I went to see Alien: Romulus a few nights ago with friends and you know what? It was pretty good! Not great, and I had some a few complaints about it, but overall the movie kept me entertained for two hours.
I should say that I went into it with very low expectations. I cannot say that I have really liked any movie in this franchise since Alien 3 and even that took me a while (and watching the Assembly Cut) to come around to. I can appreciate what they were trying do with Alien Resurrection even if I do not like it; as for Prometheus and Covenant, I thought they were both awful and I wish they had never been made.
Romulus is certainly better than the two prequel films. It did not attempt to spin up a bunch of heavy mythology. Neither did it constantly insist that every character make the worst possible decision at every moment in order to keep the plot moving along. The characters in Romulus are engaging and even when they do make bad decisions, those decisions are understandable (if regrettable) in the moment.
Romulus is not as scary as Alien and it is not as intense as Aliens. That is fine, though; it does not need to match those films. One of the things I like about this series is that every installment has its own take on the overall story and its components. Every film adds something new. Romulus does that while also managing to stitch some of the films together a bit, which I appreciated. It has some great action sequences, some interesting ideas, and the final act really goes for broke and manages to stick the landing. It also managed to keep me guessing for nearly the entire runtime, which I really appreciated.
I mentioned at the outset that I had a few complaints. That is true but none of them is major and they were mostly plot points I could explain away in my head without engaging in too many mental acrobatics. My only real complaint is that I found the callbacks to the previous movies a bit tiresome. The cornbread, the drinking bird, the pulse rifle howto—these were silly but insignificant. The “Get away from her, you bitch” line was utterly ridiculous; it was way too obvious, made no sense in the context of the scene, and totally yanked me out of the movie.
I feel like these are mostly minor quibbles, though. As Mark Kermode mentioned in his review, they are probably only going to matter to super-fans who have seen the rest of the movies a billion times.
I have said elsewhere that I do not have a fundamental problem with movies and TV series that are set in shared universes. It is a trope of online discourse that franchises are bad and that all this stuff is just corporate IP, but online discourse is mostly garbage. There are bad examples, of course—poorly executed junk cranked out to maintain rights to a property or to squeeze a few extra million out of fans (the Sony Spider-Man spin-offs and the Fast & Furious movies come to mind here) but I think Alien: Romulus is a pretty good example of how to do this sort of thing right.