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Alien: Romulus (2024)

This movie doesn’t reinvent the wheel; it doesn’t even polish the wheel. It just points to the wheel and hopes we remember how good it used to look.

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Alien Romulus

Alien: Romulus – the latest attempt to resurrect the franchise that taught us all to fear dark corridors and hissing pipes – somehow manages to feel both deeply familiar and frustratingly hollow. It’s a film so drenched in nostalgia and “remember this?” moments that it’s more of a highlight reel than a fresh story. If you’re here for anything truly new, well, you might just want to stick with the original Alien trilogy.

Set in the shadowy depths of a dilapidated space station, Romulus follows a group of young, ill-fated colonists who, surprise, surprise, come face to face with the infamous xenomorph. Sound familiar? That’s because it is – every beat feels like it was lifted from previous Alien films, yet flattened and recycled like a worn-out VHS tape. There’s the usual slow crawl through creepy corridors, the sporadic hissing, the “is-it-behind-me” glances, and the inevitable moment of terror when the xenomorph finally shows up to do what it does best.

This movie doesn’t reinvent the wheel; it doesn’t even polish the wheel. It just points to the wheel and hopes we remember how good it used to look.

The cast of young colonists are all appropriately wide-eyed, scared, and ultimately disposable, but they don’t leave much of an impression. They feel more like placeholders for past characters rather than fully-realized personalities with motivations and backstories. Their dialogue is riddled with callbacks that are supposed to thrill die-hard fans, but, in reality, it just makes you wonder if the writers had an original thought left in the chamber. And when one character finally has the audacity to drop the infamous, “Get away from her… you bitch,” you can practically hear the collective groan of audiences everywhere. It’s a line that once held power, but here it feels forced, like someone threw it in hoping it would magically make the scene memorable.

Visually, the movie delivers a predictable parade of shadowy hallways, flickering lights, and dusty consoles. It’s clear the production team had fun making the space station look appropriately dilapidated, and, to their credit, the atmosphere is just as claustrophobic as in previous installments. But ambiance only gets you so far. Without new stakes or a fresh perspective, the visuals feel like set dressing for a story we’ve all seen too many times.

If there’s a highlight, it’s the xenomorph itself – still as menacing and iconic as ever. It lurks, it slinks, and it pounces in all the ways we expect, yet can’t help but admire. Romulus clearly knows what we love about the creature and gives it plenty of screen time, perhaps in the hope that we’ll be so distracted by its chilling presence that we won’t notice the plot running on empty.

In the end, Alien: Romulus is a perfectly serviceable entry in the franchise, but that’s about it. It’s a film that relies so heavily on our nostalgia that it forgets to tell its own story, leaning on callbacks instead of taking any risks. You’ll watch it, probably shrug, and move on, without the lingering dread that Ridley Scott’s original film or James Cameron’s Aliens left us with.

If you’re an Alien completist, by all means, dive in – there’s enough xenomorph action to satisfy a casual craving. But if you were hoping for something that might evolve the franchise or take it in a bold new direction, Romulus will feel like little more than a distant echo of better days in space.

Alien: Romulus
3 ScreenDim Score
Summary
This movie doesn’t reinvent the wheel; it doesn’t even polish the wheel. It just points to the wheel and hopes we remember how good it used to look.

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Films

Bring Her Back (2025)

“Bring Her Back” is like a horror film that’s been assembled from really good individual scenes without anyone checking whether they actually fit together into a coherent whole.

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Bring Her Back

This horror film has more unexplained mysteries than a David Lynch fever dream, but at least the gore is properly mental.

SPOILER WARNING: Loads of spoilers here.

Don’t get me wrong – this isn’t complete shite. The gore is properly brutal, the kind that makes you wince and immediately check that all your limbs are still attached. The performances are genuinely solid across the board. And Laura, the main antagonist, is the sort of character you absolutely love to hate, like a particularly effective parking warden or someone who talks loudly on their phone in quiet train carriages.

But Christ alive, the story makes about as much sense as a chocolate teapot in a sauna.

Laura apparently kidnaps Oliver from his bedroom, according to a missing poster. Now, I’m no expert on child abduction, but last time I checked, scaling buildings and making off with random children isn’t exactly a beginner-level criminal activity. Did she just happen to have a ladder handy? Cat burglar training? A very understanding Uber driver? The film doesn’t bother explaining how someone manages to nick a kid from what we can assume is a family home without anyone noticing.

And speaking of Oliver – or Connor, or whatever his name is this week – how exactly did he get possessed in the first place? Did the demon put in an application? Was there an interview process? A background check? The film treats demonic possession like it’s as common as catching a cold, but never bothers explaining how any of this supernatural bollocks actually works.

Then there’s the question of whether Laura actually murdered Andy and Piper’s dad, or if that was just convenient manipulation. Because if she did kill him, that raises a whole other set of questions about her murder methodology. If she didn’t, then what are the odds she’d randomly acquire a kid who happens to be both female and partially blind? That’s not luck, that’s winning the evil plot lottery.

And where the hell are all the mothers? Andy’s mother – no idea what happened to her. Piper’s mum – no idea what happened to her. We find out Andy’s dad is a bit of a dick so are we meant to assume he was abusive to both mothers and they both leave without the kids? What the hell happened there?

The more you think about the logistics of what’s supposed to have happened, the more your brain starts to hurt. It’s like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces are missing and the other half are from a completely different box.

But here’s the thing – when the film stops trying to make sense and just gets on with being properly horrific, it actually works quite well. The knife scene is absolutely brutal, the kind of thing that makes you grateful you’re watching it on a screen rather than having to clean up afterwards. The table eating scene is similarly mental – properly disturbing in all the right ways.

And the actors – fair play to them – they sell the hell out of this confused narrative. They’re committed to making this mess feel real, even when the plot is doing backflips to avoid explaining itself. Laura, in particular, is brilliantly hateable. She’s the sort of antagonist who makes you genuinely invested in seeing her get her comeuppance, which is no small achievement when you’re working with material that’s held together with narrative duct tape.

“Bring Her Back” is like a horror film that’s been assembled from really good individual scenes without anyone checking whether they actually fit together into a coherent whole. It’s got all the right ingredients – decent acting, proper gore, genuinely creepy moments – but it’s been mixed together by someone who’s apparently never heard of things like “logic” or “cause and effect.”

Review 0
4 ScreenDim Score

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Films

Smile 2 (2024)

Still better than most horror sequels, mind you. But that’s like being the tallest person in a room full of sitting people – technically accurate, but not exactly a ringing endorsement.

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Smile 2

Yes, I’m late to the party on this one.

The story follows a pop star who gets infected by the smile curse, which sounds like it should be a tabloid headline but is apparently a legitimate supernatural threat. Naomi Scott does a perfectly decent job as someone slowly losing her mind to demonic grinning, and to be fair, she sells the hell out of the increasingly unhinged behaviour. The supporting cast all do their jobs competently enough – nobody embarrasses themselves, nobody phones it in.

But here’s where it all goes tits up: the film spends most of its runtime building up tension, creating genuinely unsettling scenarios, and making you invested in what’s happening to these characters. Then, just when you think you’re getting somewhere, it pulls the old “actually, the last thirty minutes were all in her head because demons” trick.

It’s the horror equivalent of those dreams where you think you’ve woken up but you’re still dreaming, except instead of being clever, it’s just bloody annoying. You know what’s not scary? Being told that the scary thing you just watched wasn’t real. You know what doesn’t create tension? Undermining your own narrative with the supernatural equivalent of “it was all a dream.”

This isn’t innovative storytelling; it’s lazy writing disguised as psychological complexity. It’s what happens when writers can’t figure out how to resolve their plot properly so they just declare that half of it didn’t actually happen. It’s like playing chess with someone who keeps moving the pieces and then claiming the rules were different all along.

The gore is adequate enough – nothing that’ll make you lose your lunch, but sufficient to remind you that you’re watching a horror film and not an episode of “Holby City” with occasional grinning. There are some properly unsettling moments scattered throughout, particularly a sequence where smiling people materialise in the protagonist’s flat and only move when she’s not looking directly at them. It’s properly creepy, like having the world’s most sinister game of Red Light, Green Light happening in your living room.

That bit actually works brilliantly – it’s the kind of nightmare logic that makes you genuinely uncomfortable without resorting to cheap jump scares or explaining itself to death. More of that, please, and less of the “surprise, none of this mattered” bollocks.

But then we need to talk about the product placement, because bloody hell, someone at Voss Water must have pictures of the filmmakers doing something embarrassing. I counted the distinctive bottles appearing on screen at least eight times, which is approximately seven more times than necessary to establish that people in this film drink water. It’s so blatant it becomes genuinely distracting – you start watching for the next Voss bottle appearance instead of paying attention to the actual horror.

It’s like they’ve confused a horror film with a particularly expensive advert for overpriced bottled water. Every time someone needs to hydrate, out comes another perfectly positioned Voss bottle, gleaming in the light like some kind of Norwegian beacon of commercial desperation. You half expect the demon to start grinning because it’s just remembered to stay properly hydrated.

I understand that films need financing, and product placement is part of modern cinema. But there’s a difference between subtle brand integration and basically turning your horror film into a pop-up shop for premium water. When your supernatural thriller starts feeling like a lifestyle magazine, you’ve probably gone too far.

If you enjoyed the first “Smile,” you’ll probably find this tolerable enough. If you were hoping for something that built meaningfully on the original concept rather than just repeating it with better production values and more water bottle cameos, you might come away feeling like you’ve been sold a slightly more expensive version of something you already owned.

Still better than most horror sequels, mind you. But that’s like being the tallest person in a room full of sitting people – technically accurate, but not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Smile 2 (2024)
3.5 ScreenDim Score

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Films

28 Years Later (2025)

It’s not terrible, exactly. It’s just… eh.

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28 Years Later (2025)

I finally got around to watching 28 Years Later.

The film is a long-awaited return to the franchise and after finally watching it? “Eh.”

“28 Years Later” is supposedly the triumphant return to Danny Boyle’s vision of Britain overrun by rage-fuelled infected maniacs. What we actually get is two hours of a sulky teenager making decisions so monumentally stupid they’d embarrass a goldfish with severe brain damage.

Remember “28 Days Later”? Remember how it made you genuinely terrified of infected people sprinting at you like caffeinated cheetahs? Well, forget all that, because this film has about as many infected as your average Tesco on a Tuesday afternoon. Which is to say: virtually none, and the few that do show up look like they’re having an off day.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around a family living on an island who’ve managed to survive nearly three decades of apocalypse. Fair enough. Then their teenage son has one argument with his dad and decides the logical response is to burn down a barn and drag his starving mother across infected-infested mainland to find someone who might be a doctor. Or might be completely mental. Or might just murder them for sport.

But here’s the thing that really gets my goat: the film can’t decide what it wants to be. The first half hour is genuinely tense. You’ve got proper infected doing proper infected things – namely, trying to tear people’s faces off with the enthusiasm of a toddler opening Christmas presents. There’s suspense, there’s horror, there’s the kind of relentless dread that made the original films worth watching.

Then, the moment our teenage genius embarks on his poorly thought-out road trip, it’s like someone changed the channel to fucking “Countryfile.” Suddenly we’re watching people trudge through fields having deep conversations about feelings while the apocalypse takes a tea break. The infected apparently got bored and wandered off to find a more interesting film to be in.

There’s an entire subplot with a Swedish soldier, which can be cut out and the film would be no different. Pointless doesn’t even begin to cover it.

On top of this, there’s a moment where the kid almost gets attacked by an infected (no, they’re not zombies, I will die on this hill – zombies don’t run) and it turns out the mother saved him, and again it just… doesn’t go anywhere? You’re forced to ask once more, what was the point of that?

What becomes painfully obvious is that this isn’t really a film at all – it’s an expensive advert for the other two films they’re planning to make. Every scene feels like homework for future instalments rather than something worth experiencing right now. It’s like buying a starter that turns out to be mainly a menu for dishes you might be able to order next year.

Good grief I need to tell someone about that ending.

The film concludes with what can only be described as a parkour demonstration set to a heavy metal version of the Teletubbies theme song. I’m not making this up. People doing backflips while killing infected to the tune of “Tinky Winky had a bag.” It’s so bizarrely inappropriate it makes you wonder if someone spiked the editor’s coffee with industrial-strength hallucinogens.

I wanted to like this. The original “28 Days Later” was brilliant – it made infected people genuinely terrifying again after years of shambling zombies who moved like arthritic pensioners. This sequel takes that legacy and turns it into a meditation on family dysfunction with occasional bursts of half-hearted apocalypse.

If you want proper infected horror, watch the original. If you want family drama, watch literally any other film. If you want to waste two hours of your life wondering when something interesting is going to happen, then by all means, watch “28 Years Later.”

It’s not terrible, exactly. It’s just… eh. Which is somehow worse than being properly shit, because at least properly shit films give you something to get angry about. This just leaves you feeling like you’ve been mildly disappointed by a vending machine that’s eaten your money and given you nothing in return.

I’ve seen worse, but I’ve also seen better.

28 Years Later (2025)
3.5 ScreenDim Score
Summary
It's not terrible, exactly. It's just... eh. Which is somehow worse than being properly shit.

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