Alien: Romulus

Weird. We agree to you one. Welcome to the Projection Booth with a special crossover with both the Culture Cast and Midnight Viewing. On this special episode, we were talking about Alien Romulus, directed by Fetti Alvarez and written by Alvarez as well as Rodo. Sayah, guess that's my best guess on that one.

This is a sequel to Alien, a prequel to Aliens, prequel to Alien three, prequel to Alien four, five, six, and seven. There's all the alien stuff in here, which was pretty surprising for me. Alien Romulus they owned to, they. Breed in, they kill in ten days. Once they grab home, they never let go.

Alien Romulus are brand new movie. Excited to talk about this one with you guys. So, Chris, tell me what were your thoughts on Alien Romulus. So, I think, as we normally do in these episodes, let's do pre spoilers in any of this conversation and then we'll talk all about the spoilery bullshit. I look, I think I am a little younger than both of y'all.

Alien is a franchise that I not was raised to care about, but I was still of an age and of a time and of a place to Catch Alien and see Alien kind of when Alien was still a thing that people were talking about. I don't It's not that I don't think people are not talking about Alien right now, far from it. It's just if an Alien sequel comes out ten years from now, will have the turnout that this one did? Is the question, because there are going to be less and less people unless they continue to make good Alien movies that are inherently invested in the franchise. And I know that Prometheus and Covenant are kind of maybe when I'm alluding to, because this movie is also a sequel to those movies'es on top of everything else.

So I enjoyed it. I think that it has its pretty glaring issues, but I think, look, you know, I think my one word summary is it's the best Alien movie I've ever seen in theaters. But that's a pretty low barred across in a lot of ways. So, Father Malone, what about you. I love Alien Isolation the video game.

It was so much fun and so scary and is so evocative of the original Alien, and this movie is very evocative of that video game. I think if fit a Elver is a fan of that game obviously, and a lot of the design work is just built right in the whole scenes and stuff. Let me preface everything by saying, I really was excited for an Alien movie for the first time, and I don't know how many years, twenty years more, And all I took away from it ultimately was I really want to go play Alien Isolation again, which is a drag. I mean, look, the movie has a lot of good points. There's a lot of good good stuff in it.

But ultimately, where this movie breaks down for me on a very fundamental level is there's not one interesting character and there is not one charming actor in this entire movie. It's it is akin to watching cut scenes from a video game. Honestly, no disrespect to these actors, but like they're all miscast and they're all cast too young. Anyway, we'll get into it. That's I was disappointed by this movie.

I'm gonna watch it again, probably just because I'm a Mascus, but it does look beautiful and I love Fed Alvarez, but this ain't no Evil Dead remake. Like I was shocked at the poor quality. Here about you, mister Mike White, Well, okay, I mean let's be honest here, tell me everything you know about Navro. What did you just say? Tell me everything you know about Navro?

The character Mavro. Oh, played by Eileen wool she's got short hair. Oh, I know that they ruined the entire scene that her character has in the movie in the trailers. That's what I know. Oh yeah, all with the X ray machine.

Yeah, yeah, they ruined that in the trailer. And yeah, that's all I know, because that's that's all her character is used for in the movie as well. And that's not a spoiler. That's literally if you watch the trailer for this movie, you see what they're doing. They just it's an alien movie.

It's gonna have a chess purster, no shit movie, no fucking way, it's gonna be an alien movie without a fucking chest person. Right. Count on one hand, the things that are guaranteed to be in an alien movie at this point, chess bursters are one of them. Well, I don't even know what this is an alien movie. This is more of a face hugger movie.

And that's all I yeah, pretty much. I mean there's hundreds and hundreds of face huggers in this movie, which is wild. It's like hundreds of hundreds of beavers. But with face huggers instead. But I would rather watch hundreds of beavers any day of the week were over Alien Romulus.

I really felt betrayed by this movie because it starts off very strong for me. I was really enjoying the scenes of Kaylee Spainey and David Johnson. I think his portrayal of Andy. I really liked that portrayal. I don't know how he does that with his face where he makes himself look sad and confused all the time.

I was trying to do that, but I don't know. I don't think my forehead moves nearly as much. And I haven't even had my botox this week. Yeah, it's it's so by the numbers after a while. And then just all of the fan service with all of the lines and just the I mean even the movie just starts off looking almost exactly like Aliens with the salvage ship, but instead of rescuing Ripley, they're rescuing the alien, which was very tough for me to see.

I had no fault what was going on in the first little bit when they pulled in this thing, I'm like, is that an egg? What is it? And they're cutting through it? I'm just like, I don't know what this is. I was really having a hard time seeing things in this movie.

It's so dimly lit, and there were times on the spaceship where I'm like, are there lights still operational? Can you turn on some lights? Because I'd really like to see that. Like even in the station on LV four twenty six, where you know the colonists are all dead, there's a lot more lighting in that colony, even though it's completely desolated than there is on this space station, which I don't understand again why it's called alien Romulus because the ship is the Romulus and the remiss. I'm just like, Okay, I guess it's cool.

I guess it sounds cool. So and I think that's the whole motivator of this movie. Is it's cool. It's gonna look cool, it's gonna be cool if we make this reference. Let's make this reference.

And yeah, I'm excited to try about spoilers because there's one that happens, and that, for me is the turning point of the movie. Oh, is that the one thing that we're just waiting with baited breath to talk about because it feels like someone just coming up to you at the playground and punching you in the face repeatedly and saying this doesn't hurt at all. Right, it is fine, it's you're fine. Everything's fine here, like Ian Holme as it. Okay, we're in spoiler jyh.

Yeah, I think it's. There's no fucking way to avoid this shit at this point. But from here on out spoilers, because yes. I think we could have danced around for a while. There's a lot going on in this troubling the ian Home fucking cam.

Yeah, but the ian Home thing is like it's the bridge too far for me. And it happened so early on in the movie, and it happened so frequently in the movie that you know, la Peter Cushing in Rogue one was one thing and it was literally one thing. One there are two scenes if that like it was not. There were more than two seats. Oh got that movie?

I mean that's what I said exactly when the credit started rolling. By the way, folks, there's nothing after the end credits. Don't bother to wait around like I did. I took the bullet for you. As soon as the credits started the roll, I said, this was like Rogue one, and then Alien Romulus came in and said, oh you think that that looked horrific and just living in the uncanny Valley.

Well, here hold my beer, because I'm gonna make this worse than Princess Leah and Graham ofv Tarkin all in one with whatever the fuck they were doing with Ian Holm. Well, look, he's a robot. See, but he's in an alien in the alien universe. We always have to have a robot movie. You have a robot.

David Johnson is a robot. We don't need to see the ghoulish specter of Ian Holme dragged out and paraded around over and over, and oh, it's happened so much that he's not just a cameo. He's essentially the main villain of the movie, which again, that makes it more of a Prometheus movie than it makes it anything else, because Prometheus an Alien Covenant are pretty much just about the robots, which, honestly, you know, the dude's over Red Letter Media. I think you know, they they kind of, you know, really laid into Prometheus a long time ago. And I think Prometheus and Covenant are better movies than Romulus, because at least they're movies that are different.

Well, no, I get it, I get that, I am I get that I am in the minority on this, But Alien Romulus, the fan service stuff that they did is more of an affront to me personally than the missteps and problems that Prometheus and Covenant are just making. And Prometheus less so than Covenant. But Prometheus is at least kind of a movie that's different than everything else. This is just Alien with some Aliens, a little bit of Alien three at the beginning, and then oh, by the way, you guys like Resurrection, We're going to give you something that is Resurrection levels of insanity in the last ten minutes of this movie. Hold, let me one up the wildest thing in Alien in the entire Aliens franchise with something so beyond that.

It's that's another thing we're going to talk about, I'm sure. But Father Malone, I want to let you you speak broadly about this, because yeah, there's more than just the Ian Holme problem. Obviously, Well, let me address the Ian Home problem. I admired the daring in trying it. And if they had built an animatronic and not done any CGI at all and had a fucked up animatronic that was spasming and crazy because they could do it.

Now, they could deprint something that's Ian fucking Home, and they could they could, you know, put mechanisms in it to do every little facial twitch and whatever, and it wouldn't even have to be that good because it's a broken down Android. Had they pulled that off, I think I would have ben okay, But because they kept doing photo realistic, deep fake Ian Home, where again I it's to me, it's it's what's funny is when he's in the scene with the other characters, it's not as bad for me as when they cut to him on a video screen like advising them, because when they ever they do that, it really feels like a cutscene for a video game, and it's it's googlish. At that point, it totally reminded me, Like, I'm not a big video gamer and so I didn't play Isolation, but even me as a non gamer, when he would show up on screens, I'm like, oh, is this like the Red Queen insident Resident Evil where she would show up on screens and be like, you're trying too hard, you must do this or something.

Just she felt he felt like an avatar for the video game coming in and telling you what needs to happen next. Gladows from Portal adjacent and you know, Father Malone, Alien Isolation is I mean, yeah, I mean I've played it. You've played it. It's fucking amazing. Like it in a lot of ways, it is the sequel you know, you know, Father Milone.

You and I I think I sent you a PlayStation over the pandemic, right, so you did, yeah, and so I and some of this is like, well, yeah, like you were able to play some of that because like those things were like things that are not It's not that they're not hard to get, but it's they're kind of ways back in terms of the release cycle of stuff. But Alien Isolation is still the best sequel to Alien that's ever come out, similarly to the way that that Ghostbusters video game that came out is the best sequel to Ghostbusters, because it's like, this is people making it that understand what the purpose of the original source material was and they're building on it in a way that doesn't feel forced and it doesn't feel hand fisted because they have plenty of time to It's so much easier to do fan service in a video game because you don't have to.

It's not that you don't have to hang a lantern on it, but you don't have to hang a lantern on it constantly because it's just there, and it's just there in a movie. When they keep coming back to it over and over and over again, it's like, Oh my god, did no one in the test screenings think that this was too much? That no one in the test, Like, I don't know who they're screening these movies for, because if they had screened this movie for you or I or anyone else who has a little bit of an issue with this AI deep PI stuff, they would have said, take this out of the movie, do something with this, do anything but this, because it's so distracting and it gets in the way of the movie doing anything interesting or different.

Because I just keep constantly being reminded of a better movie at every turn. Let me double down to my opening statement. The Ian Holme problem and the plot problems and the sort of too often reflecting the earlier better movies would have been softened had we had adults in roles here, and had we had charming actors. I like Cayley Spanney as well. I enjoy her work but she is not Ellen Ripley, and they're kind of making her Allen Ripley here, and it's a big mistake.

Uh, shouldering this movie on her is I don't know, it's it's not a good idea. But then the entire cast, other than Andy the Android, by the way, they break the cycle here. If you go through the Alien movies, they're the the the Androids have been named alphabetically. So there's Ash and then Bishop, and then Call and then David and then and now Andy. Yeah, and it's before yeah, and then you've got Rook.

Now Ash's Rook And I'm just like, is this a a chess reference here? Yeah? Rook and Bishop? Yeah? Yeah?

But why because and and and yeah? Yeah, I want to put out a conspiracy theory here. Uh. There was a contest that twenty Century Fox and a group called Angle T O n G put together back in twenty eighteen for a wartieth anniversary of Alien. So in twenty nineteen they released a series of six films that were written by fans, shot by fans, made by fans.

I believe, and yeah, I think that they probably took some of these fan ideas and made them into a full length movie. I'm looking to see if the co writer is listed on any of these, because this just feels like a big fucking fan film, just feels like, oh well, we'll pay service to everything. We'll even mix in some of this commeanant Prometheus horseshit that we have with this black oil which I saw in X Files twenty years ago. So how care you bring up X Files in this conversation. That's a much better usage of black oil than this could have ever begun to.

But that's what they fucking copied there totally. I mean, as anyone who's watched the X Files, wouldn't that happen in Prometheus? That's all I could think then. And now it's like, does anybody in this audience fucking care that they're connecting it to Prometheus? Like you know who did Ridley Scott?

And they did that for him. I guarantee you for those every Prometheus references and go see, we're connecting it all. And it's like, Okay, at least happy we can make the rest of our movie. But the problem is, Chris, as you said, that Alien Isolation video game is the best sequel to the Alien franchise that that we never got and why didn't they just make that the Alien Isolation. The plot line in that is Amanda Ripley went looking for Mom and ended up on this space station that is overrun with aliens, and you're playing as Amanda Ripley, like it's a natural.

Yeah, yeah, I don't know, because the game already exists, and I know, like is. There a rights issue where like they want to make their own shit or something like, and you know, Fee Alvarez wanted to do an original but like but then like he pulls so heavily from the fucking game, even to the point if I don't know if you noticed, Chris, but like this, anytime there's a save portion in the game, it's one of the like the the intercom things on the wall, and every time you save the game, some shit's about to go down. And he does that in the movie. He like he'll close up the fuck in intercom and then like suddenly swarm of face huggers. So he's drawing inspiration from the game.

Anyway, just make the game into the movie. I think it's because this whole thing of the Ghostbusters Afterlife and the you know, the Star Wars force awakens them at all it's like, this is the way these movies are made now, which is we got to have all this fan service nonsense that in like in the universe, Why would he say get away from her, you bitch? It makes no sense. It's it's it's this is not Deadpool and Wolverine, Like, what the fuck you can't You can't do that in this kind of movie. This movie's being played straight some movie's being played straightforward.

There's no fourth wall breaking, there's none of that. Why would he say that that hasn't even happen, and yet we're still thirty years removed from that happening because this is only twenty years after Alien, which means it's still thirty seven years before Ripley gets found because she's in space for fifty seven years. So did she say it because he said it? Like I don't fucking understand, And you know the I prefer artificial person. That line makes sense, It makes perfect sense, Like I get that entirely, because that's that makes more sense than get away from her, you bitch.

But it's like just with the Ian holme of it all and everything else, like fan service needs to have a point within the construct of the movie. Itself. Otherwise it's just out there for the fans, and it's like, well, are you sacrificing telling an interesting story just to have bullshit on screen that's already been on screen before. Yes, and that's how you get Ghostbusters. Afterlife with a CGI, Harold ramis running around like, I don't understand putting fan service before engaging storytelling, or to your point, Father Malone, engaging in creative character development and character creation, because nobody but Andy in this movie is an interesting character period.

It's a Friday, the thirteenth movie in the Alien Universe. It's a bunch of teenagers going off to the scary place and then oh no alien as. Yeah, no. I was thinking of Evil Dead and like you, the remake, which I am not a fan of. I thought that the second Evil Dead remake, however you want to put that in, which I thought was Fetti Albarez but found out that it's not.

I like that one. I thought that was actually pretty good and was like, oh, well, this is really nice and gross. So when the I mean the one character who's pregnant, that's all you need to know about her, because that's all she is, is just a pregnant person. I was like, all right, well she somehow, somehow the alien is going to get in there, and we're going to have that moment like you know Dawn of the Dead remake where the corpse baby comes out of the woman. We're going to get that somehow or like an alien baby in this case.

How are we going to do that? Because I'm just like trying to figure out what the alien life cycle and all this. That's where the black goop comes in. I'm just like, oh, okay, that's how we're going to do that. Don't put that in your system.

Okay, I won't put it right in. And then the alien life cycle, which I thought I was pretty familiar with. I guess I missed the wall vagina part. Didn't know that that was a thing. You know what.

I actually liked that. I thought that was so fucking gieger like that. Uh. And you know, just because we haven't seen one of the life cycles doesn't mean it didn't exist. So and these are like, ultimately, these are genetic clones.

There's no queen here. These have all been harvested from the genetic contents of the original alien. Big Chap, The Big Chap, The Big Chap, that's the Cane's son, the Big chap. Okay, you know, look, we got it. Movie starts with the salvage ship finding them remains in this stroma.

It's great, right, It's like John's two when they find the orca at the bottom. It's just like my favorite film that the Jurassic World franchise, Jurassic World Dominion. Wow, I'm fucking or Fallen Kingdom. I'm joking because that's how falling. That's literally how Fallen Kingdom opens.

They go to Jurassic World to get a dinosaur tooth, and then the entire movie is based off of that, like legacy sequel, box checked again, like it's not bad here, but it's it's they've done it a bunch of times. This is integral to the plot at least. Yeah, except except Ripley had escaped in the Narcissus and was so fucking far away from that thing when it exploded, and then shot the thing with the harpoon and then blasted with the engine, which meant that alien was tumbling on through space forever and ever and ever. They were never going to find that. As much as I liked seeing him and thinking like, oh, all the villains in this are going to be from that guy from the original movie.

Okay, that's kind of cool. And I did like the mirroring of aliens in that case, like a crew went out and found Ripley, but before that, a crew went out and found the alien, because that's more important. Like I like that plot wise. It also reminded me of Superman Returns the where he goes out and I think they cut this out of the movie, or maybe they didn't, where he goes out to find Krypton and sees that it is exploded. But yeah, I agree with you that alien corpse would have been so far away from the Nostrollo it doesn't make sense where it is.

I'm not going to quibble about the physics of that, because, like you say, we don't know certain things, you know, Like I'm not going to get into other than my one thing about the Wallvagita too much about that because yeah, I forgot I remember Harry Dean's standing. I think picking up the the skin of the first one in the first movie, and so we know that it sheds, we know that it grows. We never really see that middle part of its life cycle before becomes a parent. But before it becomes a real alien. And yeah, it's yes, for all intents the purposes, a male alien.

So calling it a bitch doesn't really make uphole lot of sense. And there's none of that gravitas as far as Ripley protecting Newt and having this other mother who is threatening her, and this other mother who has destroyed this entire planet of LV four twenty six, and all of these people that Ripley knows. I mean, kad, how well written is aliens that you care about? Characters like Drake and a Phone and all of these guys in that intro, whereas with this one, Yeah, bunch of dead meat teenagers who I don't know and I don't care to know, and they don't tell me anything about them. That one guy has a really heavy British accent.

There's something in the wall. Shut the fuck up? How many times have I heard that in the trailers? Now? I speaking of speaking of fan service, would you guys like like some cornbread?

Don't mind my drinky bird? I can an opening scene? No, And we're not gonna be doing this the whole time, are we? Oh? We are?

Well, here's the thing, though, it's an interesting question. How much of the fan service is him and how much of the fan service is just studio meddling? Is that a thing that we could say, like, oh, Disney wanted and home in the movie, like Disney wanted all that shit, Like I'm let me put it this way. Fetti Alvarez made and wrote with roto psygaiis the Evil Dead remake, which your mileage is going to vary clearly between the three of us. It's a better movie than this movie, and it doesn't beat you over the head with the fucking fan service like this movie does.

I wonder if some of this is just the Disney of it all, which, boy, wouldn't that be fucking fun, because I would echo Deadpool and Wolverine. That movie's problems. A lot of it comes from what I believe to be meddling of a studio that doesn't really understand what they have and never has, which is why they didn't own it up until the last couple of years, and now that they do, they're meddling. May be getting in the way of these things actually having a soul of their own, as opposed to feeling corporatey and soulless, which is kind of the way Deadpool and Wolverine felt at times, and this feels really like that. This this feels like a fan film with a massive budget.

Like you guys liked Alien, right, you like Dean Holme, you like the Newborn in Resurrection. I don't know who liked the Newborn and Resurrection the. Other thing born. I like Resurrection a lot. It's a fun movie, or you know.

I think I like. I mean, Resurrection to me is in all of the movies that we've been talking about other than Aliens. I think that's one of my favorites. I mean, it's kind of like it's kind of Aliens esque, like it's it's pretty much just another Aliens but with you know, space pirates as opposed to colonial Marines. I'm with you, Like I was being flippant about the Newborn, but the Newborn is actually like the first interesting thing they did in three movies is what it felt like, Like, I mean, Aliens is great, but Aliens sets that standard.

Alien three, Alien three is Alien three, and I don't want to draw the ire of the Alien three fan base. We know how excessive they can be with their love and hatred of people that do and don't like that movie. But don't screw up when you're talking about it being puppets rather than CG. So yeah, sorry. But the Resurrection has an interesting, weird fucking thing at the end of it, like this movie does.

It's just it was done better in Resurrection and here it's just it's like a mix of it's like mixing everything into a way. It's like going to a soda fountain and getting all the things in the cup and being like, this is gonna taste good, right, It's like, no, it's gonna be a lot. And none of this was really fine tuned and calibrated to be in the same thing together. And that's apparent when Alien and Prometheus are existing on the same screen together and one of those things definitely fucking doesn't feel like the other, that being everything from Prometheus. When they go into that lab, I was just like, oh God, here we go.

This is where the movie does the thing, right, this is where they're gonna do the thing with the Prometheus stuff. Yep, yep. It's like telegraph everything. Why don't you movie please, Well. There's nothing to telegraph because it's almost just the greatest hits of the previous Alien.

I will say this, I liked the Newborn here better than I like it from Resurrection, just because I think it was creepier here and better executed because the man in the suit in that thing, it's so poorly articulated the the Newborn in Resurrection, Like I almost wish that had been CG instead. But there are some things that I like in this movie. I like that Newborn scene here. I like the even though that character is pregnant, she follows two stories to a point where I actually thought the character was dead when when she fell that far, I went, oh, yeah, that's a that's top that she died that way in an alien movie. But uh so I like that sequence.

I like I like when whenever they show the aliens doing intelligent things, like there's a scene with where we first encountered the adult alien where with that girl where it's chasing her and they want she wants to be let in through the air lock and the android won't let it in because he can see the alien sitting there because it wants it to open, wants them to open the door, And just moments like that are great, Like I wish there had been a movie like that, a cat and mouse game with an alien like instead of you know, like I said, the greatest hits of everything that came before. I also do like the zero G acid blood sequence. That was nice. That was a nice kind of show piece that they had, and it was nice that they built it up earlier in the film and I kept thinking, Okay, that's going to come back later on, but I wasn't sure how they would have it.

So when it was with the acid blood, I was like, Okay, yeah, that works, and that's pretty nice. And the way that she uses the gun to propel herself around was was pretty cool as well. And speaking of acid blood, I like their treatment of the acid, but every each movie seems to dilute more and more that like what the what the acid will do? Like in the first film, like a drop of it like goes through three decks of their ship. They're worried it's going to breach the hull.

And then you know, in each successive things, people are getting sprayed with it and they're like, oh, I'll be okay, just wipe it off like no, and in here it's corrosive as goddamn hell. I love that aspect of it. Ye Bill Paxson gets showered in a fair amount of it in Aliens, and he's fine. But Drake, on the other hand, gets a face full of it and is debt unequivocally debt. I think you mean Hicks, sir.

Oh yeah, you know. I want to go back to the thing about the characters, because I watched Aliens last night, and that movie takes forty five minutes to get going. Okay, so good. I love it. I love the length.

And when you're watching the director's cut, it's almost an hour before those Aliens ever show up. And it's and exactly so that was the version I watched last night, the two and you know, thirty four two and three before minute version, And the movie spends so much time getting its legs underneath it to make sure that you care about everything that's about to be happening through the characters that they've introduced, be it you know, the guy loading the missiles onto the ships, to the woman who's the pilot of the little aircraft carrier thing or the little ship that goes down from the Sulaco, like all of that. They spend all the time and effort, and this movie is an hour two hours long like it, and it does nothing with any of the characters we've mentioned.

Kaylee Spanny, She's in a better movie. This is the best movie I've seen her in this year that she's been in. But that's not hard given that the last thing that we talked about, the Three of Us was it the last thing we talked about maybe two times ago with Civil War, and she was in that, and she was completely underused in that movie to the point of like, not not that she didn't need to be in it, but she didn't wasn't given much to do. And I think that's kind of the point in a lot of ways of that movie. Here.

I think she's fine, but I think this movie does have a horror movie problem, which is there are characters on screen and they're gonna die, you know that. You just don't know how many are going to be left at the end, and I think they picked the right number. I think this is a you know again, like two people, one human and one one android or artificial person. But yeah, all the other characters are completely worthless. And I'm not saying like the actors didn't do a good job.

I think the actors are fine. It's that the writing does not help any of this. There's no writing. It's not just any one thing. It's the writing, it's the performances, it's the choice to make them all fucking twenty years old.

It's just there's a lot going on there. Like I care about every member of the crew of the Nostromo. I care about every member of the crew of the Silaco, every fucking one of them. Yeah, yeah, we talk about those shares. Yeah.

Yeah. Turns on the air, turns the air off. Yeah. It's surprising how little character development is in this movie, given that this movie is two hours long, But it does just feel like. What we're given for a story is the fucking beginning of the movie solo that remember that it's the same beginning, Like we gotta get off this horrid planet where we never see the sun.

Like, wait, they're changing my credits. I have to stay another seven years. Oh woe is me? They have a ship. Leave, Yes, leave.

That was the thing I kept wondering about. I'm like, is really is the next closest planet really that far away? Is it really? What is it nine light year or nine years in a cryo chamber away? Or can you just hop, skip and a jump to someplace where you can see the sun?

And maybe there's another M class planet around here. Rabot guys. Well, you've got a spaceship on a planet though, and they can leave, and they never explain why they don't. And that whole thing of them being on this mining planet. I'm just like, man, I'd rather be watching Outland.

I really like that movie so much better than this. And yeah, I just even with the Ian Holmes stuff versus the Grand Moth tark and I was really reminded of just the unnecessary rogue one. I mean, it's funny that and Or got his own show because I was like, and Or, I barely remember that guy. He's nothing. He's got his robot companion who I find to be more charming than him.

And when they finally brought out a show of and Or, I was like, Okay, this is great. Now I finally get to know this character, even though he's kind of the least interesting character in the entire show. It's really more Stolen Scars Guard show. For me. I don't yeah, I didn't know any of those people.

I just knew Donnie Yenn because he's an actor other than Ian Holme and our main character. I don't know any of these actors. Nothing to latch onto as far as even bringing things from other movies, you know, at least with that horrific sequel to Pacific Rim, at least I got some characters that I remember. Though. They bring in John Boyega and her and I'm just like, and what's Eastwood's son's name, Scott Eastwood?

I like, these are all just zero charisma. Well, he's zero charisma. The other two are not Boyega I love, but he's not given anything to do either. Scott Eastwood is is proto Glenn Powell somehow. Glenn Powell is a much more charismatic guy.

And his dad's not Clint Eastwood, which is pretty fucked up but also kind of amusing at the same time. All the characters, I mean, I fall them alone. Again. I think we differ on what the feelings are on why they're not great, but I think the feeling, the sentiment is still the same. This has like a prequel problem with the characters, Like they just they don't want to do anything interesting with them for whatever reason, because they're not aliens.

The aliens are what you're writing this movie for, for fuck's sake, Like I get it. Like, and then the face Hugger, Like, none of us have ever gotten a chance to write that in a script that anybody's gonna do anything with. And if we did, I'd I'd be just as excited to talk about and write for the aliens than I would be for the humans. Like I'm not a fucking idiot any more than either one of you guys are. We're writing an alien movie, I'm probably gonna want to focus on the aliens.

However, that's not how this works, because that's not how this fucking franchise has really ever worked. When it's been it's that's at its best. Even in Prometheus, Numi Rapas's character is better written than all the characters in this movie. And in Prometheus, it actually does a little bit of a trick with that movie because you actually kind of care about some of the characters of that movie because they give you a little bit of time with them, and sim similarly to Covenant, I mean, it takes a while for those movies to get going. This movie, on the other hand, is a horror movie for you know, twenty somethings and their parents to go see together.

Because that's the thing. I mean, what all the articles and information I've been reading is my parents went and saw Aliens together, and so we're gonna go see this movie all of us now, And it's like cool. I'm glad that that can be a shared experience and that people's generational things that people have shared with their kids can now be a thing that we all go see an alien movie in theaters together. However, I wish there was more to this as opposed to just alien. It's alien.

It's like that's not enough, but for some people it's going to be. And I'm not saying that those people's opinions are lesser or better worse than mine. It's just my bar here with alien movies. Alien as a franchise even is probably pretty high, because this is a franchise that I have been watching since I was like thirteen, and that's not for nothing twenty one years now for y'all, it's a little bit longer than that, but like, this has been a franchise that's been part of our lives for a while. I'm sitting listening a father Malone rattle off the names of the goddamn ships here, so he's as invested as you and I are.

Mike, I know you're invested as well, And at this point it's like, you've got to do more for people like us on top of being able to make a movie for everybody, and people like us, I think at some point are just going to go. You can't just keep doing the same thing over and over again with the fan service that we've seen in all these other fan service movies, because Alien doesn't need it. Like Alien at its best was not about trotting out the old lines and having people say them knew that aren't the original actors, Like that was never a thing in this franchise. The point of this franchise is very different. Point of this franchise is kind of all over the place in terms of what movie you're watching or what source material you're seeing.

But this movie just wanted to take a horror movie and put an alien in it, which is fine. That's just not enough for me at least. Yeah. I think about the movie Prey, and I know that didn't that that didn't get a theatrical RD. No, that was just the to Hulu.

Yeah yeah, and that was supposed to be this too. This was supposed to be dumped to Hulu. And I remember with Prey, I was like, Wow, what do you like to have seen that on the big screen. I don't think I would have said that for this one unless they didn't. You know, the thing that I liked about Prey was that they had like that little nod with.

The gun at the end. You're like, oh, that's the same gun that Danny Glover had and Predator to That's pretty cool. And of course other like little hints of things, but you know, way better than the Predator where you got, oh, get to those choppers and I'm just like, oh my god, this is so embarrassing. But had they taken this idea because the First Alien is very much a horror movie with an alien and it, you know, and conquered the your type of thing or what was the terror beyond it terr beyond space or whatever it was. It's like, okay, cool, Yeah, that's great, take it, but please, if you remove the fan service, just have these guys running into another ship or like another alien rather than this particular tie in to Ripley and her story just said, it's someplace else.

And that's what the comic books, the old Dark Horse comics used to do. They had a whole new characters that they had and they were great. Those were awesome comic books. I really recommend those, and I think they could have learned something from this word. They don't have to just be so slavish to all of the old stuff and just keep giving us these nods, because for me, every time they do it just takes me out of it.

They should just adapt to those comics into a series already. Books or the fucking multitude of books that they've written all the A. You can go to half price books right now and pick up five or six Alien books for fifty cents that are better written than this movie is. And A, I get it. It's a two hundred page book and it's not a two hour movie, and all the time blah blah blah.

You know what, that's not a fucking excuse, because we have mentioned already Alien and Aliens and even Prometheus actually do some character development that's worth talking about. You can get audio books of Alien if you don't want to read them, and then got some audio dramas that are really fucking good. Yeah. Alien is a franchise that has so much extended universe material that's still canon until Disney doesn't want it to be anymore. Probably at this point, like there's so much that they could have drawn from that.

They just were like, not Alien and aliens, that's it, And like the alien base movies, like nobody has read Alien whatever the fuck X Y and Z book just rip that off, even to your point by them like isolations, you would have thought enough removed. And clearly in a lot of ways it is from the mainstream to rip that off without getting lambasted for it in every review for the movie. You know what'd be a good link between alien and aliens Allen Ripley's daughter trying to find her. Weird the thing that so I had a real problem with Alien in the idea of and this was more in the scripts that were rejected for Alien three, but it still ended up being an Alien three. This whole idea of if an alien gest states in something that's not a human, it takes on the properties of that creature, which to me just doesn't make any sense.

It's that whole idea of like if an alien embeds a baby inside of a rhino, it's going to come out with like armor plating and a horn, and like that just doesn't make sense. As far as the DNA of the alien itself, it. Kind of sells cool Kenner toys, Mike. It does, but it kind of makes sense with the black goop with the black oil, like that kind of makes sense. But where, oh, where is that mouse alien in this movie?

That's what I was waiting for. Once you see that mouse explode in that video footage, I'm waiting for that mouse alien to come out. Yeah, where was it? It was just what we got was like a cocoon kind of a thing, and then no payoff, and then and then we get another cocoon later saying if there you see a cocoon, there's something in there. It's coming for you.

Yeah. Well, and and again the Prometheus of it all, we have a direct homage to Prometheus with the pregnant woman at the end of the movie, because that's I've got to assume that's what they're referencing with her laying the alien egg, which is very similar to what happens to Numi Ripas and the third act of that movie where she has the emergency C section and she has the thing taken out of her and it's wiggling on the arm like it's just that again, like they're even the thing in this movie that kind of feels somewhat unique and original, is ultimately a poor fact simbly of a thing you've already done elsewhere two movies ago, two movies ago, even not three, not Alien, two goddamn movies ago. And how do I know this Because Ridley's Gott directed the goddamn thing and he produced the fucking movie.

Like and to your point, body, this is all. This is all If it's not Fox meddling, it's Ridley Scott going, I'm producing this, so you better have this shit in here. Oh, it absolutely is, because here's I haven't said anything about Prometheus or that other fucking Covenant, what was I fucking hate those movies, like I hate this whole what I love about the Aliens, and I will continue to ignore those movies. I love the idea that we don't know where they're from. There there's a planet of them somewhere, and they're just they are the apex predator of the universe and don't go there and all of the love Craftian kind of connotations involved with them, and instead Ridley Scott's like, no, I'm gonna do this bullshit nineteen sixties concept of space seeding, you know, like Chariots of the Gods man, Like, that's what you came up with and by the way.

You really come up with it either by you didn't come up with us all this thing you did. No, he didn't come up with any of that. He didn't come up with anything. For Airy and either he directed the. One movie, like why is he Why is he charting the course for the rest of these films, and why is he charting their mythology?

He's a fucking hired gun man. He was a fucking shoe salesman before this. Dan O'Bannon is turning over in his grave. Baby, Now Dan O'Bannon is going, where's my check? Mother?

F Yeah, that's Dane. That's on point for mister O'Bannon. But it was nice seeing his name on screen. Oh yeah, it always is. Yeah, always always is.

But at the same time, I could just sit and think to myself, like, what would he think about this movie, because like him and Ron Shoest really nailed it with that first movie, so hardcore, and then to watch this movie just kind of again succeed in what it could succeed at. But ultimately, in my mind, flail a lot of the time because some of the things that happen in this movie are flailing in a way that's like flailing upward for people, clearly because we're I would say that I might be the most positive of the three of us on the movie, but we are in a minority here of finding this movie to be not as great, because most everybody I've talked to and or seen online is like, enjoyed this movie a lot more than either of us.

Either three of us did, which is not surprising. But at the same time, I wonder the amount of experience and exposure and yearning and wanting that people who have seen these movies, even within the mainstream media and critics, are watching it and have a frame of reference for the other things outside of just I saw Aliens once and I know that that line is in Aliens. I mean this to your point, father alone, this world that was created is so deep and interesting, and it doesn't need to be like. The parts of it that are deep and interesting are not the parts that need to be explained. Those are the things that I like.

To your point, I never asked where the fuck did the alien come from? Why does anyone care? It's the whole prequelization of shit thanks to George Lucas and Friends and Indiana Jones The Last Crusade, Like, oh, how did Harrison Voord get that scar on his chin? How did he get his hat? How did he get his whip?

Like that's five minutes, five ten minutes of that movie. And that's the perfect prequel version of anything I think I've ever seen because it's connected to a movie, it's not the whole goddamn movie. And that's this entire I mean, this entire movie is just more of like where did the alien come from? It's weird that I haven't fucking cared this whole time movie that didn't really care. I mean Prometheus and Covenant.

The parts of those movies that I have enjoyed are Michael Fassbender's performance, because he's great in those movies. Like that's really not up for debate in terms of those movies. That's the quality at the center of those movies is his performance and the way he interacts with the other people. But the alien of it all in those movies is like I didn't want to know where Hannibal Lecter came from. I don't want to know Darth Vader's backstory.

I don't want to know any of this shit because it doesn't fucking matter, and for the longest time, no nobody else thought it did either. Do you like Boba Fett. I'm going to show you where Boba Fett came from. He was a little kid and his father died and he was really sad. Such a cool idea for a movie, please put.

I always loved all the mystery of the space Jockey and the eggs and was he transporting them? Like was he trying to get rid of them? Like who set up that beacon? Was it him? Who is that?

Is he an elephant? Yeah? Yeah, exactly, Like you know, it's just mystery upon mystery, and like, I'm fucking totally cool with that. How does a rook work without that thing that they give to Andy? That's a good question that they probably don't have an answer.

For space Magic. I like that whole transformation of Andy when they put that new chip in, and I like when he looks up at the sky and his eyes go white and his hands are tremmoring, and I'm just like, that's a really cool moment for me. There's some there are some good moments into this this, But otherwise, I mean, does it say, tilt out his eyeballs when it goes up. Well, reminded me. Of warning, warning, warning.

Yeah, But things like the creature design for the baby alien, like, I tend to agree with you, father Malone. That looks a little cooler than the skull faced alien that we had in Resurrection. It reminds me a lot of the aliens that were in Close Encounters of the third kind, like that last wave of them that come out that are so and spiny, and there's a silhouette where it's just like, Oh, that kind of reminds me of that. That's pretty cool. But then I'm like, oh, and it's got the engineer's face from Covenant and Prometheus.

Fuck me. Yeah. It was when the reveal happened at the end of the movie, I said, audibly along with several other people in the theaters, what the fuck? Because it was it was I disagree with y'all. It was a It was a worse design than Resurrection because it is a full CGI creature that anytime they cut they cut to it, it looks like CGI and there I'd be I will be that guy one time right now and go.

This was where practical effects would have helped because it was already low lighting anyways, guys like you're in a dark hold of a ship like this, I mean, I get it, Like you can do more with CGI than you can do practically. I appreciate it. And I know that there is a gentleman who plays the hybrid in this movie, so there is a person in a suit, but it's also a lot of it that's CGI. Well, that's the thing, Like that would have solved the fucking Ian Home problem too. It's like, you know, it's we're not We're not like misusing his image or anything.

We're using that character based on his look and you know, and the sound alike, Like I would have bought a fucking if you saw if you've ever seen any of the animatronics at Disneyland, like fucking malfunction, it's fantastic, Like they could have done a lot with that with with Anna Share or Rook Rook. As soon as Rook came on screen, I was very audibly upset. I was just like you no, just because it just looked so pad with the way that his head moves, because I understand his head's down on his chest doing the whole like Bishop from uh from Alien three thing where he's half the half there, half not. He did such a better job with Bishop with the way that they did that. And I understand that Lance Hendrickson was still a relatively young man and still alive, whereas with Ian Holme it's been gone for a few years.

But do you know what this opens up? We can now redo the hobbit with Ian Holme as Billbo baggets, this is gonna be fantastic. Christ don't put that out into the fucking universe, Mike, why would you. Are You're gonna show up on Rings of Power. Yeah, that's what I'm worried about.

Man Like, And there he is. There's Bill Bo walking around like, oh no, no, no. You know, canny to beat the band. There's uh, there's a research ship from Whalen Newtani and it is filled with the aliens. And if there's one thing whalen Utani wants more than anything in the world, it's these aliens.

And somehow it's just derelict hanging out above his mining colony. They haven't come to get it, Like there's a dynamic that they could have explored the Whalen Utania on the way kind of think something something that they needed there other than rods to power their ship to get I don't know, maybe a plot or something. I was gonna say, where was the like opposing force coming to get the aliens? Like, because that's a thing that was never really been explored in any of this. I mean, we have it a little bit at the end Alien three, not really in Resurrection because again, this kind of rips off Resurrection that it's taking place on the space station where they were fucking around with the alien d at a like.

But Resurrection does it better because Resurrection shows us where the mutant aliens are hanging out and where the mutant Sigourty Weaver clones are. In this movie, it's like it's just perfect. It's still perfect. Everything's fine. The alien got loose and killed everybody, but it still looks normal, Like we what what?

Why? Yeah, Rook should have been all about trying to figure out a way to get those aliens back to wheeling Utani. And yeah, if there's power on the ship, and you see power on quite a few times, why don't we go ahead just pilot this ship this whole romulus remiss thing or whatever, you know, he can crawl around with his arms. We see that too. Why does he try to commander at the ship and take off with some of the face huggers in tow They're going to leave him alone.

Right because they don't care, Because it's just, it's just And I don't know why they don't care. Because you have these franchises, and you have these opportunities to do something with them, and you're spending money. You spend eighty million dollars on this movie. It's not nothing. That's a significant amount of money, at least to me, at least the way I look at the world.

Only eighty million dollars a lot of money to spend, and this is the best that you can do is just kind of playing the discordant tones of Alien over and over again, just like playing it on a piano and being like, this is a new song. I like, Nona, we've heard this before. Don't try to lie to us, like, don't try to put one over on me. Because here's the other thing. At the end of this movie, the story's over, thankfully.

That's the one saving grace in all of this is I don't there what universe do we need to see anymore? With these characters? Oh? We don't. And that's good.

Right, you can do like Indoor and now do a prequel with Rain. No Andy wrong and the early Deed. God No, we want to know why Andy the android is called that, and why is she called Rain? She was found out in the Rain? Uh.

I did the whole idea of them living on this shithole planet and just being stuck in this uh you know, never ending cycle and trying to break away from this. I mean, this is stuff I can relate to as an American. I'm like, Okay, I get this whole thing. We're gonna keep moving the goalposts snia. You know, pretty soon they're gonna raise a fucking retirement age and they're gonna change this roule in that role.

And it's just like Okay, I get it, and I get this so well. But then once they make the decision like oh, there's a ship up there, we're gonna go up to the ship, it's like okay, cool, boom. Five minutes later, we're off and that's it. And they just take off, and like you said, it's like, Okay, go someplace else. Then, you know, I don't get why you're so stuck on going to this space station Okay, great if it doesn't work out.

What these cryo tubes, you know what, they got enough power for three years. Let's go someplace that's three years close. That's not what the script allowed them. I know. Now, that's a horrible person.

That's not how the script was written. Like that's yeah, someone said, let's just make this alien again. Let's just have them on a space station and have aliens running around and the scariest part of the movie being the face huggers, because that is, I mean, the most compelling part of this movie is that sequence that was in the trailer where they're in the cryo room and there are quote something in the water, and those things are the face huggers, And that is the best in this entire movie. It really is, Like it's compelling, it's different. There are some stakes, there are some components going on, because there's the android in there who's rebooting, and then there's the two other guys whose names you couldn't get me to remember even if I had tried.

And yeah, and on top of everything else, let's mention something else, something we haven't really talked about. It maybe kind of alluded to it that the characters are fodder. Are there any good death scenes in this movie, even with the usage of the way the aliens work other than is the chest burst or scene in this movie good? Is kind of the question I want to ask, because I don't think it is. I mean, they showed the entire thing in the trailer, and the only thing they didn't show in the trailer is the shot of the alien popping out of her chest, and then when you see it, it's thoroughly underwhelming in a way that I was not expecting given the guy who directed this fucking movie and wrote it is the guy who had blood blood raining from the skies like it's a fucking Slayer song in Evil Dead, Okay, And this is just like a little, just patch of the alien popping out, like what in the fuck Man?

For real? It's it's it's a waste of time because then when we have the alien doing alien things, there's not a big enough cast to see people getting fucking oviscerated anyways, And so we get a quick shot of one of the two guys getting murdered by an alien and it's like the movies rated PG. Thirteen and it doesn't even want to show you what's happening with any amount of like detail, which again not saying I need to see guys heads exploding or anything, but the movies rated are so you're clearly aware that you can do essentially whatever the fuck you want. You're not, so I just don't understand why you're not, is probably what I'm getting at. Here's how excited for the movie I was.

I avoided every trailer I sell him, I having managed to avoid ye every piece of media. So with the axe stray thing, when she first picks it up, I was like, Wow, that's cool. That's a cool piece of tech, and and didn't didn't think it was going to pay off, So that actually worked for me. But the when it when the little alien bursts out, yeah, I think Alvarez was just trying to be different than the John hurt one, and boy he existed, he succeeded. Talk about phallic, Holy the shit.

That was the most phallic first or I've ever seen in my life. I know, there's basically a foreskin out of a chest burster, but you get to see that, you get to see the blue veins. I'm just like, Wow, Okay, we're just not hiding it anymore. I like to make everything phallic. Thanks HR.

But I will say about that chess Burster scene, I like the dynamics of what was going on and with the shuttle and then like slowly crashing. In fact, one thing I really liked in the movie was all of the all of the space stuff, all of the ships and all of the it all felt heavy, like there was gravity to it all, and it all felt very realistic and very of that universe. So I think they succeeded one there and including in that sequence. The influence of Ron Cobbs still looms large in this franchise, thank god, because yeah, there, then, while they may not be kit bashing anymore with the ways that they're designing things, they're kit bashing in three D rendering. Because yeah, everything feels that's the thing about this movie, Like everything feels proper alien, like everything really does.

Like everything looks like alien, feels like alien. It's just poorly executed. But it's a beautiful movie. I mean, unfortunately, like I had. But again, that's not much of a fucking bar anymore.

Eighty million dollars produced by Disney, Like, oh, your movie doesn't look good, that's a bigger problem at this point. Because where did the money go? At least if we can see, the visual effects look pretty good, The set design looks pretty great, the production design and the costume design is great. Like, Okay, I can concede that there's a fair amount of money going into that, But I mean, again, a movie looking nice in twenty twenty four, that's a big budget studio movie. I mean, I'm sure Borders looked fine.

Clearly wasn't a good movie and execution, but I'm sure it looked fine. But again, low of low bars to cross. I will here's the other thing I like that, And this is sort of tying back into what I said earlier about showing the aliens and how intelligent they are. There's a scene where that the Android has given each of the characters new pulse rifles. These are before the pulse rifles that the colonial Marines will have fifty years from now, So now nerds have a whole new model.

They have to go three D print. But anyway, it gives them the guns and tells them don't use them because they have acid blood and they'll kill all, kill us all. And they said, why do you give them two of us? And he says, well, I think they'll think that it is a deterrent and it is so that one scene where they there's like a group of full grown aliens coming around the corner, climbing on the wall and she holds up the gun and they all pause that scene somehow that the image of them like paw and waiting, and I don't know, I thought that was really evocative, like really like uh worthy of the rest of the series of movies like that, the things with the actual adult alien in this movie, like I've knocked my socks off, it's just everything else hanging on it is is bad.

But I will say this, Chris, I think I did like this movie more than you because I will never watch Prometheus or Covenant again. I will watch this again for at least for the for what we're what we were just talking about, the production design and like like spending two hours in this world, Like I will watch it again. I mean I can't argue that. Yeah, I think the performance that Andy Gibbs is enough to possibly bring me back. And there's a few things.

I thought It was interesting that we're trying to fight aliens with cold rather than fire, which again takes me back to Alien Resurrection. With the u that little brad dwarf macheen that he's got where it sprays them with the cold stuff, and then when she tries to use again later on, it doesn't work. Okay, I thought we were going to have instead of flamethrowers, we're going to have ice throwers or you know, cryo fuel, which apparently is very cold. So I was like, all right, great, but you know, at all there are there are some interesting things in this film, but I don't think it's enough for me. It's more interesting and more enjoyable.

And I actually, for all the my complaints about not knowing these characters, when you get to Covenant, other than David, I don't know any of those people whatsoever. I'm like hard pressed to even remember. I think what doctor Manhattan was one of the scientists, and Danny McBride, and then poor James Franco just kind of gets all the scenes cut out. It's like otherwise I'm just left with the lady with the dark hair, and yeah, that's all about I remember. Poor Catherine Waterston was just in big franchise movies there for a while, and they were not good because she was also the female lead in those Fantastic Beast movies and it's like, oh, I feel so bad for you.

Sam Waterston's daughter is just getting She's like the female idriss Elbows, Like, can you be in something good that's a big budget thing as opposed to just being good in all the non big budget stuff you're in because we want to love you. Yeah, franchises, what is wrong with you? Yeah? Yeah, I'm I'm rewatching the slot slight version And just even in that shitty video quality that Ian Holmes this of it, it's just it really disturbs me. I mean, I don't tend to just focus on just how bad CG can get, but this just really hurts to watch.

Remember those Zales commercials with Humphrey Bogart, Oh God, remember that That's where this all started. Like that was like the initial onus behind this is like can we have dead people sell rings? And now it's like, can we have dead people be in movies and pay some dude like sag minimum to do the work of a real actor, because that's the thing. Daniel Betts does the voice for Ian Holmes's character because there's someone doing like an Ian Holme impersonation, right, He's great It's just sad that there's all this other stuff surrounding it because I just, yeah, I don't under would it would not it have been enough to just have the voice of Ian Holme coming out of a robot that looks different and the people that get it just be like, okay, it's like an Ian Holme thing as it was, just like it is e and home on screen, please acknowledge, like I don't want to, please stop forcing this down my throat like a fucking face hugger's too, like, don't do it right?

And had they moved on to another model, because that's the thing with Alien three, the whole thing of Bishop coming back, and it's like, oh, is this actually Bishop? No, it can't be Bishop, So who is this guy? Is this the guy that Bishop was based on? Or is this another android that look sorry, artificial person that looks like Bishop? And I kind of like that they leave it a little bit vague there, but then in this one it's like, oh no, no, they just have models and they all look alike, like, all right, so we're doing the little Picard season one thing here.

Well, and isn't I mean father Malona work me if I'm wrong that's so in Isolation, all the robots look the same, all the synthetics look the same. They're just like I was just thinking that, Actually it's like. A plastic like it's like a plastic like burn mask just over like a robot like body. It's just it's literally like the CPR dummies basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, And they're horrifying.

Yeah, fucking they're more scary that Like, here's the thing, Alien Isolation. It's a great Alien game, but the fucking robots are more horrifying than the Alien is. They kill you in two hits twice and you're dead. I think they I think they are very, very scary. But there is nothing that nothing made me more frightened of the other than the original movie of the Alien than playing that game.

You hear it coming, man, a just fucking hide and you fucking pray because it knows you're that. It's really scary. Hiding in the lockers and watching it like walking around. Yeah, man, move back in the locker too, to pull yourself back away from it. Yeah.

It's video games part form for certain things. They just are And with this it's like Alien kind of is made for that kind of story. To be interacted with in a way that is more closely tied to the person having the experience is interacting with the alien directly. And that's what Alien as a franchise kind of has always wanted, is to put you in the shoes of the people there, and by having it be just a spaceship with a small amount of people, you can make that feel like anywhere else other than space where you couldn't run away, and Alien Isolation captures that in a way that, yeah, like we've already alluded to, nothing else really ever has, and now this is the first thing that's kind of tried to even and it fails.

It really fails in terms of just being a worthwhile sequel to Alien. It just kind of ends up being a sequel to everything, not specifically Alien, which is fine, But nobody asked for that. That was a choice that was made specifically by the writers and directors and producers of the film. So, okay, here's what I'm asking for. Here are my two ideas.

If anyone from the franchise is listening, make these movies. I would like to see a movie made from the alien point of view. Hell yeah, like in a violent nature. Yeah, like I'd like to, yes, exactly, like where the Days we see how horrible we are to them, you know, like I'd like that movie. I would also like a Predator style movie.

You want to do it on a space station, put it wherever you want. I want to see one person against an alien. They're hunting each other for the entire movie, like the stuff I was talking about then. I like in the movie every time we get to see them like plotting and scheming and like being more than just the sort of beast that they I'd like to see that like throughout a movie, like setting traps and doing shit like you know, that could be really fun. Anyway, Sarah Helien comes up and opens up its mouth and the second set of Jaws is there, and the guy just goes clever girl.

I mean I was talking about this last night with Ryan from Someone's Favorite Productions, Like where does this go from here? Right? I think is ultimately like the final question to answer here the kind of big thing to think about because, like I alluded to the way this movie ends, there's no reason to return to these characters. There's nothing. There's no cliff and there's no overt cliffhanger, like at the end of Covenant, which is clearly never going to be resolved at this point, which is perfectly fine, But this movie just kind of ends and it's you know, they're not drifting out through space like alien or aliens.

It's just you know, they're going to Yuvanga or wherever the fuck they're going, and they'll get there and they'll be fine and whatever. I don't care about their story, So where does it go from here? There? My mind goes immediately too. They're just gonna make aliens again, and like, why haven't they?

Apparently they're supposed to make something called Alien Earth. They showed a preview for that, and in my theater actually wanted to ask you guys about that. So there was it was like a three or four second maybe ten at the most teaser, and it was the shot of the Earth being reflected on something. And then you kind of realize as it's moving, the thing is moving up, that it's actually the reflection of the Earth on the top of the alien's carapace, like on the top of his head, and it kind of moves up and he goes and it's Alien Earth. Sumwhere twenty twenty five, and that's a Hulu thing.

But and now they're finally taking the Aliens to Earth, which means. Is this independent end of that series that what's Noah Hawley is doing? No? That is that? That is?

That is the series? Yeah, oh okay, well you know who cares well? I mean, you know, I'm going to watch it because it's like an alien universe. But like Noah Hawley, he actually knows it's not going to be It's not going to be the Earth war that we want. It's not gonna be the Dark Horse comics.

No no, And they've been promising that since Alien three. When they first had the posters for Alien three, it said, this time it's hiding in the most terrifying place of all I don't find I've said this many times before. I don't find Sigourny Weaver's stomach to be that terrifying. I figure it was going to be Earth, and they even had like it was tied in with the poster with the really early teaser preview, and I was like, oh, this is going to be fantastic. And yeah, they've been on Earth with Alien Versus Predator and Alien one was that versus Prenator requiem at the.

Movie nobody saw because it was so. Dark and not Yeah, you're right, I went to the theater. I can't say I saw the movie correct. Yeah, it was. Oh god, that was awful.

I really like the first Alien Versus Predator and that was kind of cool that it was all isolated and kind of, you know a little bit like the thing that we're gonna do in this down in the Antarctica. I was like, oh ah, right, this is kind of nice. And that's its own that's its own fucking timeline too. By the way, that doesn't that exists separate from Alien and Predator. That is not they're not cannon either.

Alien and AVP and AVP Requiem are their own things, separate from everything on top of everything else. And I'm okay with that, ye I'm I'm really. The thing that was getting me was this whole we need to explain what Whalen and Utani are and that we have like, oh, mister Whalen's joining us, Oh, bring that box to mister Utani. I was like, I don't give a shit, guys, just get the fuck on with it. Yeah.

Yeah, I wonder why they've never done another colonial Marines thing, Like why they've never just gone down that road, like of all the things, just get a bunch of semi charismatic actors together, throw them into an Alien's esque setting and just have like the radio silence guys who did those Scream sequels and Abigail Hey, have them do it like it'll be. They know how to work and write for like an ensemble cast of people, clearly, and they could do it. And look, they actually have a sense of fun to what they do as opposed to it being just kind of grim dark and series. I'm not saying Alien Romulus was grim darkin series, but it's trying to be Alien, it's not trying to be Aliens. There's not necessarily the sense of fun that you get from Aliens, which is I think a action and fun movie in a lot of ways that almost nothing else in the franchise ever gets to because everything else is kind of doing its own thing or trying to just be a horror movie.

I think that that's where this needs to go, Like take that and just do the Aliens thing again. Why not? What's the worst that could happen? You get a entertaining action movie with semi charismatic actors or really charismatic actors fighting aliens for two hours. I mean it worked for James Cameron.

You're telling me someone hasn't fought in the last forty years to just do that again, I don't get it. I mean, I like Alien, but why do we need to redo Alien? Why not just redo Aliens? Is there not more room with that to do more? No, Like, Okay, we'll just have them shooting aliens a little bit in this movie.

That's loocative of aliens. I mean not really, but in the scheme of this movie versus Alien, yes, they have guns in this movie, they are shooting aliens that never have happens an alien. He literally goes, you know what does he say? He's like, he'll rig up some of those incinerators, which that line always made me think, like these aren't even a thing that they're ever using for anything other than like a technical purpose. It's not to defend themselves, so like.

They're in a cargo ship. They don't need weapons exactly. It's like, okay, well, I'm Aliens is such a fun movie because it's like, now the Aliens are the ones that are outmatched, until you realize that's not the case so clearly. But that's because James Cameron actually took a right instead of going left, And I want someone to do that with this franchise at this point, because it's not that the Aliens aren't scary, far from it, but the Alien has been scary in other things so successfully. I don't think anyone else can do it as well anymore clearly with something like this.

They tried and it's like, eh, sure, it's kind of scary, it's kind of entertaining, but like the original Alien will never be matched in actually being unsettling and creepy and disturbing and creating a sense of dread throughout the movie that can't be escaped because you're on a fucking space station cargo ship. However, you know whatever it is. Yeah, but this one could have gotten there had it not been saddled with all of the worst characters and all of the sort of bullshit fan service and all that kind of nonsense like I was. Since it's gotten since I wanted. To take a right turn as well.

But I don't think we need to make Aliens again, Like I want them to do something interesting that we haven't seen before, like stop fucking like echoing all of the shit from the past. We've been there already, Like, do something new. I have an idea here, What if Kaylee, Spanny and Andy there was a face hugger on board. Yeah, and let's say that they crashed on like a wood planet. And let's say that the face hugger got Kaylee spanning?

How would you feel about that? Father? And long two? Close to Aliens? Three?

I would you know what? I would ask? Everything after Aliens doesn't make any sense to me, because how does an alien get on the fucking Silaca. Magic? An egg?

Don't they show eggs like falling over like with the flames going and stuff? How did they get there? The Queen we see her tear away from her ovipositor and come running after Ripley and then gets on the ship. Where did the fucking eggs come from? I wish I knew?

I mean, yeah, I think that of all the things Ripley would do, she would make sure there's no goddamn aliens on that ship before they. Have motion trackers. They would just walk around the ship and me. Yeah, smart characters acting stupid is a great way to get your sequel to a movie rolling in the wrong direction. That's that's this movie too.

When they're trying to go through. First off, it cracks me up that we're still using the fahrenheit in space here. That's that's fantastic. Get the room up to ninety eight point six fahrenheit, walk through this thing, and then have your fucking radio on. And that doesn't immediately trigger because they're like, oh, they're attracted to sound, but really more it's the heat.

So I'm like, oh, but yet he's just basically having a conversation with the p ignant lady, the old I'm like, shut the fuck up and get out of there. Idiots. Yeah, I thought just her through this speaker would would be enough to trigger them. It would be him going like, please stop talking, stop top fucking stop stop. You know, like that scene it should have been successful in it was not for me.

The where the trek through uh through face Hugger Hollow. It was basically when they swim under the ship, you know, not not the Betty, I can't Betty was the ship that they came in on. But in Alien Resurrection, when they go underneath and they're in the cafeteria and coming up on the other side, I'm like, oh, this is kind of like that, Like we have to go through this impossible area and we don't know what's going to happen, but no, we'll fuck that up too. Look, it's gonna it's gonna check enough boxes for enough people. And oh yeah I've seen people like, oh I'm going to see it for a third time today.

I'm like, wow, Okay. If we can get a colonial man's television series, it's like maybe just a limited show. Like, you know, I'm sure those marines fun more than aliens. They seem to have a history with uh, with aliens prior to the xenomorph, you know what I mean, Like they were clearly unprepared for it, but it doesn't mean that they haven't tangled with other things. Is this going to be another bug hunt?

Yeah? And then they've got that what is it Arcturian pussy that they're after? Doesn't matter if it's Arturian. Yeah, man or woman apparently. Yeah.

Yeah, I think about that because I like, like, you've clearly alluded to an aliens in that in the Hangar seem they're like, it's another bug hunt. There might be a xenomorph. It's like these okay, so they know, like there's some awareness the term xenomorph. These guys don't just go ah when they hear it. They're kind of like a little nonplussed, it would seem so.

But again, xenomorphos. Again, that's the other thing about this franchise that immediately like when people are talking about it's like the xenomorph actually is not the alien. That's just that's just the name that they're giving broadly to aliens in this series in general, Like does xenomorph is not actually the name of the alien at all? It never has been. That's like, I think the one time it's used in the entire original four movies is in Aliens when they say xenomorph, because I guess James CAMRA's like, we have to say zeno morph for whatever reason.

But xenomorph is not the name of the alien. That's never been actually the name. That's just what they're talking about in that scene. But all aliens broadly in the Alien Universe are xenomorphs because it's. A that's because the alien was really really selfish and he said, I'll just take that funny that's mine.

Now if you refer to an alien, you're talking about me, And you know what, He's right, Well. It's that whole thing you know, baby Yoda is not actually a Yoda. Yoda is something, but we don't know what he is, and so that's not. A baby Yoda. Come on, guys, it really makes me mad.

Come on, just call him Grogu. Don't dead name Brogu. Wow here, I am nepicking. I just feel like such an asshole. Hey, I I hope we get more alien stuff.

We clearly are, but maybe not this maybe not alien again, right, I'm not. I just Predator has had, like all these movies have had so many missteps at this point, like we have. We haven't mentioned the one franchise that this does get compared to, and I think now it's kind of broken away from being compared to it. But there was a time where this franchise was compared to Terminator in the same breath, and where like. Dominator has fought aliens in the comics.

Yeah, they sure have, and I believe at one point the Terminator and the Alien and the Predator squared off with each other. But I mean, are you saying one is better than another? What are you saying one franchise is better? No, I'm saying that I think that Alien Is has broken free from the problems that Terminator now has more than ever. But I don't think that that's.

Yeah, it's broken free maybe a couple of degrees, but I still think they're they're still spinning in gravity about to slam into the same plan. I think Terminator is just a lot further along with how bad everything has been since Terminator two, and there are how many Terminator movies since, Like you said it yourself, father, I'm like, since Aliens, none of this really has mattered in any substantive way to the point where they retcon the beginning of Alien three. I don't know if you guys know about that, but in the Alien Colonial Marines game, which is Cannon, yeah, Hicks is still alive. Oh yeah, yeah, like that's it, Like yeah, of course the. Comic books hit Hicks and Newton are still alive.

Yeah yeah, it's like, oh, you mean the characters from Aliens, the second best movie in this franchise, they didn't deserve to die off screen? Really, hmmm hmm. Yeah, that is all such Hill and Guyler stuff. I mean, oh, Walter Hill, Walter Hill. I love a lot of his work, but him and Aliens do not go together well.

Like every while I was doing my research on Alien three. Every bad decision was coming right from those two. Guyler is such a fucking dick, and he he tried so hard to make make sure Dan O'Bannon didn't get a fucking credit. And every time I see him on those documentaries that I watch every now and then about this franchise, it makes me so angry that they gave him any amount of screen time and he could just sit there and talk about this franchise like he has anything to do with it other than being a fucking parasitic fish on the side of a shark or whale, just hanging on while everybody else is going for a ride, because yeah, I'm with you. So much of this is just attributed to idiots who have no idea what they're doing, but they were successful in other avenues, so they get to they get to say, they have their say, and it's like, fuck this shit.

Come on. Look, there were a lot of contributors to that first Alien movie and what made it successful and to their credit, and I think it's Walter Hill more than Dave Geiler. You know, he made it more. Working class made it. They're like basically space sharkers and like give me my shares, like, let's talk about the bonus situation like that came from them, and I appreciate that.

But the rest of it's fucking obada, except for the chest burster. That's wrong, choose it and so like you know, but then, like you know, they the next movie is a singular vision because Cameron writes and directs it, and then everything after that is just stumbling and falling down because nobody has shown up and going and gone, here's what the movie needs to be. And then and them said them saying, okay, go ahead and do that. It's all by committee now. So the committee has spoken, and I guess they wanted fan service until there's nothing else.

I don't mind. Read if she don't like the combred either. No me either, none of us. Two God that that that Dipper that Dipper bird. Guys, I'm glad I saw it again in this in this series.

I was wondering where it was this whole time. I think it's worth the watch. I don't think you should go out to theaters and see it, but you know, it's it's no worse than a couple of the other alien movies of what's been passing for movies. In my estimation of Late Hey. I would say, you know, when it shows up on Hulu, go ahead and watch it the way that it was intended to be watched.

That's just horrible. We watch it dumped on Hulu where it deserved to be. Yeah, I'm in agreement with y'all. I think if this is something you're really passionate and motivated about, if you're a fan of the Alien franchise, I think it might. I don't know.

I think you're gonna be fifty to fifty you might either be able to overlook some of the stuff and really appreciate it. Because I have close friends that are big fans of the franchise that really enjoyed it, And then there's people like ourselves who are equally as big fans of the franchise that did not enjoy it because we wanted It's not that we wanted something different, it's that the movie should have known better than to do some of the things that just don't need to be trotted out again at this point in the at this point in the history of the franchise, because we've had It's not like Ghostbusters, where there's thirty years between the movies like there was an Alien movie that came out five years ago, Like why are we doing sequel legacy sequel baiting and fan service shit when Alien movies have actually been coming out, Like, it doesn't make any sense.

This is a sequel to Alien, is what this wants to be, and that's what it is, and in a lot of ways, it being a legacy sequel to Alien is the big overriding problem with this movie. If it had not been in a Alien legacy sequel, I think we would have enjoyed this movie a lot more because it would have been giving itself a lot more room to do interesting things with And instead it just wants to be an Alien sequel, which is fine. I just you don't want that. I think what we got here. I think you're right, both of you about the sort of the studio meddling.

The more I think about it now, I think it somewhere in between dealing with a studio that really wants a hard reboot of this series and wants to bring back all the fans because they're trying to put distance between them and the fucking previous two Ridley Scott movies, like you have them on one side and on the other side, you have Ridley Scott, so like, how do you satisfy both those matters? Stairs and like in that line, this is a this is a tremendous success. But I would like to have seen what Fede Alvais would have done without any fealty to either side. Just take the characters, take or take the alien, and then do whatever the hell you want with it. I want to see that movie very very much.

That's called twenty fourteen's Evil Dead. It really is, like the amount of fan service in that movie is negligible at best. There's an ecronomicon and that's about it, and there's a cabin in the woods and that's about it. Like and don't forget the yeah, the post credit sequence. Right also that but to be fair, it had a post credit sequence at.

Least, that was the only part of the movie I enjoyed. With ash at the end. You mean yeah, I mean. Oh yeah, sorry, I'm not a big fan of that movie. I mean, I get it, I understand.

I mean the original Evil Dead is see I love it. I'm with you, I like, I'm with Fatim alone. I like it a lot. But I can understand where someone like yourself Mike, who's a fan of the franchise as a whole, similarly to this, like either you're either gonna like it or you're not. There's not gonna be a lot of middle ground there.

And I am with Father Malone. I like twenty fourteen's Evil Dead, but it is the right way to do a legacy sequel without any of the fan baiting and nostalgic bullshit, because again, like they didn't have they didn't have Bruce Campbell walk in stage right and be like, hey, everybody, it's me. I'm ash rememberly Oh no, I mean, and then that's the right way to do it. But that movie came out. I was up at the very end.

It's just like out of my way. I've handled these deadites before. Yeah, just like Ghostbusters After Life, they just show up in the last frame of the movie to save the day. Great, I'm good. Well, I want to thank my co host on this episode this week where we are talking about alien rhyme milss So, mister Christashu, please tell us what are you up to these days, sir?

I am doing audio diversions over weirdingwaymedia dot com. What the culture cast is and it's tenth year. It's been a hell of a year for me personally, and I haven't been able to uphold my end of the bargain in terms of posting all the time. But that's okay. The sometimes sometimes life happens.

But for the most part, Yeah, weirding Way Media is where you can find everything that I work on, other than one place, which is over at Patreon, where you can find ranking on Bond at the ten dollars level on Mike's Patreon. In mine, which is once a month, we talk about James Bond movies and Father Malone. You're coming up on an episode here pretty quick. About two episodes from now, we're going to be talking about Live and Let Die. So if that gives you an idea as to where we are on the Bond franchise run, that'll give you an idea of what you can expect when you go on over to our respective patreons.

So what about you, Father Malone? What can people find and what can they find it? Where can they find it? Well, thank y'all, it's Weirdingwaymedia dot com. Check out Midnight Viewing.

That's my show over there. That is a twice a week show. Mondays is Father Malone's weekly round Up, where I do current and streaming titles and every Friday alternates between the horror Anthology podcast, which I do with these two gentlemen. Right now, we're looking at Tales from the dark Side. In fact that this Friday we're starting off season two of Tales from the dark Side.

And the other show is Anthology's Attack, which I do with co host Antonio Lapour, where we look at anthologies of every variety. We just did pulp fiction and I actually don't know what we're doing next, but anyway, you can find us there find Midnight Viewing. Oh and go to if you go to patreon dot com slash follow them alone, you can subscribe or support me or whatever you want to do. The Madman that has Falling Alone podcasting twice a week now, Holy fuck bor what? Wow?

Yeah? You know, I thought I was busy, but apparently not. Apparently you're you're the one throwing down. The gauntlet now, yeah, God, good lord, dude. Twice a week.

It's a bit much. It's a bit much, but. Kudos to you for making it work. I'm very tired. I want to thank everybody for listening.

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We've got to thank you everybody for listening, and Goodbye,