The Alien franchise has touched upon many genres in its 45 years of chest-bursting glory. From its humble beginnings as a single-location, claustrophobic horror flick, through the existential sci-fi of its more recent entries, there are few modes that don’t mesh well with the DNA of the series. Some entries are (much) more successful than others, but the fact that H.R. Giger’s iconic obsidian monsters can still tickle the brains and turn the stomachs of audiences a near half-century from their inception speaks to the infinite malleability of the concept and iconography. To put it simply, the Alien franchise can basically do anything it wants, and as a fan of the material on the whole, I enjoy the way each entry tries to do something new.
Alien: Romulus provides novelty by backing away from the franchise’s loftier ambitions, instead choosing to deliver a lean, mean fright machine that wants little more than to scare your pants off. And for the most part, it succeeds. When Fede Alvarez, who also helmed the impossibly good Evil Dead, gets to apply his unique horror chops, Romulus sings. It’s when the script, co-written by Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues, attempts to Easter Egg its way into connectivity with the series at large that the film suffers. It’s not enough to sink the ship, but it certainly saps focus and energy from what should’ve been an easy home run. Naturally, any filmmaker would be hard-pressed to resist having fun with the larger Alien mythology, but a stronger film is one that exists in a vacuum; one that lets any Easter Eggs speak for themselves within the margins rather than clumsily driving the plot forwards.
Romulus occurs in the gap between Alien and Aliens, and it follows a group of low-level grunts who see an opportunity to escape the mining colony where they are doomed spend the rest of their lives under the corporate whims of Weyland-Yutani. Directly above the colony is a derelict space station that has intercepted the detritus of the Nostromo. To our protagonists, this is good news. They can steal the cryo pods and use them to travel far away from their current situation. What they don’t know is that this space station has also picked up an extra passenger. You know who it is (hint: it’s a Xenomorph).
In order to access the station’s systems, Rain (Cailee Spaeny) must involve her “brother” Andy (David Jonsson), an out-of-date android with a variety of physical and functional glitches. His hardware will be able to open doors and such, and even though Rain knows that Andy is being taken advantage of, she understands that there really is no other way to gain access to the vessel. She also knows that waiting for a legal means of escape is a fruitless pursuit. Weyland-Yutani, like every last one of their real world corporate counterparts, cannot be trusted.
You know what happens next: The crew gets to the space station and an alien starts killing everyone. It’s awesome.
The good: After a somewhat leisurely opening act, the back half of the film is paced brilliantly. Once the gang gets on board it’s pretty much non-stop action and horror that smartly utilizes the Xenomorph’s unique biology in imaginative and terrifying new ways. The body horror is there, the ticking time-bomb of the space station’s integrity is ever-present, and the threat of the Xenomorph’s double chompers is felt around every corner. There’s one sequence that utilizes the Xenomorph’s acid blood in a way that we’ve never seen before, and which makes for one of the most intense and innovative sequences in the whole series.
The incredible effects help make everything feel tangible. The Xenomorphs are largely animatronic, as are the face huggers, and the set design, which maintains the look of what we see in the original film, has a strong geography that allows for Alvarez to capture the quiet tension of Alien/Alien 3 as well as the funhouse calamity of Aliens/Resurrection. The digital images are gorgeous as well, most notably the exterior shots depicting the space station’s pending collision with the rings of a nearby planet. It’s truly jaw-dropping and ranks among some of the most astonishing imagery we’ve seen in the series so far.
Now let’s talk about what doesn’t work. Mild spoilers follow, so if you’re sensitive to it (and I promise that you don’t really need to be in this case), skip ahead to the “end spoiler” tag.
MILD SPOILERS
Guess who else is on the space station? A nearly destroyed android named Rook, which is of the same model as Ash in the original film. Yes, this means that it takes the form of the late, great Ian Holm. Now personally, I don’t give much of a shit about the recent trend of using digital images of deceased actors, just as long as it suits the story. For example, there was no way around using Peter Cushing in Rogue One, and the filmmakers did a bang up job of making it as visually believable and narratively essential as possible. He had a reason to be there, and his face is so iconic that it would’ve been difficult to recast (that said, they probably could have simply recast and just trusted the audience to go with it). In the case of Christopher Reeve appearing as Superman at the end of The Flash, it was less about wringing a performance from a dead man and more about showing multiple versions of an iconic character, the most iconic of which was inseparable from Reeve himself (it’s worth noting that no one seemed to care about the other deceased actors whose faces were used in the same sequence).
But with the image of Ian Holm as used in Romulus, there lies two big problems that keep it from working properly. First, there’s simply no good reason why the android in question would need to look like him. Sure, it stands to reason that perhaps it was the most popular model at the time, but it’s also been well established that androids don’t all have a singular look. And since the android on the derelict station is canonically NOT the same one as on the Nostromo, it could’ve been played by literally anyone who was willing to be soaked in milky robot juice.
Secondly, it looks like shit. Even if you can get past the fact that it’s all a bit of needless fan service, the effect is distracting. Sure, Grand Moff Tarkin didn’t quite escape the uncanny valley, but the rendering was complete. In the case of Romulus, the effect looks unfinished. The android’s mouth is blurry, and his head seems to shift in proportions as he speaks. This would be easily forgiven if it was, like in The Flash, a throwaway bit of fun, but this too-inhuman android is a major part of the Romulus story. He basically drives the plot from the midpoint on. It’s a strange gamble of a creative choice, and it does not pay off AT ALL. It only highlights how empty Romulus’ myriad instances of connective tissue to the rest of the series are. Almost none of it is needed in accomplishing the film’s goals, so the bulk of it feels like wasted energy.
END SPOILERS
Even with these glaring flaws, the fact of the matter is that Alien: Romulus delivers when it comes to insane thrills, which is all it actually needs to do. Both Spaeny and Jonsson give terrific performances, adding the human element which an Alien film requires. Together they elevate the script’s “what does it mean to be human?” material which, on the page, only registers as lip-service to the concept. They illuminate one of the franchise’s overall strengths of characterization: the Xenomorph may be the perfect killing machine, but humans, with all of our flaws, prove to be its ultimate enemy simply because we care. The Xenomorph lives only to consume and spread, while humans, and evidently their robotic counterparts, wish to create and thrive. Ya gotta love the lack of cynicism in a series that also regularly points out how humans are inherently skittish and boneheaded.
Alien: Romulus is far from the best the series has to offer, but it succeeds in pulling the best genre aspects from each film and mashing them into a circus of carnage and breathless thrills. The film’s low ambition is its greatest strength, but its empty attempts to call attention to its weak connective tissue end up being extraneous. All we really needed was the horror. Luckily there’s enough of it to drown out the rest.
Directed by Fede Alvarez
Written by Fede Alvarez, Rodo Sayagues
Starring Claire Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced
Rated R, 119 minutes
