Alien: Romulus (2024) review

Unwilling to spend more years slaving for the Jackson's Star Mining Colony, Rain (Cailee Spaeny) along with her "artificial human" friend Andy (David Jonsson) accompany a team consisting of Rain's ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux), his pregnant sister Kay (Isabela Merced), Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu) and try to board an unoccupied research station in order to journey to the extremely distant planet Yvaga, but don't have enough cryofuel to fly there and then have to contend with those loveable "facehuggers."  The sets and effects are very good and the "final boss" - a lanky human-xenomorph hybrid played by Robert Bobroczkyi (a former basketball player who's well over seven feet tall) - is impressively gruesome, yet it's a fundamentally unimaginative popcorn movie that shamelessly reuses all of its "ideas" from previous entries in the series in the laziest way imaginable and even goes so far as to "resurrect" the late Ian Holm (from the first Alien) to play mangled science officer Rook.  A sizeable portion of the dialogue consists of the characters bullying Andy for being a "synthetic" ... and the rest is a copy-and-paste job that cost $80 million (which it did make back at the box office).  They'll continue to pump out follow-ups to this, but the proverbial well is dry and partially melted by acid (and not the trippy kind, either).