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Episode #780: Alien: Romulus (Patreon)

Published:
2025-01-21 05:00:06
Edited:
2025-08-21 18:46:01
Imported:
2026-06
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“One fella is just hollowed out!” - Chris on xeno aftermath gore

On this week’s episode, we’re taking the show back to Franchise Town as we chat about the solid-ish sci-fi sequel/prequel/in-between-quel, Alien: Romulus! How incredible are all the ship and planetary designs in this film? Should they have kept the entire story on the mining colony and had the xenos just chasing them down there? How great is David Jonsson in this film, portraying both Andy and Upgraded Andy? Is Bjorn the most annoying character in the entire franchise? And yeah, this Ian Holm decision is truly repugnant! PLUS: Lotta Alien: Resurrection in here, folks!

Alien: Romulus stars Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, Aileen Wu, and Robert Bobroczkyi as Offspring; directed by Fede Álvarez.We hope you are enjoying Ad-Free WHM! Thanks so much for being the kick-ass Patreon subscriber that you are—your support keeps the lights on around the old clubhouse and allows us to continue doing these shows! We know you have a lot of options for podcast enjoyment and we're stoked you chose to spend some time with us!

Don’t forget to snag your tickets to our first worldwide digital event of the year when we talk about Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire LIVE on Thursday, January 30 at 9pm/et! Be sure you bundle in your After Party Q&A ticket as well— those After Party tickets are FREE for Patreon subscribers at the $8 level and up, btw. Can’t make it live? No problemo! The replay will be available for 14 days after broadcast!

Tickets are on sale now for our three-night residency during the Oxford Comedy Festival! We’ll be doing six shows over three nights from July 18 through 20, doing shows like WHM, W❤️M, The Nexus, The Gleep Glossary, and Animation Damnation! Tickets are going fast, so friends over there, snag your tix!

Throughout 2025, we’ll be donating 100% of our earnings from our merch shop to the Center for Reproductive Rights. So head over and check out all these masterful designs and see what tickles your fancy! Shirts? Phone cases? Canvas prints? We got all that and more! Check it out and kick in for a good cause!

Original cover art by Felipe Sobreiro.

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Comments

Exambolor

I was literally 20 seconds in and I was still amazed 20th Century Studios still do the spooky alternate logos lol

Daimon

Funny enough there was an actual VHS made for the movie though I’m not sure if ads were included

Josh

A glorious return of "The Schiffening"!

Kennieth Miles

Me screaming Aaliyah! For the 5 bonus points

Scmods

I agree with a lot of what the guys are saying. Lots of this movie is really great. Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson are both fantastic. A lot of the production design and the general look of the film are really engaging. The way Alvarez stages and paces a lot of it is super effective too. Guy has the stuff. But that fucking Ian Holm cartoon just kills it stone dead for me. Leaving aside the morbidity of puppeteering a corpse, the question is why? It being Ash serves NO story function and is never even remarked upon. It serves no purpose beyond people in the cinema going "oh it's Ian Holm isn't he dead?". It's a bad decision made for seemingly no reason. The use of the character is terrible too. He's just spouting video game esque dialogue like "have you collected the formula yet? I can't open the door until you collect the formula". It's just such a nothing vacuum of a character made insufferable by the way they chose to execute it. So much of other parts of the film feeling like a fan film esque mash up of all the other Alien films really dragged it down for me as well. It's a really weird movie where I really, really liked large parts of it but the negatives just drag it down so much that I never want to see it again.

profondo robbo

A weird detail that didn't get explicitly mentioned in the movie but which Alvarez confirmed in an interview is that Bjorn is the father of Kay's baby despite the fact that they are cousins. Feels like the kind of thing a bong-ripping EXTREME screenwriter would concoct.

profondo robbo

Feels a bit cheap to just recycle the logo gag from Alien 3, though.

Frank Grimes

That alien's face haunts my dreams

Comrade Trash Panda

You take out the marionette corpse and ALL references to previous Alien films and this becomes a really great movie

DMAC

I could be a CGI Ian Holm, MARK!!!

Boston Roberts

Replacing Ian Holm with one or more Andy models would've been a better story choice. At least there's a connection to the protagonists there

MarkNM

If not Andy, Martin Freeman.

MarkNM

Alien: Romulus almost exactly follows the formula of a Disney theme park experience. You have the world building queue areas where generic audience surrogates are rocketed into a fast-paced recreation of the franchise's greatest hits. A Facehugger set piece!! Multiple Xenomorph set pieces! The guns from Aliens! The stuff from Prometheus! A Big Chap puppet on display! An animatronic of an actor from the first movie! It's a fun enough ride, with lots of TLC put into the effects by people who love the franchise, but it's very much a ride. Get in, get out, maybe come back, maybe forget it entirely.

MarkNM

Huh?!?

Paul Deehan

Agree with all the guys points (except Cabin feeling the colony intro doesn't do enough) but in spite of the many problems it really works for me, feels part of the world of the trilogy rather than everything else that followed. (Not a Prometheus/ Covenant fan but I like how it linked them in)

Josh

This movie has a few issues, but as a worst of 2024 I cannot disagree more. I enjoyed this movie. Better than Prometheus and Covenant IMO.

MarkNM

According to the one review I saw, it went straight to the movie, and was letterboxed.

Smaug

I had a good time with Romulus, and I agree with all of the flaws pointed out here, minus most of Cabin's gripes about seeing the inside of a mine for...reasons. I just can't agree with the love for Covenant that gets tossed around every time an Alien movie is discussed on the show though . Romulus has a debilitating case of CGI Holm, Covenant has a crippling case of Fassbender pretentiously jerking off over a Philosophy 102 textbook for 2 hours. It's OK to like a movie, Covenant just has every single problem the show complains about with prequel movies. Feels a bit like yall give it a pass because it;s a Ridley entry in the franchise

Z

Man, whomever uploaded that video showing how deepfake technology "improved" the de-aging in The Irishman really opened up a can of worms...now you get wretched stuff like this. And that Irishman deepfake isn't even good when you give it another glance! Short version: flawed CGI will always be better than AI because you can always tell the former was done by humans.

DRKITTENPHD

I liked Prometheus more. I thought Prometheus was unique and pushed in interesting directions. But I also liked this movie, albeit I’m a bit numb to all the callbacks to past movies. So many movies nowadays are callbacks. Even if it’s good, it’s hard for me to enjoy it. At least Prometheus was different.

allegedlycool

I have a theory about Ian Holm deep fake in this movie: this is another test to see how tolerant audiences are of fully digital human characters. They keep tinkering and tring different ways to do it. Like with BOBF and the digital Luke. It's all leading to something expensive and borderline unwatchable. I'm bracing myself for the SW movie in 2030 that has a fully digital younger Luke & Han.

Matthew Mariner

I really want to see this proposed "Weyland-Yutani uses aliems as strike breakers" movie.

Robin Fry

Is there an upper age limit on being a disgusting shit boy? Because Bjorn at least was one once if he isn’t still. He does sound like The Streets (Mike Skinner). I think it’s because they’re both guys from the midlands of the UK desperately trying to sound like they’re from London for some reason.

Stewart Moncure

I can’t remember who said it about the final alien but it was called “the undrafted center from Serbia that’s totally gonna turn things around for the Pistons next season”. Otherwise, enjoyable movie.

We Hate Movies

Great question on age limits for DSBs! We'll have to debate internally and see where we land! - Andrew

Voror

Good episode. I personally liked this one for the most part with the major issues being the Ian Holm recreation and that one particular, completely out of place one liner (seriously why wasn't it a dad joke to fit with Andy's whole thing?!) Still it is probably lower on my list. I do think all the production design is great and wish the actual story was a bit better to match it. If anything this makes me want an episode from you guys on Covenant because I admit it's weird to hear so much praise for that one when I put it around the same level as this one if maybe a bit higher since it at least doesn't do any of that nonsense with resurrecting the dead.

We Hate Movies

I dunno, maybe we just like Covenant for what we perceive are enough positive merits, and not just because it has Ridley Scott's name on it? You clearly don't like Fassbender in the movie. We do. Maybe that's the sticking point? Who knows. Either way, it's pretty reductive and unfair to say we like it solely because Rid's name is on it, if only because we dislike plenty of Rid's movies, so I don't really agree with your police work there, Lou. - Andrew

We Hate Movies

Keep in mind, we explained at the top of the month that this isn't really a Worst of 2024 month, it's just a month filled with movies from last year we wanted to talk about. - Andrew

Paul DeCoursey-Clark

Jesus this movie. I guess I'm with Eric. This movie is almost good ... but isn't. For me it might as well have been "Callback! The movie." Everything in it was in previous movies, but better in those. I'm not a Prometheus fan exactly, but at least that movie was a swing.

Paul DeCoursey-Clark

Take out all references to previous movies and this become a really great 22 minute short film!

Adam Lewis

So boring that I almost left the theater before all the deaths.

Jamie

Dunno if I've ever said this, but Cabin is 100% correct. The world building got me so excited, and as soon as I got a good glimpse, the entire movie hopped into a ship and flew to Planet Forced Nostalgia.

RJ Cunningham

The real reason they would not make Cabin captain of the ship is due to being unable to give a cogent answer to the question, “wait, your favorite movie involves a horse doing what to a man?”

Lar

I cannot stress how deeply I want “Beekeeper 2: AI boogaloo” now. My friends and I loved this movie but absolutely hated the digital corpse of Ian Holm being trotted out. I agree, just get Fassbender, who cares? I liked how gory this one was (the only thing I liked about Covenant as well). We spent the entire last part of the movie just cringing soooo hard at how creepy it was (not necessarily in a good way)

Lar

Sadly that’s where we are now. Ghostbusters, marvel, Star Wars, Star Trek, even “original” shows like stranger things are just “let’s mash all the stuff we liked growing up together”

Josh

I completely understand where you’re coming from. I don’t dislike Prometheus. I kinda just don’t enjoy backstory movies as much when I didn’t need to know how something came to be. I think if the Ian Holm recall was removed and just a random synthetic this would have been better received

Lar

Prayer circle we get Alien Covenant for the Spooktacular this year!

Tala Hobballah

"Both AvP movies are better" Speak your truth Cabin there are dozens of us! Also Martin Freeman was created in a lab specifically for young Ian Holm characters.

Tala Hobballah

I really wish the Ian Holm bot was another David Johnsson bot. That way maybe we could understand why she would leave her injured pregnant friend for her iPhone.

Smaug

That's fair. It's OK to like a movie. It's hard to assess a like or a dislike of a movie in a less than holistic manner. I might complain that prequels mostly have X,Y, and Z problems, but still recommend a specific prequel because I like it holistically, which maybe is the case with the show and Prometheus/Covenant

Lar

I think you’re on to something here. Part of why Walt Disney invented animatronics was because they could go on and on and on with no breaks and would make minimal mistakes, unlike humans. So doing a digital actor (remember when they tried to do that with that weird final fantasy movie?) is another way for the studio to micromanage every tiny little thing.

Lar

But have you considered Fassbender kisses himself in Covenant? (I kid, I kid)

Lar

Sort of agree with you here, also agree with the dudes saying it feels like a video game. Because the more I think about it the more I wish it WAS a theme park ride or video game.

Lar

I guess if you’re gonna die young from a mining accident or whatever you may as well live life with no consequences, no matter how uhhhh cringe it is.

Gone

If we’re in store for rote, safe-playing Alien sequels, this first one in the line is at least a good one of those. I also hated the deep fake and the one really terrible line of dialogue, but what I liked about it stuck with me more than what didn’t. Of course, I wasn’t a fan of the clumsy lore-dumps that were the Ridley Scott prequels.

Lar

Or like the guys said, Elijah Wood. He’d make a great cold, emotionless robot. He’s got those big blue eyes and a sad face.

Smaug

It definitely sounds like he's kissing himself in the crotch the whole movie.

DMAC

What was the question again?

Unicorn Trista

Laughing out loud at work at the Paul Walker shoutout

Joe Gunch

No 4:3 pan-and-scan? Unacceptable.

Joe Gunch

The movie needed more Bjorn-type characters... but then I guess that'd just make it 'Attack the Block.'

DMAC

I misread that as "Bjork-type characters" at first.

DMAC

I was only taken out of the movie at the Tarkin-town part. Upon a rewatch, eh whatever it's in there. I still enjoyed it.

DMAC

The member berries were definitely on the menu for this movie no denying that. Was it on par with or worse than Ghostbusters Afterlife though?

Adam Tharpe

I grew up in Toledo…can I get a live show there for the Alien: Toledo jab??

MarkNM

WE LIKE ROY!

MarkNM

I know right? They're selling that overpriced shit based on nostalgia, why not give the full nostalgic experience?

Busiris

If there's one thing this movie has for me over Covenant is a return to dudes in the Xenomorph costume. I do like Covenant but the CGI Xenos just don't do it for me like when we have someone there in costume, it's awesome. As Cabin says, real light hitting real things.

AlsoNamedB0rt

I think the Ian Holm deepfake stuff looks bad, is unnecessary, unethical, and should probably be illegal. However, I had a good time watching this movie in the theater. I’ve liked all the main Alien movies. People seem preoccupied with their own expectations with this franchise. Also knock it off with that “why do they have British accents?” garbage. Why would they have American accents? Why would they speak English? It’s never an interesting topic. Can’t wait for the We Love Movies episode on this one in 10 years as the guys complain that “they don’t make movies like this anymore?!?!?):)&2”

AlsoNamedB0rt

Cabin better love that Minecraft movie.

AlsoNamedB0rt

What if instead of Ian Holm they used the robot Teddy Bear from A.I.? 5 stars.

Jason

This episode really locked in for me that the Alien franchise is perfect for the "Stephen Sajdak Playbook for Super Duper Bad Times" because, in an Alien movie, you're almost better off a) punching your own ticket immediately and b) never ever helping out your friends when they're in a jam.

Eren Keskin

In space no one can hear you inbreed.

JK

Wow I had mercifully forgotten about The Streets altogether until this episode, 2004 was terrible

Eren Keskin

Still no free healthcare, but A.I. necromancy out the ass, huh?

Amber Schumacher

Man, The Streets reference took me back. High school me enjoyed many glasses of tall water while listening to “let’s push things forward.”

Adam Rosenlund

You know what would have been better than Tarkin Town Ash and make way more narrative sense? If the other robot was the same model as Andy. Reinforces the Romulus and Remus theme, plus maybe explains why he was found in the trash.

James Richie

Oh hey, if you want definitions of non-normative sexual perversions but don’t want smoke coming out of your cell phone John Waters’ Dirty Shame, especially the director’s commentary, is the way to go. That’s how I first learned about Roman showers, sploshing, upper deckers and dirt fiends. It’s enlightening! Not his best work but fun.

Rose Esposito

So how many of you refunded your UK show tickets after those accents in this ep? (jk jk)

Isaac Coleman

This movie can reference Aliens, because Aliens has memorable original ideas. A future movie in this franchise cannot reference Romulus, because all of its ideas come from previous movies. That's the ball game as far as I'm concerned.

Isaac Coleman

Counterpoint: Covenant has Robot Oppenheimer dropping xenomorph nukes on a planet of engineers while listening to opera and crygasming.

Trev Herron

I wanted to like this movie more. The AI stuff sure sucks ass but all the callbacks to Alien just makes me wish I were watching Alien. I really did not care for the alien in this one being the same as in the first one because it undermine. There are some good scares and impressive visuals, the facehuggers in the wa'ah sequence is probably the scariest it gets and the production design does a decent job of marrying the first movie and Prometheus movies aesthetics, but other than that... I'm of the opinion that like Jurassic Park, games are probably the final frontier for Alien as an IP. Now begins the long wait for Alien: Isolation 2 (play the first one if you haven't yet guys, it's a must for Alien fans). Still better than Covenant though. PS. The Streets is a great deep cut lol

Dennis Stack

That's a great idea. Since this movie is littered with callbacks already, have one Andy play the flute while the other offers to do the fingering.

Smaug

Crygasming while he's flicking his nipples over how hard he just read about Humanism in that Philosophy textbook. "Oh the sincere existentialist crisis, someone pour some butter on me!" Stupid City.

Andrew Dean

Youtube just made me aware of a show called Just Foolin About with Michael Biehn. This sounds like a bit from WHM but its real. Guest include Eddie Furlong, Eric Roberts and Cary Elwes

Matthew Lloyd

Disappointed that although you mentioned that the adult xenomorph cocoon looks like an angry vagina you didnt mentione that when its head emerges its looks like a massive curved erect dick.

Craig

Props to Andrew for immediately remembering the actual melody (if one can call it that) of one of his songs too!

Craig

I thought that was a weird take from Cabin. I don’t know if that means he prefers the special edition of Aliens because you get to see the colony’s everyday life before the aliens take it over.

Craig

I got the impression he was the father. I had no idea they were related. Maybe she was only a stepsister and got stuck under a coffee table?

Craig

Apparently it was originally going to be a female android. Maybe Holm was a studio idea.

Craig

The Holm thing didn’t really bother me as I knew about it going in, but THAT line and all the relentless callbacks did. When she started putting on the spacesuit in her underwear it really was too much. That said I still mostly enjoyed it and agree with the guys that Andy and the actor are great.

profondo robbo

Why does Tyler have an English accent while his sister Kay has an American accent?