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.

What would the Alien universe look like if there was no main character similar to how Game of Thrones is told?

With Alien: Romulus on its way to theaters (yes, I'm going to see it), I think that it is curious that storytelling has changed so much since that first Alien film so many decades ago. Back then, what George R.R. Martin did in his story (by removing a protagonist in favor of point-of-view characters) was unheard of. Alien and its sequels are very much "old school storytelling." For example, the first four movies in the franchise are pinned on Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). You always knew that Ripley was going to be the main character, and that she was going to survive. Even after they killed her off, they brought her back, because it was probably assumed that there was no Alien series without its star.

But what if they hadn't made this decision? What kinds of possibilities might there have been for the directions that the movies could have made? If after say Aliens we had gotten an Alien 3 that instead followed Newt around, I think that would have been great. There could have been more exploration of people doing things in different parts of the universe rather than just on LV-426 (the doomed planet). This kind of thing could have played very well into Alien's natural storytelling, because Ripley doesn't emerge as the protagonist until the first movie is two-thirds over. She doesn't have a "hero's journey." She survives through luck and tenacity. You get the feeling that had things gone a little differently, it might have been Dallas on that shuttle at the end, or Parker, or maybe even poor Lambert.

Instead what we got was 1) competent professional Ripley, 2) mama-bear Ripley, 3) hardened survivor Ripley, and 4) Whedon-esque Super Ripley. But maybe abandoning the lead was just too much of a progressive idea for studios to do in the era in which Alien emerged. It certainly turned Sigourney Weaver into a household name. Predator 2 is an example of a sci-fi franchise that abandoned its lead, and it got a lot of flack and wasn't as popular because of the lack of Arnold (from the first movie). But it was ahead of its time in this respect, I think.

What I might have wanted was more things like Prometheus that dared to explore the larger universe of Alien. The irony of my statement is that I think I'm going to get just that with Noah Hawley's in-verse series that has just wrapped filming and will be coming out some time in 2025? I believe it is called Alien: Earth. I wonder if there will be a protagonist, or if there (instead) will be point of view characters that we can all kind of root for and latch onto as the greater story progresses. Anyone have any thoughts on this? Leave me a comment below if you do.