After many sequel movies to the original classic 1979 Alien, we got the excellent movie Aliens and now we finally have another decent movie in the series. Alien Romulus is set between these two brilliant movies and is a real homage to the original.
The movie starts with a salvage operation in deep space where we see the name “NOSTROMO”, floating past on a large piece of hull, setting the approximate timeline. This ship collect’s something and then heads to a space station where we see some scientists cutting it open and then leaving the room. We then move a few years into the future to the colony Jackson’s Star where we meet the main characters, Rain and her synthetic brother Andy, Tyler her ex-boyfriend, his sister Kate, there cousin Bjorn and his girlfriend Navarro.
The goal of the main characters is to simply complete their contract and leave for the planet Yvaga. This, however, is almost impossible as their contracts are forcibly extended just as they get close to being completed. So they hatch a plan to salvage some cryopods from a derelict company “spaceship” that they have detected in orbit.
To access the derelict they need someone or something that can communicate with the ships MUTHA computer system and the need Andy to do this. So they set off to get the cryopods and then onto Yvaga.
Once they get into orbit, they discover that the “spaceship” is actually a “space-station” in a decaying orbit leaving them just 36 hours to get in and out. What can possibly go wrong ?
Well just about everything, the pods need more fuel and when they try to get it from the cryo-store they accidentally unfreeze a face hugger which causes the station to initiate a lock down trapping them inside. If you want to know more then go see the movie, its brilliant. (I will come back and add some more in a few months to avoid spoilers).
It was really good to see just how much care and time has gone into this film, there are so many shout outs to the original movie, the salvage ships startup sequence mimics the nostromo’s startup sequence. The design of the space ships all follow the design of the nostromo, the station even looks like one of the towers on the ore processing plant of the nostromo. It was nice to see they brought back science officer Ash again, but the CGI face swapping is a little iffy and could have been done much better.
