Alien: Romulus
A nice mishmash of all Alien films, a little bit of horror, a little bit of action, a little bit of body horror and baby human-Alien hybrids. Utterly ruined by the stupid decision of putting a fucking deepfake Ash in it, Ian Holm must be rolling on his grave (eve though is estate is credited).
Our hero is Rain (I’m calling her Rainpley), who slaves away in the Wayland-Yutani mines in some mining planet with rings and no sun. She filled her quota of 25 thousand hours of backbreaking labour and wants to go to The Island now, but the deal was altered (pray they don’t alter it further). Back to the mines, then.
Rainpley lives with his “brother”, a malfunctioning synthetic person, mostly a keepsake from her tech-wiz father (killed in the mines, bringing up the Bertrand Russell quotes about Einsteins picking cotton). It behaves like a realistic person on the autism spectrum, not Rain Man, just a slower-witted human. His brother(?) has a better job, he’s the planet-level version of the haulers from Alien, their ship doesn’t have any cryopods, so they can’t go far.
They don’t see much, but are on good terms, but this only left in the air and not really explained. The rest of the crew is a guy called Bjorn with a cockney accent and a badass Asian girl. There’s also Bjorn’s little sis hanging around, pregnant.
Those guys spotted a decommissioned WY station floating around, about to hit the rings and turn into space dust, with cryopods for them all, so they propose they get there, take the pods and leave for the next system, a sunny land free of Weyland-Yutani interference. They need the synth to open the doors, that’s why they didn’t just got there right away.
Even though this is a one way trip, Rainpley is stuck in that hellhole anyway, so why not shoot for the stars? They get to the ship, get to the pods, but when they are getting extra fuel, they realise this is a science ship studying the Xenomorphs. Again. The synth needs some door key so he downloads the mind of a broken down Ash synth they find half-digested. They call it “Rook”, not Ash, geddit? In Aliens, it was Bishop, now it’s Rook, there are no other chess references.
Anyway, when they download that door key, their synth turns into a Bishop personality, including the British accent and murderous corporate kowtowing. They are offed one by one by face-huggers or aliens, as they try to escape the station. The escape sequence is divided into Alien horror, Aliens action, and Alien Ressurection body horror to cap off the third act.
The finale is a mix of Alien (being trapped with the Alien on the ship, and wearing a space suit over space undies) and Aliens (the pulse rifle was out, so she has the reverse flamethrower: a freeze gun). There are a lot of fake out endings, where you think this is it, but it isn’t.
The final girl needs to defeat the baby-alien hybrid by itself in the real ending, just expel that aborted fetus product of alien rape. The pregnant girl does not survive, I guess Wayland Yutani is pro-life. The synth does “survive”-ish, free from corporate influence, but that’s for the sequel.
This is actually fine. Rainpley is played by the girl from Civil War, and she can carry a film, but this is playing the hits for the fans, it’s extremely derivative. Which is not a bad thing per-se, just puts a ceiling on the awesomeness.
It’s just the Ash deepfake that leaves a bad aftertaste. If it was only a cameo, I would reject it too, but it would be understandable. But having fake Ash talk so much is preposterous. Stop with the deepfakes of dead actors! This shit is infecting everything, it broke the containment of crappy Star Wars dross! The rest of the film is fine. Just have an ageing Burke say Ash’s lines instead, he’s the real villain anyway. What’s worse, it’s ugly. It’s just bad, uncanny valley shit, just like Gemini Man.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.