New & now: Alien: Romulus

Some thoughts from a series apologist.

21st Century Fox

(Some mild spoilers)

This will not be a fair review.

I have not been paid off by 21st Century Fox, as so many people on social media like to believe when a movie they don’t like is given a positive review. I have no skin in the game as to whether or not Alien: Romulus succeeds at the box office. I just can’t review it from an unbiased point of view.

You see, I love the entire Alien series¹. All of them. Yes, that one too. And that other one as well. Even the one disowned by its director. I especially love Prometheus, the mentioning of which seems to set off a Winter Soldier-esque “kill” switch in other fans of the series. The first two movies are unequivocal masterpieces. The rest are all, at worst, flawed but always entertaining and watchable.

“Flawed but always entertaining and watchable” is exactly how I would describe Alien: Romulus. Was it unnecessary to bring back a legacy character through the “miracle” of CGI? Absolutely. There was no real reason it couldn’t have been an entirely new character serving as the Basil Exposition of the movie.

Was another character dutifully reciting the one line everyone knows from the entire series (even if you’ve never seen any of the movies) a silly callback? Of course, especially since it was referencing a moment that, according to the series timeline, hadn’t happened yet.

Did either of these decisions pull me out of the movie and ruin the whole thing? Not a bit.

I haven’t talked about it much, but I’ve been taking a break from “professionally” reviewing movies recently. Mostly it was because I was dealing with a difficult personal situation, but also because I’ve just gotten tired of it. I got tired of the grind, and of the competition over who churns out the most reviews the fastest, when really the best, most thoughtful reviews are written after one has had time to digest what they’ve seen, and not 37 minutes after the credits roll.

I’ve also gotten tired and bored of how online film discussions are mostly reserved to “hot takes” and endless, interminable debates over what movies are “overrated” or not. There’s a joke about how Film Twitter consists of a lot of people who don’t actually like movies, and that’s true. It’s constant negativity and mean-spiritedness over a medium that is meant to provide a diversion from the everyday horrors of the real world.

In what has been called the “Cinema Sinsification” of watching movies, minor inconsistencies are considered “plot holes,” and a movie fails if everything isn’t carefully explained for morons who don’t understand subtext or ambiguity. It’s not enough to simply say “This movie didn’t work for me,” one must rail at its very existence, and question whether anyone who liked it might be lying, though who would lie about such a thing is beyond me.

When I read something online like “People actually liked Longlegs, huh?” it’s like the visual equivalent of nails on a chalkboard for me. Yeah, a lot of people did. I know that far too many of us have taken a page from Elon Musk and started thinking of other human beings as NPCs whose existences don’t matter and should be immediately ignored or discounted, but expressing phony disbelief because God fucking forbid someone liked something you didn’t is among the more insufferable ways to address pop culture.

“PeOpLE aCTuAlLy lIkEd LoNgLEgs, hUh?”

There’s no need to justify why I thought Alien: Romulus was good. This isn’t a courtroom, I don’t have to make a case. Maybe I do have low standards for Alien movies, but also who gives a shit? I don’t care about my low standards. I love my low standards. I’ve seen Kung Pow: Enter the Fist six times. I watch Neil Breen movies for fun. My supposedly low standards can be summed up with one question: “Was this entertaining?” As it turns out, it makes watching movies a mostly pleasant experience.

Now, that’s not to say I like everything. You can see that with some of the stuff I’ve written here. I also appeared on a recent episode of Horror Queers, during which we discussed Jan de Bont’s extremely misguided remake of The Haunting. I didn’t like it when it first came out, and I like it even less now (and frankly, if you want to talk about CGI “ruining” a movie Alien: Romulus has nothing on this). There are entire franchises I’ve designated as “not for me,” including the Fast and the Furious and Jack-Ass movies. It’s not a question of “standards,” but rather they’re just not anything I’m into.

But I certainly accept without question that many people do enjoy them, and not ironically, or because they’re too dumb to realize that they’re bad, actually, or whatever condescending bullshit people have the audacity to say. I have never once demanded that someone explain to me why they like a movie in the same deeply offended tone as wanting to know why someone has a Trump sticker on their car. It doesn’t matter. It affects no one. Find a new way to get engagement on social media, because this shit is extremely tired.

Anyway, Alien: Romulus, good movie, 3 1/2 stars out of 5.

1. Because some of you are probably wondering, no, I don’t count the Alien v. Predator movies here, because those are Predator movies in which xenomorphs factor into the plot. Also, it’s my newsletter and I can do whatever I want.