I just watched Alien: Romulus and it was really kinda dumb.
Guess I'll start at the beginning where we see a ship approaching the wreckage of the Nostromo from the first movie. Apparently when the Nostromo blew up all the pieces stayed neatly in one spot, perpetual motion in zero gravity due to an explosion be damned. This is where we also see them picking up the Alien Ripley shot out the airlock of the escape shuttle. The same shuttle that made it a good 50 miles away from said explosion, but fuck it, I guess the Alien just drifted back to those conviently stationary wreckage pieces, where it remained for 20 years. This is not even mentioning that it's just plain stupid that the Alien from the first movie survived. You can argue all you want that 'Hey, it's an Alien, right? It could survive.', but we all know why it surived; So that this movie could reference the first movie, so that we can go 'Oh my gawd, it's the Nostromo, AND the original Alien creature'.
After that the movie gets a bit better, but this only lasts for a few minutes till it goes back to being dumb. We're introduced to Rain and Andy who want to escape a mining planet. Rain has apparently worked in the mines for years but still maintained the skin of someone who hasn't worked in a mine for years. Andy is an android and actually this movie's only redeeming aspect. The character isn't great or anything, but the actor does a very good job making him engaging. The rest of the performances weren't too great.
And then we get to all the Alien stuff, and it's honestly the worst in this franchise. And yes, that includes Resurrection. There's just no presence to either the Aliens or the Facehuggers in this movie. Sure, they're there, they look like Aliens, and they kill some folks... but they just feel like big dumb monsters in how they act and how the movie presents them. A lot of shots of them just going hiss grrr, and delaying their attack on our heroes - that they have within their clutches - long enough for a daring rescue from someone off-screen. The Alien used to be quiet and invisible, even when James Cameron got a hold of them. You didn't really know where they would pop out of to grab ya, and it made the empty steel corridors feel scary on their own. But not anymore - The Alien is just there now telegraphing itself as the monster that's gonna get our heroes.
Oh and the incubation cycle of an Alien now happens in about the same amount of time you need to boil an egg.
We also get to see Ash return, except it's not Ash, but it looks like Ian Holm so it should be Ash, but it's not. It's just the movie being dumb and cheap. There's no reason for this tasteless cameo. Ash in the first movie was supposed to be undercover on the Nostromo; nobody of the human crew was supposed to know he was an android. Then why the fuck would the company send a model that's clearly part of a series that has the same identical look? What if Brett or Parker recognized Ash the moment he joined the crew? There goes your plan to have Ash sabotage everything Weyland Yutani.
And the ending is the same ending we've come to expect from this franchise, but now with an even stupider and dorkier looking monster.
*sigh* This movie fucking sucked.
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