No, I haven't seen it. Yes, I know RedLetterMedia is not an infallible source of movie criticism. But when I read about the movie myself, from promotional material for it no less, I found myself asking "that's it? That's all there is to this?"
Maybe my interest/fondness of the franchise hasn't fully recovered from that "David actually made the alien and killed all the Engineers" retcon asspull from before that made the universe feel very small and stripped it of a lot of curiousity and dread in the darkness of space and all of that.
If you saw it and liked it, that's great. Share what you liked about it if you like. The set design, physical costume/makeup work, and even the acting all sound promising, but I don't think I could bear to sit through what really does sound like some LLM-written kitbash of the previous movies.
let's strip the mystery from the aliens with a backstory that is complete nonsense. Also let's make it about faith and creationism and have Jesus be an engineer.All the alien movies have aspects that are cool, I'm sure Romulus will be that way too, but there is so much wrong with how they handled every movie after aliens. Just An endless string of cocaine-fueled bad ideas.
being brought into existence just so I can watch people retell the same like 2 Bible stories over and over again until I get to return to the eternal void
Stay strong, they make might a movie based on Gilgamesh and Enkidu at some point
If it helps, I really liked the game Alien: Isolation, even if it dragged on a bit too long with an excessively long final act that didn't really feel necessary. It was nostalgic, sure, but it also introduced enough new ideas and expansions to older concepts to feel like it was still adding something, the Working Joes in particular and the bleakness of a dying competitor to Weyland-Yuutani and the working-class consequences of that.
The Capcom AvP arcade game was a good time too, even if it was a whiplash mood-shift from what it was based upon.
The Working Joes alone are a better addition to the lore than anything Ridley Scott's added to it in 40 years
I've read a bunch of the reviews on letterboxd and the kind of people who speak in memes seem to love it, not a good sign
I'm also noticing some horror fans starting to lionize the director Fede Álvarez, but he really hasn't made a single great movie. He's mainly popular for using practical effects instead of CGI, which is great and all but who cares if those effects are in service of a weak story? way too much attention on how a movie looks and not whether it's any good
Evil Dead 2013 is a meaningless splatter-fest. the first Don't Breathe was okay but the premise of Don't Breathe 2 is so genuinely offensive that edgelord should never be allowed to write a script again. ever since then I'm actively rooting against this man
honestly I expect to enjoy Romulus on an aesthetic level but there's gotta be more to it than that. even fun schlocky horror movies can and should be about something, and from everything I've heard Romulus is just about keeping the franchise alive and making the studio a lot of money
PS his justification for reanimating Ian Holm with AI is so funny:
"It’s so much more expensive to do it the way we did it — it’s much cheaper to just hire an actor"
oh so not only did you use a dead man's likeness without his consent instead of paying a living actor, you also wasted money and people's time just to do something creepy and immoral? all so people can point at the screen and go "hey it's the guy from the old movie!!" ugh
You know it's going to be a good Half in the Bag episode when the boys already have red rosy cheeks before the camera starts rolling.
Waiting for
to watch any film. Fuck paying for that, I don't have money for expensive ass theatresYou should watch the Deadpool movie, as a treat of treats
The telesync cams are very good
I was strongly considering doing that when I had the time and the spare cash in pocket.
Even RedLetterMedia seemed to like it and they're as tired of capeshit as I am.
It's capeshit that makes fun of capeshit, with a heavy dose of 2000s middle school quasi-homophobic jokes for those that aren't in it for the meta humour
But ultimately it's still capeshit and can't really decide whether it's fully taking the piss out of itself or not
with a heavy dose of 2000s middle school quasi-homophobic jokes for those that aren't in it for the meta humour
Because I'm already tired of capeshit, actually knew the comics' lore pre MCU and was already tired of it then, and because I always hated 2000s edgelord humor, that's definitely a mark against me seeing it.
Barring a couple of cringey things the movie was pretty good. It never really got dull and the characters didn’t always make stupid decisions. The Ian Holm face thing was unnecessary though. I don’t think it adds anything to the universe except for showing the chestburster-to-full-grown-alien growth process
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
It seems like at some point movie and tv motivations pivoted from "i've got an awesome idea/story/twist to try" to something more like... "we've got to do something and we haven't tried this in a while".
Got to see it in cinema for free the other day. Thought it was pretty good. Pretty creative action sequences, didn't feel 'plot armour' filled at all, soundtrack was awesome, and for the first time ever (for me) CGI gore had me viscerally reacting/cringing in a good way. I was pleasantly surprised the whole way through, especially given the start where it seems like it's gonna be focused around some chipper teenagers being quirky in space. I won't say it was well written in terms of tension and themes and all that malarkey, but it keeps going at a good pace and isn't completely see through.
However, I'm not a big alien fan overall. Only seen the first one, and a decade ago at that. Never researched or thought about the universe of it, just see it as 'cool alien movie'. For that reason, I didn't pick up on the fan service, that when explained to me by my friend did seem pretty cringe (bad cringe).
I made no real attempt to analyse any of it. It's not a movie that's meant for that.
I made no real attempt to analyse any of it. It's not a movie that's meant for that.
I have had a hard time turning off my tendency to analyze what I'm consuming, even when I wanted to.
I've often had a bad time with what others said were "popcorn movies" to me to dismiss whatever I was seeing in them while watching them. Sometimes that served me well, especially if something took a turn for the worse later or if the people in charge of making it wound up being chuds or the like, but sometimes I'd actually prefer to "popcorn" thoughts away but it just isn't happening.
I used to be able to do that with Beavis and Butt-Head for example, but when I got to the recent new episodes and saw the one where Beavis was in need of government services and the subtext seemed to be "lol welfare recipients stupid and lazy" I stopped watching that episode, and that season, entirely.
I get what you mean. I'm like that 90% of the time - I think the key is just being very tired when you watch it. I started thinking about the world the characters lived in and whether it was an interesting, realistic, or at all Marxian approach to world building, and then I was like ah, why the fuck am I even bothering? An utterly pointless task. Sit back, enjoy your ice cream, enjoy the huge sound system, and let it wash over you as an exercise of feeling/experiencing rather than an exercise of thinking/logic.
Considering how exhausted most working class people are most of the time, I think I see the mass appeal of "popcorn" movies, for better or for worse, then.
This "review" sucks. The two most interesting aspects of the movie are its portrayal of androids and what it has to say about women's issues. Meanwhile the dude wearing red completely fails to understand Andy. Calls his original personality a "simpleton," refers to his two personalities as "good" and "bad." Zero mention of agency, enslavement, disability, emotion vs rationality. And the only thing these guys have to say on women's issues in the film is that there's a weird alien vagina. Good work guys. I'm not even sure what they wanted out of the film. They say the best part were the first 30 minutes, which frankly is just over-the-top sci-fi capitalist dystopia. It's as derivative as the rest of the film. This is an interesting movie with a lot worth discussing, and they managed to hit all of the least interesting points.
I just can't get past how ableist the movie is towards Andy. What aspects of his character do you think are interesting in the movie itself? Or do you mean what it represents about how broader society views disabled folks?
I'm still not fully sure how I feel about Andy. He's coded as autistic, with his two personalities sort of being two stereotypical (?) "types" of autism (tropes?). I've seen analysis on how his character partially subverts but arguably still falls into racist tropes as well. The point is, if you're reviewing the movie, you should be discussing these sorts of things. The guys in this youtube video don't, and so their review is extremely shallow. A movie does not need to be good for it to be a good movie for analyzing.
its portrayal of androids and what it has to say about women's issues.
spoilers, discussion of SA
Early in the film, one of the characters reveals she's pregnant, that the father was an asshole, but that she's excited to have the baby. At the end of the film, she gives birth to a monster. A fully-grown man-thing that's more sexual predator than human. How do you make a thirty minute "review" of the film and have nothing to say about this motherhood and patriarchal violence?
Their takes don't always land, and that's part of why I made this post: a second, third, or maybe fourth opinion.
I like the Alien series though I've been burned by it before (Covenant was horrid to me).
I liked Romulus. It wasn't perfect, but I thought it was just a plainly good and watchable sci-fi movie and we don't get a lot of those anymore. The visuals design was great, sound design good too. Really like seeing analog sci-fi, lot of knobs and switches.
LLM-written kitbash of the previous movies.
That's not totally inaccurate, it's a bit of a bummer because the movie has really nice glimmers of just an original Alien film but it force itself to be a "franchise" film far too often. Luckily it does in a well crafted way, but it still does it which is annoying.
I value your opinion highly, and I think I will reassess whether I watch this movie sometime or not because of that.
RedLetterMedia doesn't always land good takes, after all.
It's at the very least an enjoy able C+/B- to use the classic lettering rating scale. It's not at all a bad film. Very watchable. Not the greatest piece of sci-fi cinema, but it is at very least a real-ass movie. Very much above slop, well in the realm of film for sure, not cinema or anything but it's solid.
