Alien: Romulus (2024): Farewell thoughts on the film, franchise

Last Saturday, Rain and Andy were cornered by a group of Xenomorphs. It looks like all is lost, but then Rain comes up with a clever idea that I particularly liked. At the beginning of the film, we learn that the station is regularly cleaned by gravity. This causes Rain to turn off the station’s gravity, allowing her to fire at the Xenomorphs without their acid immediately eating a hole in it. She turns off gravity and starts shooting at the aliens. Once they’re all dead, the two make their way through the floating puddles of acidic blood and reach an elevator shaft.

Why we cheer for Rain

I really liked this scene because it made Rain seem smart – which she should be if she deserves to be the protagonist of the film. Apart from Ripley, the other protagonists in this franchise have always caused excitement because they always reacted to situations and never foresaw obvious problems. This moment was a real highlight for me.

As soon as Rain and Andy enter the elevator shaft, they encounter another problem. The gravity flushes begin to increase again and Rain doesn’t make it to the top of the shaft before the first one starts. She begins to fall, but an alien catches her and pushes her against the wall. At this point the viewer may be wondering why the alien saved her, but the next plot twist is very clever: a facehugger appears and begins crawling towards Rain. Without a single character saying a word, it is announced that the alien is holding them so that the Facehugger can implant an embryo into them.

Aliens with goals

It is worth noting that the monster has a goal here. I haven’t seen that in any of the previous films. There the aliens are just creatures of chaos, appearing here and there and doing this or that because the script demands it. In this film, the xenomorph is a predator with a specific goal, a nice plot development.

But before the facehugger can do its job, Andy jumps from the top of the shaft and kills both aliens. Then Rain and Andy return to the ship. Rain puts Kay in a cryopod and it looks like everything is fine. But shortly before Rain wants to enter a cryogenic capsule himself, a red light goes off on Kay’s capsule.

Rain opens the capsule and finds that her friend gives birth to a terrible creature that is in some kind of shell. Rain takes the grenade to a large storage container at the bottom of her ship, presumably used to transport mined materials, but the grenade opens. While the creature that crawls out of it is bad enough, the shell is full of acid. Rain rushes to grab a weapon that will freeze the acid, but the newborn alien returns to its mother before she can return. Andy also shows up and the newborn kills Kay and causes serious damage to Andy.

The Rings of Doom

Rain rushes back with a freeze gun and finds her friends. She then confronts the newborn. She eventually leads it to the storage room and throws the acid in the shell onto the floor so the creature can be sucked into space. After barely managing to avoid being pulled into the void herself, she releases the storage room, which is destroyed by the mining planet’s rings. Weyland Station is also destroyed by the rings and takes care of Ash.

The film ends with Rain promising herself to fix Andy before going into cryosleep and escaping the mining planet where she has lived her entire life.

The successes and failures of the franchise

Alien: Romulus isn’t perfect; There are plot holes here and there that vary in depth. Overall I liked the film. In fact, it’s one of the better additions to the series. I would surprisingly recommend it.

Before I conclude this review, I would like to offer my final thoughts on the entire franchise. It’s mostly terrible. The first two films are good, but after that the bottom falls out. However, I see a ray of hope. Admittedly, this could be due to my drastically lowered standards when evaluating this franchise. But if the audience sees a few more Romulus Quality films and nothing more Alien Covenant Quality, the series can make a comeback.

What around those alien embryos?

The main problem lies with the aliens themselves. The gestation period of the embryos, for example, is not thought about at all and it varies greatly in each film. It seems like alien embryo births have become a sloppy plot device to make things happen as needed. The reason I see this as such a big mistake is that the gestation period is very long if handled properly A huge missed opportunity! A set amount of time would be a perfect ticking clock – a great way to build tension over the course of a film. But the authors never do this. They are content to make the process a mere invention so that audiences can watch people die horribly at the right time.

Unfortunately that is Romulus The script does not correct this error, but attempts to correct others. It tries to explain why the aliens grow so quickly. It attempts to establish a series of hunting patterns for the Xenomorph that have been previously mentioned but never really explored. The fact that the Xenomorphs are primarily hunting their facehuggers is only brought up in “Aliens” when Newt is captured at the end. But beyond this unique case, the Why What’s behind what the Xenomorphs do is simply ignored.

Characters that make no sense

Another problem was the cartoonish casts in the later films. In the first and second films this problem does not exist. But Alien 3‘s and Alien resurrectionThe characters are clowns. Prometheus‘s and FederalThe characters do things that make absolutely no sense.

In Romulus, In contrast, miners have a goal. You are young. They don’t want to die in the mines like some of their parents. This makes the audience empathize with them, so when a character is killed it’s a disappointment, and that’s how it should be. Finding a cast is what raises the stakes of a film.

On the other hand, if everyone is an unmotivated idiot, then it doesn’t matter when they die, because it’s abundantly clear that they’re not really human. That makes a film boring. But Rain took risks to save her robot, which made sense because Andy was a gift from her father. Details like these force the audience to care, which makes for a better story despite the plot holes.

And now my reviewers’ rankings

In conclusion. I’m going to list the Alien films first chronologically and then by quality.

The films run chronologically as follows: Prometheus, covenant, ForeignerRomulus, Aliens, Alien 3And Resurrection.

In terms of quality, I would rank them as follows: Extraterrestrial, Alien, Romulus, Resurrection, Prometheus, CovenantIce melts, grass grows and Alien 3.

Prometheus, covenant, And Alien 3I think can be completely ignored. They are so stupid that watching them is a threat to the intellect. Alien resurrection lies somewhere in the middle. It’s better than the other three, but only good if the viewer likes mindless B-movies. However, aliens, aliens, And Romulus are worth your time.

I’m sorry to say I don’t think so Romulus will do well at the box office based on the previous two films, but I hope the improved quality is a sign of things to come. The Alien franchise can still be saved if future authors at least maintain the quality of this latest addition.

Here are the first three parts of my detailed review:

Alien: Romulus (2024) – Wait! Is this movie actually good? A new character, Rain, tries to escape the Weyland Corporation mine where her parents were killed, but the Xenomorphs have infiltrated the space station that the refugees must board… Romulus will likely be hurt at the box office by this the previous two films in the series were terrible. It meets the minimum standard for a quality film.

Alien: Romulus (2024): Andy gets angry – thanks to an old friend. Ash reappears in the story, a nice touch that ties the film back to the original. When measuring the importance of a plot hole, we should ask ourselves: How does it ultimately affect the story? Some of them in Romulus are not deep.

And

Alien: Romulus (2024) Newsflash: Ripley didn’t kill her first alien. This film makes a serious effort to summarize the Alien anthology. Continuity is all too often seriously neglected in the modern age of “cinema.”
We learn that the aliens usually have no intention of eating their prey, but rather using it to hatch facehugger embryos.