Alien: Romulus and all the images you see in this review are owned by 20th Century Studios
Directed by Fede Álvarez
The Alien franchise is unique because it’s a series that descended into utter shlock, but never truly lost its prestige. Heck, the first sequel to it was blatantly an attempt to turn an atmospheric horror movie into a wild shoot-em-up, and yet it’s considered nearly as good, if not the equal of, the original film. No matter how many times it gets screwed up by the studio or has terrible crossovers with The Predator, a new Alien film always comes with a certain amount of clout because we all remember just how good that original film is. This latest attempt is the most direct attempt yet at recapturing that magic, but is it simply too big a task for any filmmaker to recapture the magic of that first film? Let’s find out!!
Taking place a number of years after the Nostromo event, we follow a group of rag tag street toughs with dreams of escaping their Weyland-Yutani owned mining planet for the blue skies and green pastures of another planet. To get there, they need to salvage cryostasis chambers from a wrecked space station just outside their home planet’s atmosphere, and with the help of Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her adopted android brother Andy (David Jonsson), they might just have a shot of pulling it off. Unfortunately for them, the space station was conducting experiments on the Xenomorphs which naturally begin to escape as soon as these kids start mucking up the place and mess with the thermostat. In order to escape the vessel with the cryo-pods and their fleshy innards intact, Andy installs a data chip that fills him with knowledge of the alien threat as well as the darkest secrets that Weyland-Yutani are hiding. Will our crew of at risk youths make it out alive with the help of Andy 2.0? What else is Weyland-Yutani up to, and is there more to all this than Andy us letting in on? Do you think the Xenomorphs ever get tired of screeching all the time, or is that part of the fun for them?
See, I made the same mistake of rewatching Ridley Scott’s Alien the night before I saw this, as it had been selling itself as a sequel, so I figured plot points from the first one would be relevant. This turned out to be correct, but more so than I could have imagined because this is closer to a remake than a sequel as it leans far too heavily on callbacks, allusions, and even shot compositions that we saw in the original film. It’s not unlike what Fede Álvarez did with the Evil Dead remake from 2013, but where that was a fun exercise in reimagining a classic shlock horror flick, this is hoping that the same trick will work for one of the most influential and artistically brilliant movies ever made. Make no mistake, Ridley Scott’s film is a five-star masterpiece and anything even half as good would still be a great film, but this is trying to be more than just a fan film and yet refuses to get out from under the original’s shadow for most of its running time. It seems that Alien has the same problem as Halloween, where the simple ideas were overshadowed by the insistence on lore. Halloween couldn’t just be about scary stories during the holiday, and Alien can’t just be about terrifying things in outer space. No, we’ve got plushies, drinking glasses, and crossover movies to sell which requires iconic characters, so the Xenomorph has become the most consistent element of the franchise. On that front, at least, Fede Álvarez proves to be more than capable as the titular Alien looks better than ever. There’s a genuine effort to make the Xenomorph scary again which means it doesn’t take up as much screen time as it did in many of the sequels, and what shots we do get of it are brilliantly layered with enigmatic lighting, top-notch puppeteering, and sound design that gets you right in the bones.
The rest of the production is fantastic as well. Perhaps a bit overdone with the deep shadows and bombastic score, but that’s par for the course with movies made these days, and it manages to have enough of the original movie’s feel to be a proper sequel to it rather than the wild directions the other sequels went in. I will also give this movie all the credit in the world for the areas where it does innovate on the Alien formula and shows off some new ideas. The cast is solid and much different from the crew in the first film, with the standout being Alan as the android with a heart of gold. Androids have always been an interesting idea throughout the franchise, and I think Ridley Scott made some great choices with David in Prometheus and Covenant, but Alan is the most relatable we’ve seen, and I feel that David Jonsson’s performance will connect with a lot of the audience. More so than any of the Xenomorph’s implanting eggs or spitting acid, the tension of this movie is from his character and how he changes for the better and worse throughout the movie with the monsters on the ship revealing, not just his, but everyone’s true weaknesses as well as their inner strengths. It also has a fantastic ending that elevates the Alien formula instead of just emulating it, and while the Xenomorphs are well shot and project pure menace, this is where the movie actually got scary for me in a way that was like rewatching the original.
Still, it’s undercut significantly by the myriad of callbacks to the previous films that pulled me right out of the experience and clashed terribly with how seriously we’re supposed to be taking the rest of it. This is not the movie to be throwing out corny one-liners or recreate iconic shots of the movie, and yet there it is sucking all the oxygen out of the room as we’re reminded that this isn’t a terrifying movie going experience, but a tribute to a film that this concedes itself to being inferior to. I did not enjoy Alien 3 at all, and I would say that this is the far more enjoyable of the two, but I’ll at least give Fincher’s movie credit for being a completely different animal from the other films in the series and tried to stand on its own. Whether it was studio demands or Fede Álvarez wanting to honor the original, there’s just not enough room for this to grow as they insist on cramming so much of the original film alongside it.
I wanted to love this movie as there are some genuinely brilliant moments that capture the magic of that original film, but I simply rolled my eyes far too many times for this to reach those heights. Fede Álvarez has proven himself to be great at updating someone else’s material, but he’s also been successful with his own ideas, and I wish this film had more of them. It’s at its best when it’s reminiscent of the tone of Alien rather than mimicking its scenes, but even at its worst, the movie is well-made and entertaining. I rolled my eyes at it too much for me to give it overwhelming praise, but I do hope that he gets a shot at making an Alien movie that is truly his own instead of polishing up someone else’s masterpiece.
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