Alien: Romulus joins Bumblebee among post-2000 movies I own on VHS. Bumblebee was just a press promo item but Romulus was actually for sale for collectors. It sold out but perhaps demand will warrant a second run.
The original press release said 4:3 so I thought they were going to do pan and scan. It would have been cool to see how they’d reframe a modern movie, but it turns out this is widescreen. Instead, it harkens back to the mid to late ’90s when we got educated about aspect ratios and bought the letterboxed special editions. 4:3 must have just meant it was configured for pre-HD TVs.
So, this edition does not cut off any of the vast mining planet or the Romulus and Remus space stations. There is just a fuzziness to those images compressed within a 19” TV (perhaps less so if you have an old 36”), like how many of us first saw Alien and Aliens.
The deepfake Ian Holm still looks bad on VHS. One would hope the degraded image would obscure some of the flaws but no, that translates in any format.
The 4K version is still streaming so you can see all the detail it was filmed with. But, for nostalgic purposes this special edition delivers exactly what we left behind decades and three or four formats ago.