Herein is my spoiler free review of Alien Romulus

Here is my spoiler free review of Alien: Romulus.

First off, I really liked it. There was a lot of reference to previous films and there were some amazing visuals throughout the story. The musical score was a nice blend of what we heard on the older films kind of cutting in with this new iteration. And I was impressed in how Disney (which now owns 20th Century Fox) was able to thread this line of grossness and gore in a way that didn't seem "overwhelming." Alien at its most basic "boiled down" point, is a singular creation of H.R. Giger, who was an artist perhaps a little too obsessed...can I say that?...with body horror.

Where the movie might have failed (I think) is pacing. But this is a small nitpick. Events seemed rushed at certain points, and some of the horror didn't feel earned because it literally happened too quickly (in my opinion). For example, there were several times when I thought to myself: does the xenomorph grow that quickly? And maybe it does, but I just thought that it took longer in previous iterations of where we have seen the creature.

The world-building in the movie also took a leap forward as far as the Alien verse goes. We got introduced to another world whose atmosphere is so polluted and cloud covered that there is no daylight at all from the planet's sun. However, people toil on this world, mining things for Weyland-Yutani (which is the corporation of all things evil in the Alien-verse).

In Alien: Romulus, the theme was "dynastic decay." Allow me to elaborate. In the 2090's (Prometheus timeline), Weyland Corporation is an upscale organization that seems to consist mostly of white collar information workers researching cutting-edge technologies. Its ships are streamlined, shiny, and full of advanced equipment.

Fifty years later, Weyland-Yutani's revenue appears to come mostly from extractive industries, and most of its employees appear to be little more than slaves trapped on dead-end colony worlds. It's as if Apple morphed into Haliburton. Weyland (the man in Prometheus) wanted to find alien life in the hopes of discovering immortality. But his company mainly wants to use alien life to create new product lines. It ends up being an interesting commentary on the public's disenchantment with big tech.

I want to finish my observations by saying that the final act of the movie will put you on the edge of your seat. This is a big-budget blockbuster despite the fact that it came out so close to the end of August (where a lot of movies go to die from the summer release). Alien: Romulus was a delightful end to a lackluster movie season that (I think) started really strong with Dune but had that saggy middle that all novelists fear will happen to their magnum opus.

Alien: Romulus also gave me an insight to a previous scene in Prometheus that never made sense to me. For those of you who have seen Prometheus, do you remember that big room that had all of the jars containing the black goo all placed in rows in front of the huge stone face? I think that the stone face was the creator of the black goo...a statue of one of the engineers...and that room of cannisters was a testimony to that person's failure to find the correct formula that the engineers needed. Anyway...those are my thoughts on the Alien verse and its latest movie.