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Both Marvels current Predator and Alien runs have been decent to good so far. Also there are some fun side stuff like "What If.... Carter Burke Survived?" and "Predator Versus Wolverine".

Carter Burke was a good fun story. Predator vs Wolverine was meh, too much skipping around thru time instead of one solid encounter. I haven’t read it yet because I’m a week or so behind on books, but I’m hoping the Predator vs Black Panther is better.

As is tradition;

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Romulus mostly succeeds because as some of our chit chat here shows? Where Prometheus left people asking “what the hell was that all about?”, Romulus has us considering wider lore impact, and how its, for the most part if not exactly exclusively, deepened the lore, and even shone a new light on motivations behind events to come in chronological terms.

I really want a sequel or spin off!

Hmm yes, lore very deep.

Romulus succeeded at nothing except making money. What it didn’t succeed at was being scary at any moment, which I’m told is a drawback for a horror.

It was the bottom of the barrel being scraped clean through. AI level script, genuinely cringe fan service, a cast of characters who might as well be named Victim 1, Victim 2, etc and a narrative structure of a video game.

The guy playing the android did a good job, by far the best thing in the film.

Android bloke good. He succeeded in making me remember the main characters name through constant repetition. Otherwise she would not have been memorable.

On that?

How often do we remember the names of characters from a single watch?

Ripley of course is one, because she’s central to the story. Andy here on account Sweet Googly Moogly that dude portrayed the same character in three ways, and convincingly so.

I know the main lass is called Rain, because I googled it earlier in this thread and it’s a unique enough name to stick.

The others? Well. I’ve seen it a grand total of That One Time. When I’ve used the names in earlier comments, I freely admit I googled those too, but they’ve not stuck.

Not because their roles are pointless or badly portrayed. But because….the names just aren’t instantly memorable and they were supporting cast.

That's a metric of how i judge a movie. If i remember the characters names after i've watched it, they're good characters with good moments. If i don't, they're forgettable and disposable. Unfortunately that's the case for romulus.

But did you remember Andy’s name?

He’s clearly the central character of the movie. And not just by performance.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
But did you remember Andy’s name?

He’s clearly the central character of the movie. And not just by performance.

Andy was solid. Especially so because formula says, when will the robot turn evil and try to kill everyone. So he was always going to be watched very closely.
I remember all of 3 names from Alien Romulus. I remember every name from Alien. I feel like the problem is these characters were little more than meat puppets waiting their turn for slaughter more than there were good characters. "A crew of young people" who come off as generic for the most part. They are fairly forgettable.

Bret and Parker and a bonus situation ! Never gets old.

Granted I've only seen it once and if we watch it at least once a year as we do with Alien* then maybe there's something there I'm not seeing but I doubt it.

* It's a movie we both love so it's in rotation quite a lot.

I think it’s a little of column A and a little of column B; the first three films (and particularly the first two) all take quite a bit of time with the crew before the alien actually appears, where as all of the subsequent ones really want to dive into the goopy, bloody stuff ASAP and do a bare minimum with character setup. I do think this one will get better on a rewatch, because the corporate hell-hole setup they do is quite interesting, but I do wish they’d make a slower burn alien film and trust that the audience can wait to get to the shiny black highlight.

In fact, I’d say taking more time to build up that tension would make it a better film; we, as the audience, know what’s going to happen, but when?!

I'd be interested to see what time the alien chest burst in alien and what time it burst in romulus. Because I felt like they did a fair bit of character build up. But we're also old and those damn kids annoy us.

I saw it today. It was very well done. Not as well done to reinvigorate the franchise like Prey was for Predator but honestly I'd probably put it pushing for second out of all the alien flicks but I'll put placings after watching alien, romulus, and aliens in a binge together.

Also loved they kept the esthetic from the first 2 movies and didn't upgrade the tech. Fantastic touch.

Alien makes it a bit weird because in Alien the timeframe is vague. The Facehugger was on the guy seemingly longer than it took the burster to appear with one scene going right to the next.

The issue is Aliens in which Ripley's recollection of events explicitly says it took a few hours from Facehugger fall off to chestburster and I think she says it took three days for the hugger to fall off.

So if you just watched Alien, you might think it only takes a few minutes for the burster to come out unless you watched Aliens right after and took note of Ripley specifying the timeframe.

Frustrating as it is, I’ve accepted it’s one of those “it takes as long as the plot in question needs it to”.

A narrative cop out to be sure, but one I can live with. And hey, it’s not like Romulus is the first to show rapid implantation and gestation.

 LordofHats wrote:
Alien makes it a bit weird because in Alien the timeframe is vague. The Facehugger was on the guy seemingly longer than it took the burster to appear with one scene going right to the next.

The issue is Aliens in which Ripley's recollection of events explicitly says it took a few hours from Facehugger fall off to chestburster and I think she says it took three days for the hugger to fall off.

So if you just watched Alien, you might think it only takes a few minutes for the burster to come out unless you watched Aliens right after and took note of Ripley specifying the timeframe.

Well... We can take some things from David in Covenant to explain a little of that. He said as he experimented with the black goo that it took on different forms and stabilized. Generation by generation, experiment by experiment, it took longer and longer for reactions to take place.

These face huggers are not born in eggs by a queen. They were generically engineered in an assemly line to be milked for their black goo to be purified and experimented with.

What does that make these face huggers? Are they closer to the ones david made or the ones the nostromo found?

I am more willing to see rapid gestation any time the black goo is in close proximity because the stuff is so volatile.