“Alien: Romulus” - You just had to make it weird (or Alien Re-Resurrection).

How did you feel about Alien Resurrection? Did you like it, hate it, accept it as good enough to scratch your Alien itch? Did you refuse to watch it altogether? Were you even alive in 1997? Short of rewatching Resurrection, Alien: Romulus is the next closest thing. Depending on how you answered my questions, that’s good, bad, or you’re not even old enough to have worried about Y2K.

In Resurrection, a group of corporate scientists are studying captured xenomorphs (the aliens referenced by the title) aboard a ship. A ragtag group of humans and one obligatory android are also on board. When the xenomorphs escape and start killing, the group is chased around the ship and picked off by the xenomorphs one at a time, all while a final countdown to the ship’s destruction ensues. At the end, there is a climactic fight between the last remaining human(s) and some new hybrid xenomorph.

In Romulus, a group of corporate scientists were studying captured xenomorphs (the aliens referenced by the title) aboard a space station. A ragtag group of humans and one obligatory android end up on board. When the xenomorphs escape and start killing, the group is chased around the station and picked off by the xenomorphs one at a time, all while a final countdown to the station’s destruction ensues. At the end, there is a climactic fight between the last remaining human(s) and some new hybrid xenomorph.

There are differences, to be sure. Romulus takes place between the events of Alien and Aliens. There are fewer characters in Romulus and none of them are literally Sigourney Weaver or Weaver’s Ripley. But there is a Ripley-analogue - Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny), a young miner caring for her android/surrogate brother Andy (David Jonsson). Yes, the android’s actual name is Andy. Andy the Android. Yeah, I rolled my eyes, too.

And the way they end up on the doomed vessel is slightly different. Rain is approached by ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) with a plan to escape their dead-end lives and flee to another planet. The three of them and three others - Kay (Isabela Merced), Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Navarro (Aileen Wu) - form the group that will definitely not all survive to see that planet. Unfortunately, none of the human characters are developed that well, so we don’t have much rooting interest in any them. Rain is the obvious protagonist and we like her because she protects Andy. But Kay is pregnant, so...yeah. The other three barely get names and are just there as slasher movie fodder. As for Andy, we’re told he is an old model refurbished to the point of being little more than functional and mostly reduced to telling dad jokes. See the problem here? We need another Ripley - a very capable and skilled person with leadership qualities and a badass streak who won’t leave a child or cat behind. Instead, we get Rain, who is really good at rebooting Andy and knows not to inject people with black goo. That’s about it.

Speaking of black goo, how did you feel about Prometheus and the whole xenomorph origin story? I thought it was half-baked and completely unnecessary. It’s one thing to give us the tale of how Darth Vader came to be Darth Vader (still unnecessary). It’s another to give us the origin story of a wild animal. Imagine if someone made a prequel to The Meg explaining the origins of megalodons. It’s a scary monster that wants to kill people. Got it. I don’t need more. As Patton Oswalt once joked when talking about the Star Wars prequels, “I don’t care where the stuff I love came from. I just love the stuff I love.” To be clear, I do not love The Meg or anything about it. The point is when the goo made an appearance in Romulus, I rolled my eyes again. Hard.

(Spoilers - If you want to be truly surprised and grossed out in the movie, skip the next paragraph.)

That goo was a key component in writer/director Fede Alvarez’s vision for Romulus. He definitely saw Resurrection, but took the wrong lesson from it. He saw the bizarre human-hybrid and thought “you know what this really needs? Graphic body horror.” Remember that pregnant girl I mentioned? She has one job in this movie - to give birth to that hybrid. And it’s a scene you can’t unsee. I realize that watching one of the chest-bursters explode through a rib cage is quite awful to watch, but watching one of the xenomorph eggs come blasting out from between that girl’s legs in an explosion of blood is over the top for me. Not because labor and delivery bothers me - I watched my son’s birth and it was super cool - but because it’s in the movie just for the gratuitous shock value. It’s also the point where the movie lost me, not just because of the gross-out factor, but because of the continued tie-in to Prometheus. I didn’t know it was possible to roll your eyes while trying not to vomit.

With that scene seared into my brain, followed by the silly hybrid and final fight scene, I was less than thrilled by the overall film. Don’t get me wrong, the movie prior to the pregnant girl’s big scene was very solid. It did what we want all Alien movies to do. It put a group of people in an enclosed space being chased by the scariest creature in movie history. It gave us another really good android character who garners more sympathy than the rest of the cast combined (not to mention Andy gets an upgrade for part of the movie that allows Jonsson to steal the show). It even did some creative things with the face huggers and acid blood to lift the tension. But Alvarez just had to make it weird.

Rating: Ask for four dollars back and a barf bag.