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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9732073" data-attributes="member: 18">I just finally watched Alien: Romulus.What a mixed bag!I didn't think an Alien movie could make me re-appraise Resurrection and go "Huh, maybe I was too hard on Resurrection..." but Romulus sure did.The Good<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Cailee Spaeny - She may be tiny unlike our dear Sigourney, but like Sigourney, she actually has a ton of screen presence and can genuinely act (also saw this in Civil War)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Visual design - It was generally good and felt very on-point and really felt like one unified ship.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Sound design</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Rook's lines</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The zero-g pulse rifle scene</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Initial character motivations and setup</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The first 30-40 minutes of the script</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Andy's actor when he was doing Andy-Andy</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Crashing into the rings of the planet</li> </ul>The Bad<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">All the other actors overacting wildly - I know almost of these people can definitely act, because they're mostly British actors and I've seen them in other things! But my god what was going on? What did Fede Alvarez, because it is on him, tell them? They were literally all turned up to 11 at almost all times, and not even in a normal horror movie way! Awful.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Andy's actor when he was doing Company-Andy</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The script after about 30-40 minutes in - That went downhill incredibly fast writing-wise (except Rook)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Character motivations after the initial setup</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Failure to understand less is more - convinced that more is more - surely if one facehugger is scary then 30-50 feral facehuggers is scarier and not just kind of silly and generic sci-fi looking?</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Failure to understand how horror works on a basic level (very surprising given the director!)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The lol-worthy alien-human hybrid. We know this sort of thing can be scary. Resurrection's one was gross and super-creepy. This just looked like a low-end bad guy from a generic AA space horror game called like "Death Planet: Fear What You Face" or something.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The hilarious use of incredibly obvious underground-station escalators in one totally unnecessary shot they should 100% have cut (looked like the ones from Canary Wharf or somewhere but I'm told they're similar ones from Budapest) and served zero purpose beyond making go "Wtf?!?!?!?!"</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Every other action scene except the zero-g pulse rifle scene, including but not limited to "facehugger water polo", "facehugger dodgeball", "whoops I kicked the controls" (what an implausibly lucky ending - they could at least have had someone hack the ship to land it like that), and "Oh no now I must fight generic alien-man in a grain silo"</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The end of the zero-g pulse rifle scene</li> </ul>The Ugly<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The word for word callbacks to much better movies - This was the first time in like, years and years a Hollywood movie actually made be cringe with embarrassment for the movie and the people involved with it, but "Get away from her... ... ... you bitch" (no exclaimation point intended) absolutely made me have to pause the TV, get up and walk around a bit, because my god, I felt bad for the actor, I felt bad for Fede Alvarez, I felt bad for the crew that had to record that.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Rook's CGI - Jesus wept did they try and use gen AI for the face not just to modify the voice or something? That was so bad, and I'm told that the Disney+ version is a huge upgrade from the theatrical version where it was claimed he looked like a bad PS3 game. Every single time I saw him I was basically dragged hard out of the movie by the feeling I was seeing a terrible, terrible PS4 game. They could easily have used a robot skull animatronic and the same voice and done so much better.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">No possible sane explanation for why they have literally hundreds of facehuggers just like, in places all over the station, based on what we're told happened.</li> </ul>I'm not getting into the technobabble, it was dumb but technobabble and I'm sure it'll be forgotten. Overall I felt it was worse than Resurrection (in part because the overall acting was goddamn awful compared to Resurrection, Spaeny couldn't save it single-handed - the action scenes and hybrid design were mostly worse too), but it made me re-appraise Resurrection and decide it was maybe the third-place Alien film (and this the fourth), but it's an incredibly distant third after the first two movies.I'm kind of mad because if they stuck to the initial premise, they could have a really strong, character-oriented, genuinely scary horror movie, but it was just of over-the-top silly business and bad fan service. Which sadly still makes it one of the better Alien movies.</blockquote>

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