#the ONLY time face cgi has worked for me was Peggy in Winter Soldier and they did that waaaaay differently

[mcbitchtits]

the most horrifying part of alien romulus is the fucking facial cgi (as always)

pretty fantastic movie otherwise though, excellent horror. more in line with the original alien than any of its sequels, although it does feel like a lot of the beats are also like "DO YOU REMEMBER ALIEN (1986)??? see what we did there?!"

the writing starts off strong with what felt to me personally like a very interesting approach to, you know, the horrors of capitalism and mining (poverty, dead parents, teen pregnancies, trapped by the remoteness of the environment, company towns and company stores), and it does a fair number of interesting things contrasting that to the parts in orbit (gravity fields, etc.) and, frankly, some absolutely fantastic horror visuals that make you feel like they are really innovating with both creature design as well as like they maybe used to work in halloween haunt mazes? very... personal shots? which i appreciate because i feel like covenant et al were more cinematic, which was fine, but also less horrifying in some ways. the acting was pretty good.

however the facial cgi for [spoiler character] was fucking terrible! this has been my #1 complaint about cgi for going on decades now and i have to be honest, this was some of the ugliest finished work i have ever seen. textures not mapping cleanly, form distention with animation, just real shit work. dunno if it's lack of budget or a bad art/animation director or the ever-present crunch because SFX is ununionized, but jesus fucking christ i hate this shit. it was bad in I, Robot and it was slightly less bad in Tron Legacy and it sucked all over again in Rogue One and The Mandalorian and Dial of Destiny! learn some fucking lessons from animators and rediscover the uncanny valley!!! watch jaws and spend a metric asston of time considering why we see so little of the shark! APPLY THE LESSON

(or, like, you've already got a half-destroyed character, just lean into it and make their mouth mechanics destroyed by acid or something. or make it look even more unnatural on purpose! it's a horror film! there are a lot of solutions and bad cgi is the worst one always!)

anyway i just really DO appreciate any time the alien sequels really dig into the birth/body horror. it's good! more of them should be better at it! fuck off james cameron! (sorry had to get that dig in there) (also, i mean, specifically, all the growth and rupturing and body-breaking, and to a lesser extent all the giger-styled vulvas etc; the actual uh babies and so forth are less interesting to me from a horror perspective. definitely weird and unsettling but also a little slenderman-was-born-on-the-something-awful-forums, you know?)

also effective use of treating the facehuggers like spiders or tarantulas. underrated approach to reinterpreting their horror. (unfortunate time to have a fur gremlin running around the house.) what i liked most about this movie is it managed to take a lot of the existing horror elements of the alien franchise and make them feel fresh and new and horrifying in completely new ways. real good shit.

also i see you weyland-yutani "W" podships, i see you AD and props. go prod team

love the score also. felt almost williams-ish and kinda raidersesqe (in the ark horror sense) and i vibed with it severely