As Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus opens, having located the wreckage of the Nostromo from the original 1979 Alien film, the sinister Weyland-Yutani company has inexplicably allowed its contents and their experimental space station Romulus to drift into a decaying orbit above one of its mining planets.
Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny, Civil War) and her companion Andy (David Jonsson) join a ragtag family of scavengers seeking escape from the dystopian world. Discovering Romulus overhead, where somehow Weyland-Yutani has failed, they become quarry to HR Giger’s iconic alien.
If you’re looking for a rollercoaster fall blockbuster, Romulus is your movie. Manic sequences, cheap jump-scares, sirens, relentless xenomorphs, destruction and body-horror? Check. Where Ridley Scott’s introjection of Erich von Däniken and ancient aliens in Prometheus (2012) was a daft failure of imagination, Álvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues (Evil Dead, 2013; and Don’t Breathe, 2016) present a narrower action-horror film.
If Romulus doesn’t fail in the manner of Prometheus and Covenant (2017), it is precisely because it is less ambitious. Despite shrieking references to every other Alien film, it aims for the original’s haunted house claustrophobia. But where the original film was a Freudian classic, today’s film bros don’t seem to understand this. One death in particular is pornographically stupid. And yes, Romulus is video game-inflected too.
I revere Alien. It wasn’t only the Giger designs that made the first film exceptional, it was the neo-Shakespearean casting and the chemistry between mature actors. Lead actor chemistry was a constant through Ripley’s (Sigourney Weaver) relationships with Dallas (Tom Skerritt), Hicks (Michael Biehn) and Clemens (Charles Dance). The Disneyfication of Romulus means there is no chemistry at all between its young actors, and the Andy story is truly mawkish. You probably won’t remember the names of the other characters. They’re irrelevant. Still, Alien: Romulus rattles along aggressively, haunted by its predecessors, a franchise pastiche bringing the sound and fury, but sadly, nothing new.
6
+Quiet/loud things!
-Pandering; repetition
Alien: Romulus
Directed by Álvarez
With Spaeny and Jonsson
Violet Crown, R, 119 min.