Josh Reviews Alien: Romulus

Alien: Romulus is set twenty years after the events of Ridley Scott’s original 1979 Alien film, and 37 years before the events of James Cameron’s sequel, Aliens.  Rain is an orphan working in indentured servitude to “the Company” (Weyland-Yutani) on a failing colony world.  Her parents have died working in the mines, and her contract to the Company prevents her from leaving the planet.  But a group of friends with access to a small spaceship have hatched a plan to escape.  It involves salvaging cryo-tubes from a wrecked ship they’ve detected; the cryo-tubes will allow them to survive (in hypo-sleep) the years-long journey to another planet.  The only problem is the wrecked ship winds up being a wrecked Company space-station… where scientists were working on the body of a Xenomorph, salvaged from the wreckage of the Nostromo (Ripley’s ship from Alien).  It’s not long before facehuggers are loose and Rain and her friends are in a lot of trouble.

I thought Alien: Romulus was great!  Writer/director Fede Álvarez (the film was co-written by Rodo Sayagues) has fashioned a taut thriller that’s fun and scary and tense, just the way an Alien movie should be.  The film looks fantastic.  They’ve beautifully recreated the look and aesthetic of Ridley Scott’s original Alien, while also bringing to life new locations and characters.  The film stands on its own while also being deeply enmeshed in the lore of this franchise — not just the original Alien, but many of the sequel films as well.  I was impressed!

I’m a defender of Alien: Covenant (the most recent Alien film, directed by Ridley Scott and released in 2017), and I’m bummed that Mr. Scott was not able to make a third film to complete the story left hanging by the end of Covenant.  That being said, I can understand the studio’s desire to break away from the confusing prequel mythology created by Prometheus and continued in Covenant, and get back to more of a stand-alone scary Alien adventure.  Setting this film in the time-period between Alien and Aliens was a smart choice.

I’m impressed with the ways in which Mr. Álvarez and his team were able to pay homage to Alien — flawlessly recreating the look and feel of the tech and the world, recreating many classic sound effects, even returning to a main title treatment very similar to that of the first Alien — while also introducing new characters and settings.  As I wrote above, the film looks terrific — I thought it was visually stunning.  They did a great job in creating all the new locations; the grim, beaten-down failed colony world (that reminded me of the look of Blade Runner), the gang’s small ship, and the derelict Romulus/Remus space station.

Cailee Spaeny (Pacific Rim: Uprising, Bad Times at the El Royale) is fantastic in the lead role as Rain, the young orphan trying to find a way to get herself and her “brother” off of the horrible planet on which they’re trapped.  I like the way the story keeps Rain in a somewhat passive role, at first, on the heist adventure; it’s only when things start to go south that she has no choice but to get involved.  Ms. Spaeny has big shoes to fill; this franchise has had several incredible female leads, led of course by Sigourney Weaver in her iconic role as Ripley.  I like that Rain isn’t depicted as a tough action hero; she’s rather soft-spoken.  But when the going gets tough, we see her strength.  David Jonsson is fantastic as Andy, Rain’s “brother”.  The film takes its time in giving us Andy’s story, and his character goes through several twists and turns.  I wasn’t sure about this character at first, but by the end I was very attached to him, and very impressed by Mr. Jonsson’s strong performance.  This is great work.

All of the other actors are fine, though none make too much of an impression.  Isabela Merced has strong on-screen presence as Kay — and she has a great movie scream — though I wish we knew anything more about her character than that she’d just discovered she was pregnant.  Archie Renaux plays Tyler and Spike Fearn plays Bjorn, and while both make the most out of their scenes, we don’t know much more about them than that Tyler is nice and noble and Bjron is sort of an asshole.  Aileen Wu plays the pilot Navarro; she’s got a cool look but, again, we don’t get to know her as well as I’d have liked to.

I’m going to dig deeper now, so beware SPOILERS ahead.  If you’re a fan of this franchise and haven’t yet seen Romulus, go see it!  Don’t keep reading if you haven’t seen it yet.

For the first half of the film, I was thinking to myself that I was impressed by how cleverly Mr. Álvarez managed to make a sequel to the original Alien that ignored all the baggage of all the other sequels.  Then they surprised me by tying the story to plot threads from Prometheus, specifically the Engineers’ black “accelerant” goo.  Then I was doubly impressed, because suddenly the film was also showing that it was willing to dig deeply into the mythology of this franchise.  That was cool!

To me, though, the film’s biggest weakness is there are too many callbacks, too many recreations of events we’ve seen before.  A few homages are fun.  Recreating the look of the tech of the original Alien is awesome.  But having characters say iconic lines from earlier films is annoying to me, not endearing.  Recreating iconic images, like that of Hicks teaching Ripley how to use a pulse-rifle (from Aliens), or Ripley, pulse-rifle in hand, stepping out of the elevator into smoke (from the end of Aliens), or the alien putting it’s head right up to that of a freaked-out Ripley’s head (from Alien 3), pulls me out of the story.  The whole structure of the film’s ending precisely mimics that of the original Alien in a way that, for me, undermined the story being told.  (In both films, we think we’re safe and the lead gets into their underwear for cryo-sleep, only to discover the alien is still alive and a threat.)  It was painfully obvious to me that the story wasn’t over when Rain is getting the cryo-pods ready; so that took the air out of any surprise.  Even worse, the final monster wasn’t even a Xenomorph, it was a weird alien-human hybrid that reminded me unfavorably of the ending of Alien: Resurrection (which is probably the worst of all the Alien films).  Not a good choice.

Speaking of that ending… while I loved the gross-out sequence of a character giving literal birth to that alien — every Alien movie worth its name has to have at least one really over-the-top gross-out sequence! — and while I liked the continuity that the creature’s head looked like an Engineer from Prometheus… I wish they’d been able to make that creature more interesting or scary.  Seriously, that ending didn’t work in Alien: Resurrection, and they didn’t do anything to make it work any better here.  I want the aliens to be the villain of the Alien movies, not some other weird looking creature.  (Maybe I’d feel differently if they’d come up with a better, scarier design for the creature.)

I did love getting to see a new stage in the life-cycle of the alien: the cocoon in which the chest-burster alien grew into the full-grown alien.  That was cool; I liked that it seemed to fill in a gap in what we knew of this creature.

I didn’t like that this film made the same mistake the last several Alien films have, in having the creature gestate way too quickly.  In the original Alien, Kane is alive for a good long while before the alien bursts out of his chest; in Alien 3, Ripley lives for days on the prison planet; here, Navarro checks out less than an hour after being implanted.

I liked the look of the alien here; they did a great job reproducing the classic look of the creature and making it look cool and scary.  They also did a great job with the face-huggers.  There is a LOT of face-hugger action in this film; I loved how they made them so fast and frightening.  That was very well done.  (It was super-gross seeing the long impregnating tube get pulled out of Navarro’s throat when they pull the face-hugger off of her.  Yowza!)

I LOVED how they brought back Ian Holm’s Ash (as the synthetic Rook).  That was awesome, and a super-fun surprise!  It makes perfect sense that the Company would be using another Ash-like synthetic.  I loved that continuity.  They did a strong job in recreating how the late Ian Holm looked back in 1979.  The combination of animatronics and CGI worked well.  There were some dodgy shots, but I could roll with it because I liked the idea so much.

I also quite liked the twists and turns with Andy; with his turning into a cold, Company-loyalist android after they update his operating system.  I loved the way actor David Jonsson portrayed the two very different Andys.  (I wish the film had allowed Andy to make a choice in the third act as to whether he’d choose Rain or the Company; instead, he winds up being passive to actions made by Rain.  But it works well enough for me.)

I loved the way the film’s score quoted music from across the franchise, as we start to get more connections in the film’s second half.  (I particularly enjoyed hearing the Prometheus music when we glimpse a black case like we saw in Prometheus, and then see the black “accelerant” goo.)

The biggest eye-roll of the movie for me was Kay injecting herself with the Engineers’ accelerant.  That made absolutely no sense.  Kay wasn’t even around when the characters learned what that was, so why would she even think to do that?  If the writers felt they needed to get Kay injected with the accelerant for the third-act monster mayhem, then why not just have Tyler inject her?  In the film, he almost does, because he’s desperate the save her life, but Rain stops him.  Just have him go ahead and do it.  Wouldn’t that make more sense than Kay’s injecting herself for no reason?  I also wish they hadn’t made Rain quite so super-hero impenetrable in the third act.  I just don’t believe anyone would be capable of dodging all of that floating acid in zero G… or that she wouldn’t have been smushed by the falling elevator…

Also, I’m still not sold on the title.  I wish the story gave more context to the Romulus/Remus names for the space-station’s two halves.  It would have been cool had that factored into the ending in some way.  (I also feel like Star Trek had staked a claim to the Romulus name several decades ago…) Oh well.

But even with some quibbles, I had a blast watching this film.  I’m happy to have a great new Alien film in existence!

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