Alien: Romulus (R)
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This is the seventh film in the "Alien" franchise, though I've labeled my review as "alien6" because it's only the sixth movie to have "Alien" in the title. It came out in 2024, and I first saw it in 2025. I was kind of hoping to like it slightly less than I did the original, because I feel like the original deserves to be at least my second most liked movie in the franchise (my favorite is the second). But while I do really like the first movie, I've never liked it quite as much as some people do. And I actually ended up liking this movie maybe just a little bit more (though I've still given it the same rating as I did the original). For most of the movie, I thought I'd end up rating it just three smileys, but by the end I was considering four. I ultimately dialed that back to three and a half. In any event, I thought it was a pretty good movie. I especially liked the scene with the zero-G acid blood floating around, which the heroine had to try to get past without touching it. And I liked the new horrific creature that emerged toward the end of the film, though I won't spoil the nature of that. (It's something that maybe was done in a previous film, but not one that I find memorable at all.) Also I liked some of the movie's background music, which kind of reminded me of 2001: A Space Odyssey. And there were plenty of other things to like throughout the film.

We don't always get a specific year for when these movies take place, but this one was set in 2142, which is somewhere between the first and second movies. A Weyland-Yutani ship obtains a large cocoon from the wreckage of the Nostromo (which was destroyed in the first movie). It is taken to a space station to be studied. Months later, on a mining colony, a woman named Rain Carradine has completed her contract as a miner, and plans to leave the planet for a better colony, called Yvaga III. Unfortunately, the company extends her contract, so she'll be forced to keep working there for several more years. (One gets the impression they'll likely keep doing this so that none of the miners will ever be allowed to leave, which effectively makes them slaves.) Then, a group of friends approach her with a plan to escape. They include Rain's ex-boyfriend, Tyler; his sister, Kay (Isabela Merced); their cousin, Bjorn; and his adopted sister, Navarro. They actually just need Rain so they can use her "brother", a defective Synethetic named Andy. They had discovered an abandoned ship in orbit of their planet, from which they hoped to obtain cryostasis pods they could use to make the journey to Yvaga. Somehow they steal another ship to get off the planet. (I have no idea how they accomplished that with no one trying to stop them. If it was explained, I missed it.) When they get into space, they find that the abandoned ship is actually a space station (the same one that the cocoon had been taken to), which is divided into two sections, Romulus and Remus. They have a limited amount of time to obtain the pods, because the station's orbit is decaying, and will soon crash into the planet's rings and be destroyed. And of course, things don't go quite as planned.

The station's inhabitants had all been killed by a Xenomorph, but not before they had reverse-engineered a ton of Facehuggers, which emerge from their cocoons when Rain and her friends show up. They eventually have to deal with a bunch of Xenomorphs, so of course not everyone survives. At one point, they find the top half of a seemingly dead Synthetic named Rook, and Rain takes a disc from a module in his head to put into Andy's module, thereby granting him access to the station's doors and computer systems, and whatnot. It also seemingly fixes what was wrong with him, so he becomes much more erudite and knowledgeable than he had been. But Rook wakes up, and seems sort of helpful at first, but ultimately his loyalty is to the station's mission. And having his disc in Andy's head gives Andy a new directive to complete the mission, as well. And that was to study a fluid extracted from Facehuggers that could potentially help humans evolve so that they would be more suited to living on planets other than Earth. This fluid must be delivered to Weyland-Yutani at all costs, and if Rain and her friends don't do that, Rook (and Andy) won't let them escape. (Of course, it's definitely not something that the company should have, for a reason that's made clear near the end of the movie.)

Well, I feel like that's more than enough details of the plot for me to describe. I really liked Andy; both of his personalities (with and without Rook's disc) were very well done. I thought it was a good story, and a welcome addition to the franchise's mythology. It was reasonably scary, as these movies always are, with a fair amount of action (though not as overly action-heavy as some movies in the franchise). It's not ideal that they used CGI to make Rook look like Ash, from the first movie. That seemed unnecessary, but it didn't ruin anything for me. And I guess that's all I can think to tell you.