Cinepals - ALIEN ROMULUS Movie Reaction & Review!

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

After watching the first two films of the Alien franchise, Achara and Steph dive into Alien: Romulus, where young space colonists find themselves battling terrifying alien creatures while exploring a derelict space station. Directed by Fede Álvarez (Don't Breathe & The Girl in the Spider's Web), the film stars Cailee Spaeny (Mare of Easttown & Pacific Rim: Uprising), Isabela Merced (Dora and the Lost City of Gold & Sicario: Day of the Soldado), David Jonsson (Industry & Deep State), Archie Renaux (Shadow and Bone & Morbius), Aileen Wu (Dear Jesus & Counting Sheep), Spike Fearn (Aftersun & The Batman), Trevor Newlin (Law & Order: Special Victims Unit & Ithaca), and Ian Holm (The Lord of the Rings series & The Fifth Element). Join our Patreon www.cinejump.com for the full length reaction to this show and many others ans subscribe to our YouTube channel for the cutdowns www.youtube.com/@cinepals SOCIAL MEDIA ~CinePals~ Twitter, Instagram, & TikTok: @TheCinePals ~STEPH SABRAW~ Instagram: @StephSabraw YouTube: @TheWhirlGirls ~ACHARA KIRK~ Instagram: @AcharaKirk YouTube: @Achara

Sinha. Pals. Hey, everyone. Welcome back. It's Achara Kirk, joined by Steph Sabra. Hi. We are watching Alien Romulus. I'm very excited for this. We have only seen Alien and Aliens, but apparently this takes place between aliens and Alien 3. It's fine. It's perfect. It's perfect. It worked out. We're going to get it.

If you want to see our reactions to Alien and Aliens, they are on the channel, and I'll try and link them in the description so you guys can check it out too but otherwise let's jump into this here we go this is a cryologue for the mining hauler kerbellin i set course to the evaga system without knowing if i'll ever reach it or what fate is to find me wow but whatever comes i'll face it i know you will Signing off. Whoa. Please make it.

Oh, my gosh. Wow. That was insane. Wow. Oh, my gosh. What a great film. Right. Oh, my gosh.

That was insane. Ugh. Dang. That was a full ride. Yeah. yeah truly and such a great i don't know like sequel or like little story in within this alien universe yeah you know like i feel like sometimes when when we do sequels we just kind of do it because it's like oh you know it's a franchise we're just going to keep pumping these out until people stop enjoying

them and until people stop buying the tickets but i feel like this is such a a great film on its own and is like very much in keeping with the first two. Yeah. So, or probably more so even the first one, Ridley Scott's alien. Right. Yeah, totally. It was such a great extension. And like, it found a way to incorporate the best parts of the original, but also add

these new layers that I was not expecting at all. In every which way I didn't know, which, where we were going to go. because like I was saying in the first one, you know, they all like gaslit Sigourney. Yeah. And you were really, really, you don't want anyone to die, but you want it, you were rooting for her. This one, you like them all.

The guy was an A-hole, but you don't want him to die because you can empathize with his story. I didn't know if we were going to follow the same pattern, which we ended up doing so, but it was not in a, I didn't think, I didn't know it was going to for sure happen. Yeah. I couldn't have guessed how it was going to happen.

So I just thought, they did such a great job praising the franchise, but being its standalone, excellent film. Yeah, and I think that on its own, even if you haven't watched any other alien movie, I think it does a really great job of just being able to be a standalone, you know? Because, like, honestly, I didn't remember an awful lot about the first movie, just like the main beats and that, just not a lot of details, but I feel like that didn't hinder my viewing of the film at all. Yeah.

So I feel like if you went in fresh and you had not seen anything, you'd be like, this is just a great story. And I think that's what's so important that we need to keep in mind when we're doing sequels or prequels or whatever that is coming into an already established universe. It's like, is it a good story? Does it make sense? Like, it can't just be just for the sake of, you know, doing it. You know what I mean?

Right. Yeah. And just in such, you know, said it from the beginning in so little time you understood the characters you understood the stakes you understood the world that was being presented and then just little lines of like their blood is acid they're the perfect creature they're all these things and you're like oh yeah oh yeah yeah and then you remember it but it wasn't redundant at all and i and i like that because in this world where we're living in these franchises it feels like so many movies are no longer accessible unless you

fully remember everything and yeah i mean they just did such a good job i loved the entire cast yeah such great casting um i andy was obviously my favorite but rain was such a great final girl yes truly like i was thinking that as i as i watched her win at the end of the movie i'm like i think she might be like one of my favorite final girls because she's such a great character because like you're like Like we were saying the whole time, she's intelligent. Yes. Like she's really smart and she's always like thinking about how can we, how can we get out of this? She's thinking outside of the box and it makes you really want to root for her because she's not just some like girl who's screaming and like, oh my God, I'm so scared.

She's like, I'm scared. But I'm also going to figure my way out of this and I'm going to survive. And I think it's so interesting to cast someone who physically is very. very different from Sigourney Weaver. Like Sigourney Weaver, she also had those characteristics as Ripley, right? Like, she was really smart. But she also looks like someone who is, like, physically more capable. She's tall.

She's, like, broader. And she already has that look of, like, I'm a badass woman and I will take you down. Whereas I think Kaylee Spaney, she is so small. Like she's very petite and she also looks really young too. And so it's just like a different vibe. But I like that we got like a different version of that, you know? Yeah, I think the choice of making it this rag tag teenagers who are just trying to survive and have a better life as opposed to scientists who are on a mission was such a cool twist that I thought was a perfect story for this movie. I liked the theme of humans

or think with our emotions too much and that's what hinders our survival almost but she did. She was empathetic. She was so human at her core and those exact qualities are what enabled her to have her reasoning and her deductive skills and her critical thinking was just above even Andy in some senses.

Yeah and ultimately it was her humanity that helped them to survive. And so, yeah, I think that's a really, that's a really beautiful theme to be like, yeah, you know, we have the technology and we have the synthetics who are, and the AI, who are able to probably think more rationally. But ultimately, it's like, what is that thing that makes us human? What is that thing that's going to ultimately save us

and, you know, make us different from this, like, perfect being? Because I did wonder, you know, like, okay, fine, physically, maybe this humanoid xenomorph is physically perfect, right? Like, it's able to survive and all that. It didn't seem that smart, though. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't have, I know in the later aliens, we get more of like this mother versus mother with Ripley, I've heard. Oh, I've seen that type. She's not a mother. I think it's just that theme in there.

Uh-huh. But it is like when you don't have anything but just a survival instinct in no humanity. Yeah. What is your purpose is so singular. And she, Rain had multiple purposes. And if she had not gone back for Andy, she would have died. And the entire ship would have been filled with the xenomorphs to go somewhere. Yeah.

And then probably killed an entire other humanity. Exactly. So, yeah, I just love that. And I like the R.R. Rain and Ripley keeping it in. Yeah, I hadn't even thought about that. Yeah, I just thought I was thinking that. I might have nothing to do with it.

Yeah, it was just like really, really well done. And the look and everything was very much in keeping with the first alien film. And also the tone, like before it starts to go bat shit crazy, it's like, that kind of slow, creeping feeling of, like, something bad is going to happen, but it's just like very slow and atmospheric at first until it ramps up and then it goes all the way up to 100. Yeah. And it's like, ah, you know?

It was so interesting from beginning to end, but we didn't, to the part where we both were like, okay, here we go. I looked and it was about 40 minutes in. Right. Which is a long inciting. I know the inciting incident is them leaving kind of, but really it was them finding the first. Yeah.

I don't know what those ones are called. Yeah. Yeah, the xenomorph egg thingy. Yeah. Parasite. But it's so good. And I like that they kept the original theme, but I felt like they added a little bit more haunted house music.

The music was so great. Like, just the choices that they made with sound overall. like how in the very beginning it was just dead silence, you know? And it was like, okay, yeah, that is what I imagined space to sound like, right? It's just an absence of sound. And no one's going to save you if you're out there. Exactly. You can only save yourself.

And it's so creepy, right? And I thought that was a really great choice. And then the addition of like the choir in the music in the beginning, I was just like, oh, this is just really cool and creepy. And then just all of the music and sound choices throughout. I thought we're really strong in just ratcheting up the tension and making you feel really, really worried for these characters that, as you said, you know, we genuinely care about because they did such a great job in the beginning of establishing like, okay, this is the world they live in. It sucks. It's so horrible. You can completely understand why they would take this risk to go on this abandoned space station or ship or whatever.

and risk their lives because what have they got to live for? You know, there's no family, there's nothing. And I thought that they did a really great job of establishing the relationship between Rain and Andy very early on because I got the sense that, you know, her dad reprogrammed him or whatever.

And so in a small way, her dad is a part of him, like with the dad jokes and everything. And so it's, you understand why she can. cares so much for him because he's like the last embodiment of her her human family right and he is like he is a brother to her and that was such a beautiful relationship and they did that like so quickly and immediately we're like oh i know i was getting teary-eyed in the first five minutes and the character said one line it was crazy yeah such good character development and the actor was so amazing David Johnson.

When he switched from his first directive to a second directive, it was so clear and so eerie. Yeah. And it just, and he had parts of him, but it was really this other directive running him. And it was so, such great acting choices. Yeah, because obviously doing the switch in accent, because he had an American accent when he was like nice andy,

and then when he was like, Wayland Utani, Andy, he had an English accent because, you know, we're all evil. Yeah, we all wait. In space, in space, the Brits are evil. Don't trust me. But in addition to that, I hadn't even really noticed that, but it was more his physicality because he had, yeah, he was so innocent as Andy and he was kind of broken, like they kind of talked about that, how he's not quite all there. But he had like this really interesting way of standing and how his hands would always just stay almost like glued to his thighs as he's moving around but when he turns into like I guess the upgraded version right

he is more upright and he's able to move around a bit quicker and there's something in his eyes that is different like he he did such a fantastic job with the acting yes so so good yeah it was such a great cast. I mean, I'm familiar with most of them. Isabel and Mercedes, she's such a great action star. She's been in a few, Sicario 2. And she was in one of the Transformers movies. And I just, I really love her, her style. But Archie was cool to see him in another role that was outside of the fantasy realm. Right. Yeah, but I haven't seen Kaylee Spaney in anything. Oh, yeah. I saw her in Civil War Oh, okay. Yeah, I haven't seen that yet. She was great

in that movie and so yeah, I'm cool. So she's going to have quite the career at least. Yeah, I'm very, very excited to see like where her career takes her because she is phenomenal. Yeah. And even the asshole played by Spike Fern, Bejorn, he's such a good actor because I hated him within two seconds. Yeah. I was like, you're such a dick. He is. He's like the perfect dick that we love to hate. I mean, obviously, like you said, we didn't want him to die. No, you know. But he was just such a, yeah, he was just a dick. And that was, that was

great. And even Eileen Wu Navarro, who only saw for the first half of the movie, I would say, she was the first to go. But man, the way she went, I was like, yeah. It was so gross. Like, the franchise already is set up. for a lot of grossness. Yeah. And I think they just really went above and beyond. Yes, above and beyond. Whoever did the makeup, wow.

Yeah. And I mean, I don't know how much of this was like practical or VFX. And in terms of VFX, I will say, what we saw of space looked so cool. Yes, it wasn't overused. Yeah. Like, it just looked incredible. all the stuff that was happening in space like when they're hitting whatever

the rings of, I don't know I'm not very good at space terminology but you know when they hit the rings of the thing that's around them whatever planet they were on. Yeah like it looked so cool and like every time that you see the wide shots of them in space and you see like all the stars

and the debris and everything all around it just looked incredible and I can only imagine that it probably looked so much cooler when you're watching it on the the big screen because it was it was incredible and then like with all of the creatures and stuff like that like wow it was just disgusting disgusting but like in the best possible way and it ended with a baby xenomorph what that was crazy he was the grossest part of the movie yeah he really was

Because, like, there was so much, like, bursting and ooze and slime or whatever, but, like, the hybrid human, you know, more of situation that they had going on was, like, yeah. Disgusting. Yeah. Disgusting. Yeah. They just do such a good job of making it horror sci-fi. Yeah. It really is so on the genre.

Like, you get everything that you came there for. Yeah. And a great story to boot with incredible characters that you care about. And I think, like, anyone who's making a sequel ought to take note. Yeah. This is how you do it. Yes. You know?

Yes. This is what, as viewers, this is what we want because we enjoyed, you know, the originals so much that we just want more of that. But, like, updated with a great story. Not exactly. Because what comes to mind first is I like the sequels of Star Wars when we get to Force Awakens. But it is pretty much beat by beat in a lot of ways. Right. And so that was fair criticism that were kind of, even though it was fun to watch and it was nice and that's one of the less criticized of 7, 8, and 9.

Right. It's a lot of it is beat by B. And this one I felt like did a really great job of paying homage to those major scenes and those major moments, but being a totally different story. Yeah. It was just overall, such a great addition to the alien franchise, I think. And saying that, we've only seen, like, two other of the alien movies. But we were, I'm upset.

They're now one of my favorite movies. Yeah, because we saw, like, I don't know, guys, were those two the best ones, or are there others that are, like, this level? You know what I mean? I heard the newest one, Prometheus, or what's the... I'm very curious. I heard that one's pretty good. Yeah.

Should we watch it? Yeah, what do you think? Should we continue, basically, with like three and onwards? Or do we stop here? Yeah. Yeah, what are your thoughts? What are your thoughts? Let us know.

How did you feel? I'm sure that a lot of you watching have, you know, been fans of this franchise for a long time. Maybe you've seen all of the films. Like, how does this stack up to the other movies? Was it a good homage? Because we certainly think so. And yeah, let us know your thoughts and we shall see you next time. I'm a Chara Cook.

This is Stub's Abra. Ciao.