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Alien: Romulus

Alien: Romulus (2024)

IMDb

Rating: A

Saw with LD. A (really dark) teenage space adventure that made me feel like I was 14 and was watching “Alien” for the first time on our family TV (a 21" Belson). They tugged at every dormant heartstring from our childhood. Graininess, floppy drives, joysticks, lots of CRT displays, and clunky mechanical keyboards1. Absolutely lush visuals, soundtrack, and cinematography. I’m glad we saw it on a big screen.

Every time I see a space flick I drift off thinking where we’d be as humanity if we got our shit together. I was then brought back to Earth by noting that much of space travel and commerce were enabled and controlled by Weyland-Yutani, the Evil Galactic MegaCorporation that’s responsible for much of the trouble in the Alien franchise beginning, of course, with the Galactic Ego of its MegaRich founder. Not sure why I thought we wouldn’t be in the thrall of unreasonably despotic gazillionaires in a dystopian sci-fi movie…

I last saw Cailee Spaeny in Devs. She’s a most worthy successor to Sigourney Weaver2. But David Jonsson just outstanding as Andy the Android3.

I’ll be watching this again and soon 🥰

  1. Reminds me of a Lewis Black quote on old-school telephones: “The kind that if a puma came at you, you could kill it.”↩︎

  2. The movie made $350M on a shockingly low budget of $80M (which I suppose is what happens when you don’t blow it on expensive/big-name actors) and has excellent reviews. There’s no way they’re not making another one.↩︎

  3. Fine, “Synthetic”↩︎