Khoi Vinh’s review published on Letterboxd:
At the point where there are so many sequels in a franchise that many people literally have no idea whether a new entry counts as the sixth or the tenth or whatever, the potential to wow an audience is pretty low. For this latest “Alien” the saddest consequence of that fatigue is that we’ve seen the alien so many times, have become so familiar with its beats and tricks, it’s just not very scary anymore. Director Fédé Alvarez has tried to bring back all of Giger’s biomorphic gore and weirdly sexual fluids in spades, but very little of it is all that shocking. In fact the only jolts in this movie are a small handful of cheap jump scares here and there, which also belies the fact that just about all of what’s on offer here is reheated leftovers from past “Alien” entries. There are precious few new ideas at work and the only ones to note are not all that remarkable: we get a younger, sexier but not particularly memorable cast; an appalling use of very bad CG to resuscitate a past franchise performer; and one zero-gravity scene that does something genuinely new with xenomorph bile. Everything else is tiresomely familiar, even predictable. That doesn’t mean it makes a whole lot of sense though; the plot details are pretty rudimentary and not all that logical. That cursory attentiveness to the mechanics of good storytelling actually kind of works in the movie’s favor, because as underwhelming as it all is, no one would take any of this seriously. As a result “Alien: Romulus” has that low distinction of rising above very meagre expectations. There’s nothing surprising here but it’s all delivered on time and in order, and if you’re one of the millions of moviegoers who settle for that, that makes for a not-bad way to spend two hours.
Saw it at Nitehawk Park Slope. When we exited the theater, there was a cloud of mulleted, tattooed, mustachioed hipsters with tote bags standing in a cloud of weed smoke.
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