Alien Romulus (2024)

Alien Romulus (2024)

7/10

Starring          

Cailee Spaeny

David Jonsson

Archie Renaux

Isabela Merced

Directed by Fede Álvarez

 

Alien Romulus is a good film, I tell you. It has been a while since I have seen a good film like this, and it carries its own weight of twist and turns, and it does homage to the franchise. There are ribcage bursting out things. Stabbing with the Alien tail, people running from a monster so huge that you wonder why not just give up. The movie plot is so dark it is amazing, and it is a great job done by director and writer Fede Álvarez.

It is a good thing to see what modern day graphics can do with these Alien creatures, and it is also amazing to see a familiar face. The moment I saw the late Iam Holm, I was like see what CGI can do. It was a nice work done, since we cannot get Sigourney Weaver’s character Ripley back into the franchise, thanks to the way the franchise has gone with her character.

This movie also takes place in space in 2142, and it follows the events of the first movie Alien (1979) the movie plot takes place between Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986).

After the events of the first movie, the humans took the remains of the Alien to a secret base to go work and see how they can merge the Alien DNA with that of humans and create a better evolved human race. Now how that played out, is something you will have to see, but this was a subplot in the movie that did not take hold until half-way in. So, what led to the Alien mounting another assault on the human race?

While they were doing their experiment in space, the Alien got out and damaged the whole space station. The whole thing was abandoned there in space.

Then comes Rain, an orphan miner who is trying to do enough time mining so she can finally leave the mining planet and go to a planet Yvaga where only humans live with the hope of a better life. Rain lives with her adoptive brother Andy, who is a cyborg with some broken motor functions, reprogrammed to protect Rain by her late father. When Rain was unable to leave the planet, her ex-boyfriend called her for a one-time job in space. The reason she was called is that they need Andy to help them get into the abandoned space station and steal the cryostasis chambers that will allow them to escape to the planet Yvaga. This was supposed to be a get in, get the chambers and get out, but as you know how these things go.

They got in, got the oxygen working, and they mistakenly got the heating on and the frozen cloned facehuggers got lose and well, as you can expect things did not go as planned from then on.

Enjoyed the movie more than I expected to.

Transformers One (2024)

Transformers One (2024)

4/10

Starring          

Chris Hemsworth

Brian Tyree Henry

Scarlett Johansson

Keegan-Michael Key

 

Directed by Josh Cooley

 

I have to say this movie was underwhelming. I had some idea at the back of my mind that I was going to like it, since it was now an animation and there is very little you cannot achieve when you are doing animation, but I was in the end disappointed. The main problem is how the story develops. I am not going to lie and say that I am fully into the Transformer franchise stories and understand many of the origin tales. This is the first time I am seeing this particular origin story of the hate between Optimus Prime and Megatron, when I naturally believe that the hate was not personal it was just you are an Autobot and I am a Decepticon. The change from friends to enemies came about from a betrayal that has nothing to do with both, and I felt the movie could have done better with that plot.

I did not enjoy the graphics at all, and I felt the plot was weak and will not help the franchise win more viewers. That said, the voice acting was good in the movie, but that was it.

The plot is about two friends working in the mines of Cybertron. Cybertron is the home of the transformers, who can transform into vehicles. But these two friends ever since they came online (which signifies birth in their world) were without transformation cogs. In fact, it turns out many come online without these cogs and are made to work in the mines of Cybertron, mining Energon for their planet.

These two friends Orion Pax and D-16 are mine workers, and Pax always sees them being more and does everything he can to be more than just a mine worker, especially obsessed with finding the Matrix of Leadership, but without cogs there is little to no way that can happen. The leader of Cybertron is a Prime called Sentinel, Sentinel is the only surviving Prime left in Cybertron after the others were killed by the alien invaders. Sentinel goes to the surface of their planet to fight off the alien invaders and to look for the Matrix of Leadership, something he has been doing for some time but never achieving.

Pax pulled one of his stunts and got he and D-16 noticed by everyone. This caused a moral boast of other mine transformers that they can be more. This did not go well with their mine leader Darkwing, the reason for this will be best if you watch the animation yourself if you are interested.

Darkwing reassigned them to garbage disposal, wanting them to be there forever, it was there they met B-127. But Pax discovers a message from one of the dead Primes, and he convinced D-16 and B-127 to follow him to the surface to find the message’s origin. There is where they find another Prime, who tells them that they were all supposed to have cogs, and no transformer comes online without one. Now they know there is more going on in Cybertron that is being kept from them. We can see from here that Orion Pax will become Optimus Prime, and D-16 will become Megatron.

As I said, I did not feel this animation as much as I should, and that is why I am not surprised that it did not do well in the box office and has some average ratings.