheus (2012) — The first of the new movies. The focus shifts from the xenomorphs to David, an android, and his obsession with genetic experimentation. It's philosophically ambitious and introduces a couple of interesting things to the franchise, but overall, it's an incredibly dumbshit movie. Characters just say things that have no impact or meaning whatsoever, hoping to make their presence felt. There are too many stupid as fuck characters who are an embarrassment to the human race. A scientist who believes in fairy tales because "that's what she chooses to do," and other extremely stupid shit like that, is spewed by all the characters throughout the entire movie. David is the only decent thing in the whole movie, and it's no wonder they made the sequel very much about him and made a second character played by the same actor for good measure.
Alien: Covenant (2017) — The sequel to Prometheus. Another visually competent outing filled with flat, dumb characters. More characters who believe in fairy tales, having hissy fits during a space colonization mission. Is this the best of the best we have to send to inhabit and investigate other planets? I quake for humanity. The alien can't kill them fast enough.
Alien: Romulus (2024) — Alien: Covenant didn't do so well, so they pretty much dropped the entire storyline of David and left it unfinished. Romulus takes place between the first and second movies. The characters here are a bunch of teenagers who also behave like idiots, but this time it makes a lot more sense because they're just a bunch of poor kids, not highly trained cosmonauts and scientists.
This movie is OK, but it just feels like a "best of" selection from the series. There's not a single new idea here. Every scene is pilfered from the previous movies in the franchise, to the point of using literally the same lines. It's more like an homage than anything else. You have a chestburster scene, an evil android scene, a tongue headshot scene, and so on and so forth.
If you've never watched an Alien movie, I think you might like it because a lot of those scenes will be new to you. To anybody else, it's a "been there, done that" movie.