Alien Romulus: A montage of stupidity in the face of existential threats.

I watched the film fully, I’m a smartass and I know what I’m talking about.

The film was garbage, and here is why, in full, infuriating detail.

There was plenty that was wrong about this film, from lazy CGI and badly made jumpscares to lazily copied material that never made it into the original films in the franchise, but first off, let’s talk about how every Alien movie contributed something new, except for Romulus:

• Alien introduced the iconic Xenomorph.
• Aliens introduced the Xenomorph hive structure and the queen.
• Alien 3 introduced the hive in the process of being made instead of the aftermath, and you got to see some new types of xenomorphs (dog Xenos are cute change my mind).
• Resurrection introduced cloning, hybridization, and the newborn hybrid, the film was weird but at least it was original.
• Then Prometheus came along and introduced a shit ton of new stuff. You got the engineers, their lore, and implied origins. You got the black goo, references to the xenomorph goddess, a live engineer, mutants, and a freaky new parasitoid which was from a developing fetus infected with the black goo that got discarded. Then you got to watch the engineer get facef*cked (I find this more accurate than ‘facehugged’, I don’t pump people full of my children when I hug them) by that parasitoid and give birth to a new creature, the deacon.
• Alien covenant introduced neomorphs and further explained the black goo briefly, then we got to see the ultimate version of the xenomorph, lovingly bred and raised by David, and that scene where the newly birthed xenomorph mimicked Mommy David’s movements in some sort of imprinting moment truly warmed my heart…

But when Romulus came along, it didn’t introduce ANYTHING new.

Literally everything the characters did wrong in the film, rambling hazard:

The pregnant girl (I’m not going to bother to try to remember her name) was so annoying to watch.

She wakes up after seeing her friend get inaccurately chestbursted earlier, decides to walk incredibly slowly to fill screen time, sees the alien cocoon (looks like a giant uterus wrapped in skeletal fingers, it was an alright design but looked like it was taken from some concept sketch for a previous alien film the director stole off the internet) and stands there.

Then her probably boyfriend walks up, sees it too, and instead of then running away like they should, they stand close to each other and stare each other in the eyes, their mouths open like they’re gonna say something but they don’t, so they stand there, staring and gawking at each other for 30 seconds like retarded goldfish, like they’re gonna make out any second or they’re gonna say something like “omg i love u i just realized” but THEY DON’T SAY ANYTHING THEY JUST KEEP GAWKING AT EACH OTHER, like the dialogue got cut or something.

Then after this absolutely random filler ends, the boyfriend decides to try to kill the alien in the cocoon by stabbing an electrical prod into it like a toddler with a fork testing an electrical socket.

Genius move, dude.

He’s an idiot but hey at least it could achieve something, and his girlfriend (pregnant girl) instead of running away while this dumbass buys her time (or more realistically lessens her time since he’s gonna wake that shit up with his prod) just stands there staring in disbelief. Probably wondering how she was lucky enough to fall in love with a boy as stupid as her.

Then the alien cocoon becomes agitated and spurts some acid on the guy’s shirt and it doesn’t do anything to him, then instead of being like “oh shit the cocoon is becoming active, that means it’s waking up, I should probably move away” nah he just stands there in front of it, staring at it.

This scene alone destroyed the last shred of respect I had for the film.

Then he gets stabbed by the tail of the understandably pissed off alien in the cocoon (WELL DESERVED) and falls over, then the cocoon, now beginning to open up, pours acid blood on him, but slowly, in small drips.

He could move out of the way (he ain’t paralyzed, the tail didn’t get his spine, plus he sits up so he can clearly move) but instead he sits there for a full two minutes just watching the acid drip onto him, burning off parts of his body, and he doesn’t even scream for most of it, he just goes “ah, hey, oh no, what, hey, what the hell, gah, oh no, agh” like his drink order got messed up, and only shouts when his fingers melt off “AGH!” not even a scream wtf (he won’t be able to please his dumbass gf now probably).

Then the acid that fell on his shirt a minute ago FINALLY eats through his flesh and the fabric of his shirt and melts his heart, and he just suddenly stops moving and dies immediately, it was so stupid to watch, needless to say.

That acid (which the bad-CGI-synth from earlier in the film unscientifically called “hydrofluoric acid”) can melt through multiple floors of a Weyland Yutani research station rapidly, it chewed through the hull of the Nostromo in the original Alien film in under a minute, and you’re telling me it takes multiple minutes just to burn through this guy’s shirt? Acid has a delay feature now, I guess.

Oh yeah and then his dumbass girlfriend, still watching instead of idk helping her man or just running away (by trying to open the door right behind her) decides to wait some more while the alien hatches out of the cocoon, and only when it sticks its head out of the cocoon does she decide to try to leave by opening the door behind her.

Oh and somehow, she doesn’t know how to open the door on the ship that her, her boyfriend, and her pals have probably been hanging out on for the past few years. That makes total sense.

So she calls her friend and is like “idk how to open this door, please help me i’m being loud and emotional while there’s a freaky thing hatching behind me VERY SLOWLY AND DRAMATICALLY”

And her friend who is supposed to be silent and calm in a room full of facehuggers (who I must say are very bad at their job in this film, but that could just be due to the effects of cryostasis) decides to answer her call and chat with her while surrounded by facehuggers that will pounce at any sound.

Fast forward, super intelligent alien kidnaps the pregnant girl and puts her in a wall in the hive.

After they get dumbass pregnant girl from the hive, rescuing her, the guy considers injecting her with the black goo they got earlier because the evil CGI low-quality doesn’t-even-count-as-a-deepfake synth on the radio told them it can drastically improve human livelihood and resilience.

This is true to some extent but they really screwed up the description of the black goo in the movie, the director probably didn’t watch Covenant or Prometheus fully. So with that kind of accurate info (but not rly) the guy does realistically consider injecting the pregnant girl who is injured with the black goo, but then doesn’t do it when the main character says “I don’t trust this”, which was the only line in this movie that made actual sense and wasn’t a cheesy reference.

Fun fact: Even though this is supposed to be the offspring of the same alien from the original film, the design is significantly different.

An important question: Why would a Xenomorph wanting to keep the girl it took alive to use as an incubator injure her so badly that she can’t be used as one?

So our injured pregnant girl doesn’t get her injection yet, good, why was she injured in the first place? Like yeah I get a xenomorph injuring her with its tail if it was trying to kill her, but the xeno that hurt her was trying to transport her, not hurt her (in any life-threatening way at least) so she could be used as an incubator, oh, and the really dumbass part of the narrative? David says she isn’t being used as an incubator because she is too badly injured (not from the shit that went down in the ship from earlier thanks to her dumbass boyfriend, bless him, but from the alien that kidnapped her).

So the plot is trying to say this:

“Aliens (rightly) kidnap usable hosts to make them incubators, but this alien, which was smart enough to act like it was dragging away corpses only to come back and surprise the pregnant girl, lulling her into a false sense of security, and then sit back and wait for her friends to try to open the door to help her so she can kill them too, this SUPER SMART XENOMORPH, decides to badly injure the girl it’s trying to make into an incubator…

And then go ahead with putting her in the hive wall like it would if she was to become an incubator, forgetting it made her unusable.”

So the xenomorph we saw kidnap her in the film was thinking:

“Let me injure the thing I need in good condition, okay I injured it, great, I like being rough with my women, aight now she’s completely useless according to the director of this film, soooo Imma put her in the wall anyway because I just forgot I badly wounded her instead of carrying her away with some care.

It’s fine though because the like three fans of this film will argue that I did this not because the director is stupid but because I’m just soooo smart that I put this non-incubator-material onto the wall, not for usage instead of just eating her for efficiency since I’m smart, but to lure the survivors back to rescue her BECAUSE I’M SO SMART, SMARTER THAN THE OG ALIEN EVEN THOUGH I’M LITERALLY THE OG ALIEN’S OFFSPRING”

The Xenomorph acted like a supercomputer that got a windows update halfway through the film.

This was my face when watching this film ironically.

Why did Kay inject herself with the black goo?

Dumbass Lady, whose name is Kay turns out, gets saved, and she seemed to be like half-awake while the dude was considering injecting her, and when she finally regains total consciousness, and sees the canister full of black goo vials next to her, she winces at some pain she rightfully deserved and injects herself.

What was she thinking? If I had to guess, it went along these lines:

“Man, I need something to take the edge off, hey, what’s this weird canister of vials? it looks important, that black stuff kinda looks like the drugs I take at home which ended up damaging my brain so much I became the way I am today, who cares if I have a baby (who realistically is probably dead after all the damage this girl took), imma put this shit in my veins because it looks like it’s got a kick to it”

Then she injects it inside her, allowing a further plot point to be established. Some viewers said she probably injected herself in an attempt to save her baby, but what they missed was the fact that she didn’t even know what this shit was to begin with, so that’s like me being pregnant, seeing a bottle of bleach with the tag scratched off next to some cleaning products, and since I’m injured, I think “My baby’s probably in bad shape, I need to drink this stuff to save them!”

The final part of the film and why it made zero sense from a scientific and anatomical perspective:

First off, black goo causes unpredictable results in the things it mutates, we know that, so Kay giving birth to a freakazoid like the one we saw is a given, however, the baby she made fully grew in roughly a minute despite not consuming anything.

The neomorphs from alien covenant did grow relatively fast but they always ate before growing like any normal organism, so why in the hell did the baby in Romulus become an eight-foot-tall monstrosity in a minute?

Also, my bigger concern is WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT BIRTH LOGIC? Pregnant girl squeezed out a giant egg BIGGER THAN A BLOODY FOOTBALL, after squirting out plenty of blood for good measure, and you’re telling me SHE DIDN’T DIE FROM THAT? SHE’D HAVE A FANNY LIKE A CANOE!!!

Oh, and the stupidest part? Not only would this birth have totally butchered her lower body and left her with a massive hole where her dignity once was (as if she had dignity lol she obviously banged that dumbass from the first half of the movie who attacked a cocooned alien and lost) but the movie then shortly afterwards shows she has gotten OUT OF THE CRYOPOD and is now slumped against the wall, AS IF SHE’D BE ABLE TO MOVE IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Some extra inconsistency is found here because there’s no huge pool of blood at her feet, no giant trail of what used to be her lady parts, nope, she’s just grunting in moderate pain as she starts feeling herself up for some reason so that she can reveal that she is excreting or (as the film is implying) lactating BLACK GOO.

Another weird plot point is the cryopod she got put in rejected her, saying she was in unstable condition and so couldn’t be put in stasis. I call bullshit. Cryopods in the alien franchise are canonically used for transporting people in critical condition, people on the brink of death, be it in the movies, comics, or books, are put in these same cryopods to be kept alive.

So why the hell did the cryopod Kay got put in reject her? My guess is maybe it has a natural selection feature that makes it reject dumbasses.

Also, can someone please tell me why the cryopod she was bleeding in isn’t totally splattered with blood? It has mostly dried blood but isn’t too messy, one wipe and it’s fine for some reason, even though she squeezed out an egg bigger than her head which would’ve destroyed her lady parts (I was going to make about her brain size but I’m not gonna now).

Somehow the pod is just mildly dirty and she got out of it with no trouble and slumped against the wall, realistically she wouldn’t even be able to move her lower body!

Wait, hold up. I forgot she was lactating black goo. That’s the cherry on top. This is stupidity. Black goo isn’t a food source for the creatures it ends up creating, the neomorphs in covenant don’t need to eat or drink black goo for sustenance, it’s a one-time mutagenic substance, you don’t need to drink it over the course of your mutant life for sustenance, so there’d be zero need for this fluid that “rapidly evolves the lifeforms it infects” according to the low-quality CGI synth from earlier TO MAKE YOU LACTATE BLACK GOO, it serves ZERO PURPOSE.

Looks like Disney has destroyed another franchise, Alien is gonna crash harder than the Renaissance space station in the ending scene.

My last thoughts on the film:

I’ve seen plenty of bad films over the years. I remember hating The Predator (2018) for its characters randomly flipping personalities and the sheer lack of logic holding it together — but at least that film had a story. A stupid one, sure, but it stuck to it.

Alien: Romulus, on the other hand, doesn’t even follow a coherent line. It loops. The majority of this two-hour drag is just the main characters dealing with their dumbass friends’ self-inflicted problems, “resolving” those problems with even dumber decisions, and finally — finally — getting back to the thing they were supposed to be doing in the first place.

My favorite part of this movie was the part when it ended.

Strip out the filler and loops, and this movie would barely be an hour long. I was eating a tragically awful beef-and-cheese pizza while watching it, and that pizza — which tasted like damp cardboard and regret — was still more enjoyable than the film. I wish the movie was like that pizza. That way, I could at least vomit it out instead of letting it fester inside and give me food poisoning (which my pizza did).

I’m never ordering beef and cheese again. And I’m never watching a franchise movie tainted by Disney’s corporate fingerprints again either.

Good riddance, Romulus.