Thoughts on Alien: Romulus, and a quick announcement

I mean, it was better than the last movie...

Hello Darklings!

So my husband and I dragged ourselves to a movie theater the other day for the first time since 2017 to catch Alien: Romulus on the big screen. It seemed fitting since the last movie we saw all those years ago was Alien: Covenant, and even though that movie was so bad it still makes me angry to think about, we’re both fans of the franchise, this new one looked sorta promising, and it was his birthday. So we went for it. And now I have thoughts.

First impressions: it was pretty good. Not great, but certainly a big improvement over the last one, and not a bad way to while away an afternoon. I liked Andy, and the actor who played him, who was easily the best part of the movie. I think he can stand up solidly alongside Ash, Bishop and David. The female lead was just okay. She was competent but not especially charismatic or someone I really wanted to root for. See, I can’t even recall her na— oh, that’s right, it was Rain. Anyway, she had big shoes to fill, and she didn’t quite manage it. The throwbacks to the first two movies were fun, if a bit distracting, although I always find it mostly just disturbing and creepy whenever Disney (which now owns the Alien franchise) uses CGI and AI voicing to resurrect a dead actor.

The other characters were blandly acted and written and just felt like fodder for the alien. The action was fun, but the tension would’ve been heightened had I actually cared about any of the characters who were most certainly doomed. The visuals were fantastic — it was a good looking spectacle, if nothing else. There were some pretty graphic and cringe-inducing body horror scenes, one so bad that I actually had to grab hold of my husband for emotional support. And I thought it did a fair and efficient job of tying together the first two films with Prometheus.

Now my gripes: One thing Husband and I both remarked on as we left the theater was how it felt like a rehash that didn’t really add anything new. The writing wasn’t great, and it felt to me like a lazy cop-out to blatantly steal iconic lines and scenes from the original two movies in the name of fan service instead of, you know, coming up with NEW iconic lines and scenes for THIS movie. Other than putting classic lines in the new characters’ mouths, there wasn’t a single stand-out line of quotable dialogue in this film. It completely rested on the laurels of the early films, and that’s a shame.

And now back to the bland characters. I needed some time to think about this. My initial thought was that, so far as I’ve seen, these Gen Z actors just lack screen presence and gravitas. But I realized it’s more than that. They weren’t given a whole lot to work with. They were more sketched out caricatures than well-rounded characters.

But it’s more than that, too. It struck me that there was no humor in this movie. Each character took themselves very seriously. There was no banter, which was an element — possibly the element — that made the ensemble casts of the earlier films so engaging.

I realize that, even as this movie played at wanting to engage long-time fans of the series, it was written for a generation who thinks that words are violence, and so the very young and diverse ensemble were, for the most part, oh so gentle with and supportive of each other. Yes, there was one character who was The A-hole of the group, but he wasn’t a likable a-hole like Hudson. He was just hateful and mean, but see, it was okay because he had a sad backstory that excused his behavior toward a certain character and was supposed to give us a reason to sympathize with him, or something.

I found myself thinking about how we were given no backstory on any of the characters in the original Alien. In Aliens, the only ones we were given any background on were Ripley and Newt, and that was sparse. Really just enough to explain their bond. And yet, we knew enough about these characters by how they related to each other — mostly through their banter.

Take Hudson and Vasquez, for example. We learned so much about them in a single exchange of barbs after they wake up from cryo sleep. We learned that Hudson is a mouthy and cocky a-hole, but still mostly good-natured. As for Vasquez, if that film had been written today, Hudson’s remarks to her probably would have gotten him written up for sexual harassment or even court martialed for hate speech, after she spent a good five minutes telling him off to show what a strong, empowered woman she is.

Instead, she cut him down with a single, witty barb that showed him and her other colleagues that she could give as good as she got and earned her the respect of both them and the audience, as well as sending the message that she’s not someone to be messed with.

Of course, the original films were produced back in a time when it wasn’t what you said, but how you said it. When friends could gleefully insult each other with ever-more-colorful put-downs and it was all understood to be good-natured joking around, while politeness and niceties were reserved for people we didn’t know that well or didn’t actually like all that much. When political correctness didn’t rule the writing room and failure to adhere to it’s constantly shifting rules wouldn’t get anyone canceled.

And the characters who behaved that way back then felt a lot more real, a lot more engaging, and a lot more like genuine friends and comrades than the sensitive and supportive and completely humorless kids in this movie.

This is a large part of why we don’t go to the movies anymore. Because every time we watch something recent, it seems like the art of good film writing has gone the way of the 8-track tape. There’s no more such a thing as subtlety, as a single line that can convey so much, or an actor who can convey a soliloquy’s worth of information with a single look.

Yes, I’m old. I get it. Hollywood is targeted at the young, and this young generation values different things. So why I enjoyed this movie well enough that I’m glad we got out and saw it, I think we’re marked safe from making movie-going a habit anytime soon.

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Now that you’ve endured my movie review that turned into a grumpy old lady’s’ “Back in my day” rant, I want to let you know that I’ll be taking an extended break. I’ve been struggling with feeling burnt out for a good long while now, and it’s becoming clear that forcing myself to push through it isn’t the way. So I’ll be putting all of my non-freelance writing on the back burner for a while to focus on other priorities, get some rest, and then see which projects, if any, start to bubble over and demand my attention once again.

In my absence, I recommend that you follow

Macabre Monday

for regular roundups of some of the best horror and dark fiction to be found on Substack. And you could always check out the rest of my book catalogue.

Until next time, whenever that may be,
♥️ Jean