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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\u201cAlien: Romulus\u201d started out at a disadvantage with me because I haven\u2019t liked any of the \u201cAlien\u201d films that came before it. I\u2019m not just talking about the heavily-maligned third and fourth installments from the 90\u2019s, the \u201cPredator\u201d crossovers from the 2000\u2019s, or the uneven Michael Fassbender arc of the 2010\u2019s. I mean that even the \u201cclassic\u201d original from 1979 and beloved first sequel from 1986 have never done it for me. I find them to be little more than glorified haunted house movies with one cool creature design and some extra squishy special effects. That isn\u2019t to say that I think they\u2019re terrible, exactly, just not worthy of their pedestals in popular culture. Now \u201cAlien: Romulus\u201d is a movie that I do think is terrible, exactly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The movie follows new heroine Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her glitchy android \u201cbrother\u201d Andy (David Jonsson) as they try to escape a miserable mining planet owned by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. They get an invite from her friend Tyler (Archie Renaux) to join him on an unsanctioned mission to a floating research station that contains stasis chambers and is set to arrive at a desirable planet in nine years. Also along are Tyler\u2019s pregnant sister Kara (Isabela Merced), his cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Bjorn\u2019s girlfriend Navarro (Aileen Wu).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of course, things don\u2019t quite go to plan. There isn\u2019t enough fuel to run the stasis chambers, so the team has to look all over the ship for more. Another little snag, as you can probably imagine, is that the ship took an alien known as a Xenomorph onboard and now the ship is infested with everything from big, cumbersome, deadly aliens to smaller, more nimble, but still very deadly aliens. Also, the aliens have acidic bodily fluids that are capable of tearing through the ship itself, not to mention any unfortunate humans. Also, the station is owned by Weyland-Yutani, a company that never misses a chance to endanger humans for its own bottom line \u2013 and it wants that precious alien DNA. All of this is explained by the ship\u2019s android science officer, and let\u2019s just say that one of Weyland-Yutani\u2019s cost-cutting measures is recycling android designs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since the characters aren\u2019t interesting and the action isn\u2019t exciting, I whiled away the time waiting for cast members to get killed off. There\u2019s a big billboard in Times Square depicting Navarro getting attacked by a face-hugging Xenomorph, she\u2019s a goner for sure. Bjorn is rude to everybody, he\u2019s no doubt toast. Tyler is bland even for this movie, he has \u201ckilled off somewhere in the middle\u201d written all over him. Kara exists solely so her pregnancy can be exploited for body horror. This franchise\u2019s affinity for heroines takes away a lot of the suspense from Rain, though Cailee Spaeny is no Sigourney Weaver. The only character whose life or death I couldn\u2019t predict with 99% certainty was Andy, and he arguably doesn\u2019t even have a \u201clife\u201d in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Walt Disney World used to have an attraction called \u201cAlien Encounter,\u201d unrelated to the \u201cAlien\u201d franchise, but certainly reminiscent of it. Guests would sit strapped in a seat and be \u201cterrorized\u201d by an alien animatronic in the form of wind, water, and sound effects in a darkened room. Disney got complaints that the attraction wasn\u2019t child-friendly, so they made the lighting dim instead of dark, scaled down the intensity, and generally made the whole thing less appealing to thrill-seekers. \u201cAlien: Romulus\u201d reminds me of a later version of that ride. While not devoid of violence by any means, the film can\u2019t properly pull off a thrilling or scary atmosphere to save its life. Nor does it have the dramatic or comedic chops to be an interesting movie on any other level. That was what saved the first two \u201cAlien\u201d movies from being terrible, the human characters were likeable, even if I didn\u2019t like their chances of survival. I think I liked this film\u2019s five human characters less than Paul Reiser\u2019s intentionally-detestable corporate sellout in \u201cAliens.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Grade: D<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAlien: Romulus\u201d is rated R for bloody violent content and language. Its running time is 119 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Bob Garver \u201cAlien: Romulus\u201d started out at a disadvantage with me because I haven\u2019t liked any of the \u201cAlien\u201d films that came before it. I\u2019m not just talking… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":59898,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[2788],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59897"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59897"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59897\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59899,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59897\/revisions\/59899"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}