Alien: Romulus London Premiere + Cailee Spaeny for Empire Magazine

[zodgory]

https://instagram.com/p/C-qr1RUSFBn
Part of the Alien: Romulus cast alongside director Fede Alvarez attended the Londom premiere of their film which opens this Friday, August 16. Absent were David Jonsson, Aileen Wu, and Isabela Merced

Comments

[waffletaco]

Saw it tonight!
Random thoughts:

It’s the best alien film since Alien 3 (yes, alien 3. The cool kids grew to appreciate the mess it was as time has gone on).

But leaps and bounds better than Ridley’s awful prequels.

********!!!! Mild spoilers!!! ****

[Spoiler (click to open)]
-It’s also as close as we’re going to get to an Alien Isolation film (though, given when this film takes place, I suppose it’s not out of the question if they wanted to do another film).

-I loved the world building at the opening of the film. We never really saw what life was like outside of the confines of each movie. Not everyone is destined to be stuck ok a mine planet (I wonder if this planet is one do the planets the nostromo picked up their cargo of mining ore from).
I’d be curious to know lore of why these people are stuck on this rock.

-The guy who played Andy was excellent.

-Fede made face huggers scary again, and without the egg part!

-I like that we see another part of the xeno life cycle, of sort of cocooning itself into a little sack.

-you guys! The xeno that Ripley blasted out the airlock survived! 🥲 Seeing the WeyYu people scour through the wreckage of the Nostromo and obtain it….Clearly, WeyYu lied to Ripley about not finding anything.

-I haaaated the re-used line Andy gave. Really?? Fede was really thought that was a good callback?? Made no sense. But my theater crowd cheered and laughed, so I guess it worked 🥴

-the final act is pretty divisive amongst people. It was basically a rehash of the things done in Prometheus, but I would have rather have had another way to connect to the prequels than the black goo being part of the research (saying what happened to Walter or David would have been more interesting than what they did…..)
But with that said, I think it was much better than what happened in Prometheus.

-I hope the good buzz on this gives the powers that be treat this series more carefully and puts out another good film in the near future. They’re already working on the follow up to Prey (Predator).

[squirrels_oh_no]

[Spoiler (click to open)]It pissed me off, though, that the alien was found with recognizable pieces of the wreckage given 1.) the MULTIPLE blasts looked like it would have left irradiated dust, not recgonizable chunks and 2.) she blew the alien out of the airlock far from the wreck after the ship exploded.

[waffletaco]

Yea. It’s a bit of a stretch to assume it was still intact…but is settle for that retcon than the alien 3 plot point of the egg magically ending up on the sulaco. They really put no thought into that.

If we’re to believe this alien she blew out the airlock was fine, then the queen from aliens is prolly still out there 😭

[squirrels_oh_no]

I wonder if Neil Blomkamp's idea to retcon Cubed and Resurrection out of existence and instead have Ripley and Hicks back on Earth having a normal life yeeeeears later (with adult Newt maybe who knows) when the company fucks up with xenomorphs on earth again is still on the table LMAO. I mean, it would probably be terrible, but that's an improvement over um... space sex offenders turned cultists I guess?

[waffletaco]

what i imagine based on the concept art is they made it back to earth after ALIENS, and maybe they were whistleblowers that had little or no effect on the company in the grand scheme of things.
Yada yada yada, years go by. Ripley has gone full activist, and maybe Hicks became an alcoholic or something. Maybe they tried to be a thing, but didn't work out. Newt would probably have been sent to family one earth to be raised.

I guess they find out that WeyYu had aquired the derelict ship that sustained minimal damage form the blast in ALIENS, and they are on a mission to destroy it.

[squirrels_oh_no]

I knew that his idea was that it was on Earth, but I like your idea. Besides, the Sulaco IN OFFICIAL CANON wasn't destroyed, it just bopped the cryopods out when it had its little issue and kept on its merry way, even if they wanted to have Alien Cubed KINDA exist but Newt/Hicks/Bishop survived. Yadda yadda, Newt's actress aged 6 years + Michael Biehn had his own issues, but still. Whatever LMAO - they had their chance to make Alien Cubed actually be something beyond *waves hand* that mess. Even if the Assembly Cut is better and actually makes more sense. tbh I give Resurrection a pass, it's not even Ripley TECHNICALLY so let her just be a sarcastic badass with her basketball and creepy grandbaby.

[Spoiler (click to open)]I don't believe the Romulus director when he claimed he forgot about Resurrection's plot until his son reminded him. If he's that big of a fanboy of the series, he would have known about Ripley's humanoid grandchild (since the baby was technically the child of the queen that Ripley had inside her during Alien Cubed and yadda yadda cloning them meant the queen had human DNA, too - but it was fun because Clone Ripley also had xenomorph DNA and that came in handy.

IDK I like Resurrection so sue me. I like it more than Cubed. Cubed ruined what goodwill I might have had for it in the first 90 seconds when I saw it like 25 years ago now (I was way too young to be an Alien Quadrilogy fangirl lmao).

[waffletaco]

Canon is a funny thing. Everything is canon until its not.
And sometimes its to sell a video game, until said video game is so poorly received, they never acknowledge it again (Aliens: Colonial Marines). (That video game presents a weird convoluted story in which Hicks body was replaced in the cryo tube after the Sulaco was boarded by the human Bishop and WeyYu people.

There was an alternate script of Alien 3 that centered on Hicks as the lead more so as well (recently turned into a comic).

And yeah, little things like Newts actress being older (i dont think Michael Biehn was deep into his drinking problem at that point, so i dont know if he was an issue).

This series is such a simple yet convoluted mess, hah

[squirrels_oh_no]

And Newt's actress didn't want to act anymore, so even if they figured out the age issue, they'd have to recast anyway.

Poor Ripley, the events of the first three movies take place over a few weeks for her given cryosleep LMAO. Imagine that much trauma. Not even counting that her daughter died (in the director's cut of aliens - but then Isolation was about the daughter so it was canon).

After the director got banned temporarily from LV426 on reddit, I got into an argument with someone about Romulus being a "perfect" entry point, and my argument was that it isn't perfect, and then some guy replied to me with this suuuuuper long argument before that thread was deleted. Yadda yadda Romulus was best in the series. No offense to that argument, but like, there is a LOOOOT of context you miss without having seen Alien - the genesis for the entire story - and randomly even more so fucking Prometheus. They try and explain the goo, say "Mr. Weyland gave his life for it", but like, that's it, and the goo becomes just as important a plot piece as the xenomorphs. And then the director replied to someone like he was jkr inserting in factoids, like that Kay's babydaddy was her fucking cousin bjorn, who like btw sounded so mumbly during the entire movie, leading to even more arguments about if Kay was adopted since she has an American accent and her brother/cousin were both English. Which in itself is weird because weren't they ALL born on Jackson's Star?

(Aside comment, but I rewatched Prometheus over the weekend and saw Covenant for the first time, and I feel like my opinion that Covenant > Prometheus - Covenant might not have provided answers but it sure did bring the series back to its roots focused on horror and less on twists - on r/lv428 would go over like a lead balloon.)

[waffletaco]

Replying late, but:

hah, you'll find passionate people in any fandom on things.

I suppose Romulus is a good entry point in the sense that if you've never seen the other films, you wouldnt be COMPLETELY lost ...sorta kinda.

But you cant expect the youth to have seen all the films of an old series, no matter how well regarded it is.

I just hate the mess that Ridley Scott created with this goo nonsense.
And even if you're leaning into his new lore, theres STILL more questions than answers.

I can't believe we're now TWO prequels and a SIDEQUEL into this franchise, and we still don't know the story behind the derelict ship in Alien. Who was the pilot. They missed a HUGE oppurtunity for that to have happened in Prometheus (the trailers seemed to suggest that the crashing ship was going to be THE ship we know from Alien, but no. It turns out that ship just crashed on the same LV-233. Wasted oppurtunity.

And THEN they missed ANOTHER opportunity for Covenant.
The lush green planet David ends up on could have ended up being LV-426, but the black goo ravaged all living life on the planet, and it eventually became a lifeless rock.

And NOW we have Romulus, which skips over all that.

[squirrels_oh_no]

Romulus also makes Isolation canon, so I've heard LOL. I haven't played it, but that gives even more lore to what happened between Alien and Romulus.

But man, the black fucking goo. I'm 95% sure Ridley Scott added that in with Prometheus and had never thought of it before, and now it whoopsie forces it onto the entire canon even though it makes no sense.

The engineers had an alien queen relief carving in their ship/base/whatever in Prometheus, so clearly David didn't create the xenomorphs between Prometheus/Covenant - and Covenant might be pretty fucking useless in canon discussions given that they were still seemingly going to their new planet and wouldn't have arrived there until around the same time as Alien, which takes place one moon over from LV-233 (like, since when did Prometheus and Alien/Aliens take place orbiting the same planet? lol who fucking knows...). I mean, I guess it provides some explanation for how W-Y knew that there might be something in the Zeta Reticuli area to look for re: signals, and they switched the science officer to Ash with the directive to go and get a "sample" (idk maybe they thought the signal was coming from LV-233 but it was from LV-426, I don't think anyone fucking knows including the creators of the various bits of media), but Romulus proved that someone at some point between Prometheus and Romulus got a sample of the black goo, which assumes someone from Weyland/W-Y (i can't remember when the merger was) went to LV-233 to go get some and reported back on Weyland and friends being dead and I guess that Shaw and David were MIA? Also, what was Ellie eating during their travels? LMAO I doubt they went back to the escape pod to go pick up snacks given what Shaw locked in there.

They made it too convoluted for their own good.

[waffletaco]

yes! The murals in the cave and all that. The convoluted lore confuses nerds like us, but also casuals are like "oh! This is the ship from Alien, so i guess thats what happened until that movie).

I'd even rather have had the giant Deacon alien that bursts out of the engineer in Prometheus be the space jockey from Alien.

In Prometheus, after Shaws "baby" strangles and impregnates the engineer, THAT engineer should have made it back to his ship to fly and the deacon pops out, causing a crash onto nearby moon LV-426.

Isolation is canon in the sense that it doesn't step on any toes of the movies, but they probably will never use its lore in the films (and it funnily is the most cohesive, well thought out media they've made. It's a little redundant, pretty much rehashing a LOT of things from Alien, but the WeyYu competitor of Seegsan and their creepy Working Joe robots would make better world building material).

Also, we don't actually know if Walter the droid is "dead" on the engineer world. Nor do we know if David made his destination to that planet, or he just stuck to doing his experiments on the people in cryo on the Covenant. Did WeyYu find David or Walter to find some goo?

I fear that the upcoming TV series won't answer any of these, as it takes place before ALL of this shit (it would be a better series to jump around timelines).

Ok, sorry if i keep this dialogue going, hah. I got caught up in my feelings.