Nobody can say that Alien: Romulus is an unfaithful Alien movie. It’s a great many things, most of them not particularly valuable, but one cannot accuse it of disrespecting its source -specifically the original Alien from 1979. Director Fede Álvarez, like a great many of us, holds that movie in high esteem, and his driving ambition on this film -the eighth in the franchise to follow it- is to honour that movie as much as he can in style, in iconography, and with any luck in tone.
And yet, it says something that the only truly successful sequel in this series, 1986’s Aliens, was the one that most brazenly departed in style, iconography, and tone from its predecessor. Generally, the Alien series works better when it tries new things -when it mixes up the old premise of a group of people who just happen upon the aliens, someone gets impregnated, and they all are then gruesomely killed off one by one. And while there are a few distinct set-pieces and concepts, and even a character dynamic to Romulus, too much of it is concerned with that same old formula and evoking the past -in ways that range from dull little bits of fan service to egregiously offensive technical choices.
Set somewhere between the first and second movies, Romulus hones in on a group of scavengers desperate to escape bleak prospects under the Weyland-Yutani corporation by hijacking a derelict ship with cryo-chambers that can take them to a prosperous planet. It is of course on this ship however that they encounter a xenomorph that Álvarez goes to pains to emphasize is directly connected to organic specimens gathered from the debris of the Nostromo -the ship that the first movie was set on.
It should be noted though that it isn’t just the first movie that Álvarez references here, either in plot beat or iconography. In fact he seems to take pride in connecting the dots of Alien and it’s original sequel timeline with Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and Alien: Covenant -likely a reason for Scott producing and giving this film his seal of approval where he mostly disparaged all the other Alien movies not made by him. Álvarez finds ways wherever he can to work in replications of iconic images from past movies in the series -the ‘how to use a gun’ lesson underpinned by romantic tension from Aliens, the shot of the xenomorph up close in the heroine’s face from Alien 3, and multiple scenes where the foreground actor is unaware of the alien descending behind them in the background as in the very first fully-grown xenomorph kill forty-five years ago.
Many of these images and a few lines of dialogue (you know exactly the big one) feel fairly cheap, though not all of Álvarez’s nostalgia-baiting is groan-inducing. Certainly the aesthetics are one of the film’s better attributes, as it adopts the same grungy look and analogue technology to the spaceship that is still one of the most charming facets of those early Alien movies. Snippets of the original moody score relay a similar effect of putting you in a mere sense of the familiar without overloading on obvious hallmarks. But that latter is the more preferred method, and while referential bits and pieces here and there can be ignored, the biggest one certainly can’t -which is the non-alien major villain: a ghoulish digital corpse of a dead actor’s likeness and AI-generated voice. I guess it should be expected with Disney now at the helm of this franchise, and their recent history of preferring digital copies of dead or de-aged actors over living ones they’d have to pay. If this actor were alive and consenting, there’s in fairness a degree to which the creative choice would work in lieu of the context -but it is still nakedly corporate a move in itself, exactly in that anti-human spirit of Weyland-Yutani. And apart from the ethics, the effect just looks bad, with a flat face on a 3D body bereft of any natural expression. Some might argue an intentionality in this, but it’s a hollow and meaningless rebuttal. Just a disgraceful concoction all around.
There are real people in the movie though, all of whom are naturally significantly better but only a few really stand out. Still, the choice to draw them as distinct underdogs, related to the blue collar aspect of the original crew, is a good one -making them more instantly sympathetic. Cailee Spaeny, hot off of Priscilla and Civil War, makes for a decent replacement Ripley and audience surrogate as Rain -joining the team headed up by ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux). When the plot calls for her to transition to action heroine, she does so perfectly fine -in a survivalist manner that again recalls Sigourney Weaver in the first movie. There’s some good terror played by the cast all around her, particularly Isabela Merced as Tyler’s sister Kay. But the only real stand-out of the movie is David Jonsson as Andy, the obligatory android for an Alien movie, here established as an outdated Weyland-Yutani model reprogrammed and adopted as Rain’s “brother”. Required at various points to be both friendly and implicitly hostile, Jonsson takes to the character’s dimensions and low-key personality distinctions with compelling nuance. The character’s neurodivergent coding is handled sensitively, especially in how it relates to the mechanisms of his programming and the movie’s general theme on corporate inhumanity. A rich, finely-tuned performance that can stand along the best of this series.
Some of the filmmaking reaches those heights as well -Álvarez can stage a pretty decent horror beat, and in particular may be the first director in this series to creatively utilize the alien's acid-for-blood as both obstacle and weapon in its own right. While most of the visuals and action are rather underwhelming, there are a couple genuinely inventive set-pieces in relation to this, as well as a sequence that plays in zero gravity.
But for as moody as Álvarez tries and occasionally succeeds in making the film, it is still not very engaging. The biggest weakness in both the last two Ridley Scott movies was where they tried to imitate a conventional Alien movie, that felt like intrusions on Scott's more profound ideas and vision. Here, that imitation is a much larger part of the movie -down to the structure note for note. And for the bulk of the story there isn't much of a creative bent to be found, outside of some of the things done with the Andy character and his relationship with Rain. The film brings back and adapts a pervasive theme of corporate inhumanity -as Weyland-Yutani is once again positioned as the real evil of this universe through their deep ambivalence towards human life combined with the recklessness of their genetic engineering. But it rings entirely hollow in the film's brazen capitalist construction and inhumane concessions. The customary second climax introduces a freaky new monster -though only half as unsettling as the aforementioned necromancy; its novelty means little bathed in so formulaic a function.
That’s ultimately the issue for Alien: Romulus, a movie interested in its universe only so far as it provides structure and material to be referenced and replayed. Even its new ideas have to be ensconced in the safety of the old. The first movie in this franchise made under Disney, it is reminiscent of another series’ turn to nostalgia in the wake of Disney acquisition -Star Wars; though its Force Awakens at least had a modestly new personality. Romulus can’t summon that, and is even without the egregious sin, one of the more meagre Alien outings. Back to the basics in the dimmest way possible.
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