Long review for Alien: Romulus - It was fun! I give it a 7.5 out of 10
The overall tone is of the OG Alien, with obvious allusions to Aliens. The horror is back, but leans into a more Prometheus style plot so the vibe feels like somewhere between Aliens and Resurrection.
Mostly well written, and acted, with characters you know you're supposed to either like or thoroughly hate.
There are a few points though where I was like, literally nobody would do that, and I do feel like it goes just a little overboard on fan service. Like it's fun to see the obvious connections to previous instalments, but sometimes less is more and the implication would've been enough, and there's one line in particular that felt a bit forced and would've worked better if they'd left out a single word. So the film comes off like more of a love letter to the entire series rather than a proper instalment in the franchise, if that makes sense - I'm sure you'll know what I mean when you see it.
Essentially it's the Force Awakens of the Alien universe. I enjoyed it for what it was, but it's the film we didn't really need, and you could watch the entire franchise and skip this one altogether and lose nothing.
There is also one aspect of CGI that sadly did not look great. It doesn't ruin the film but it's pretty hard to ignore, and these small grievances aside, there's a lot here to like. Overall it's a solid flick that doesn't let up on the action much once it starts, and I think it will only grow on me with repeat viewings.
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What I thought was particularly cool was finally getting to see the pupal/chrysalis stage of the xenomorph's life cycle from chestburster to full-grown. And I'm so glad they went back to the more traditional design for it's adult form, with the somewhat translucent carapace and without the ridiculously elongated middle fingers as seen in Resurrection and AvP.
The only thing I thought really sucked was the CGI on the face of the Ash inspired character, Rook. It's fine when still but pretty bad when he's talking and I found it rather distracting during his scenes. I don't know how the production team decided that was good enough for release as it looks like an early 2000's video game, and I think it would've been easier to simply stick with the guy who did the performance rather than CG Ian Holm's face onto him... especially since it's already established early on that other models of synthetics exist.
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