EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: CAR CHAT! Alien: Romulus, York, America in the 80s, and review scores
Added 2024-09-03 07:54:00 +0000 UTCMorning all. Happy Tuesday.
Loads of bits are at various stages of rendering and uploading. On the way this week are the brand new main vid, the Patreon car chat above, and a chunky Writer’s Club video. We’ve also got lots of little bits and pieces from our couple of days away that I’ll be able to share as outtakes or behind-the-scenes.
By design, the new main Digi video is shorter than most that we’ve done. We’re continuing to refine. While we love doing hour-long epics, we know they’re a big commitment for potential viewers, and potentially off-putting. So, we're aiming for a balance.
However, for some reason, this new video – despite being a relatively brief 22 minutes – took longer to edit than some of our bigger ones. There are lots of moving parts to it, and because I was editing for pace and tone – it’s generally a LOT lighter – it meant a bit of extra work. Weird that.
Anyway. I'll shut up before Sanja tells me I'm being boring. Watch the vid. It's not boring (I was banned from being boring).
Comments
Lovely update you two, love rhe car blogs, but laughed when you stopped at Peterborough services, I grew up about 5 miles up the A605 towards Oundle and remember when it was built, or how we used to love a maccy-d back in the day, its a nice little services. 😍 Right back to Alien Romulus, I loved it for pure nostalgia, I've recently binged watched on Disney+, all the Alien, Predator, AvP and prometheus and I have to admit, there's no new story line, and it's got elements of the original movies, but I absolutely loved it. My other half on the hand, hated it! 🤣 Have a cracking week x 😊
Katie Rootham
2024-09-03 21:33:16 +0000 UTCI totally get where you're coming from, but for me the writing - at least in terms of characterisation - was on a level with the first Alien. That barely has any character development at all. Ripley doesn't even get an arc or backstory as such until Aliens (even then, the backstory is put into the Special Edition). I know what you mean about that thing at the end though. I thought it looked dumb!
Paul Rose (Mr Biffo)
2024-09-03 18:24:20 +0000 UTCI was less impressed with Alien: Romulus. I found it to be really disappointing, and more than a little frustrating. SPOILER-FILLED RAMBLE INCOMING! I thought the world building in the first 20 minutes was great. I would've been happy to watch an entire film set in the colony. They absolutely nailed the aesthetics and visuals too. Direction was a bit pedestrian, but it all looked really nice, and I loved that there was such a heavy reliance on old school practical effects. However, I thought the writing was terrible. Characters were poorly developed and the structure just felt too contrived, like a series of video game levels. Some sequences, and even the whole setup of the film, also didn't make much logical sense. For me, Andy, played brilliantly by David Jonsson, was by far the best thing in it, though even he was underserved by the script. I would much prefer to have seen him be the hero of the film - that would also have made a nice counterpoint to David in Prometheus and Covenant. And speaking of androids, the badly realised Ian Holm didn't need to be in this film at all. A fleeting cameo may have just about been acceptable, but Rook is essentially the third or fourth most prominent character in the film, and he's given way too much exposition. It could've been any random android. In fact, it would've been way more interesting to have had him be the same model as Andy, essentially giving Jonsson three roles to play. I wasn't too keen on the alien offspring at the end. The make-up was cool (amazingly, the creature was played by a 7'7" basketball player in full body prosthetics!), but the design was awful. Giger would have laughed, I'm sure, and would've produced something far more.... alien. There were just too many references, call-backs and member-berries in the film for me. It's so in love with what came before that it fails to stand on its own. It came across like Alien Greatest Hits played by a cover band of fans playing with their toys. Say what you like about Alien 3, Alien Resurrection, Prometheus, and Covenant, but they at least have their own voices. Romulus didn't, it just felt like an AI created homogenous lump of what had come before. It's the film equivalent of the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme. Don't get me wrong, I found some of it entertaining, and I think I probably would've enjoyed it more if I weren't such a huge fan of the original films, but I just felt it was a disappointment. Could've been a great little standalone Alien story, but it seemed like the studio wanted to connect it to everything else, whether that made sense or not. It will be interesting to see what the forthcoming Alien: Earth TV show will be like. My expectations will be very low.
Simon Lee Tranter
2024-09-03 17:43:19 +0000 UTC
