Alien: Romulus review
Director: Fede Álvarez
Writer: Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues
Stars: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux and Isabela Merced
Running Time: 119 minutes
Please note there may be spoilers below.
Alien Romulus confronts us with an important question: just what do we expect from sequels? To borrow the common Hollywood phrase, “the same thing, but different.” Unfortunately this doesn’t really answer the question. If we want something different, then we need to come to terms with a sequel providing us a genuinely different experience, but if we want the same experience, then we must deal with the law of diminishing returns, the fact that conventions inevitably become stale.
With Alien Romulus, Fede Álvarez is entirely here to please audiences by providing them the same conventions – a corridor based monster movie with gruesome deaths, sweaty skin and plenty of heavy breathing. Now’s a fine time to remind ourselves that Ridley Scott’s Alien is, in the clear light of day, a simple horror B-picture, one that just happens to look incredible, feel terrifying, and represent one of the best commercial examples of feminist cinema ever. But make no mistake, the bones underneath are pure genre. To put it differently, Alien is a trashy monster feature that has been elevated to a prestige picture by the extraordinary talent involved. As the expectations of audiences have soared for this legacy franchise, in a way we’ve lost track of how humble its origins were.
Alien Romulus seems acutely aware of this, for Fede Álvarez is keen to steer the series back to basics. The blue collar themes return. Our heroes are uneducated explorers (thieves). The origin of the Alien is rendered once again unimportant. We’ve been here before. Yet Álvarez manages to do what his best predecessors achieved – elevate schlockly B-movie material by making it’s lead characters likeable and the aesthetics outstanding. It’s an exciting moment to discover some of the old magic is present again, even if the experience is a reminder that this franchise is more limited than fans would like to believe.
A grounded Cailee Spaeny is Rain, a Wayland Yutani mining employee trying to fulfil a 12,000 work contract. She’s baby-faced but not naive. She cares for her adopted brother, a humanoid android named Andy (David Jonsson) whose malfunctioning, stilted conversations and movements make him bait for the more cruel personalities of the colony. They ensure the story is elevated to one of sibling love, one of caring promises to each other in a galaxy full of ruthless bureaucracy and slimy threats. In a plot from a teenage slasher movie, Rain reluctantly grasps an opportunity to escape – her ex-boyfriend invites her to join a group of young peers keen to plunder a derelict spacecraft, one with suitably dank corridors and mysterious laboratories.
Again, we’ve been here before. But remarkably Cailee Spaeny pierces through the redundant plot as the series’s most charismatic lead since Sigourney Weaver. She smart, reactive, internally anxious, a quick decision maker, all this despite the limited material. Whilst Prometheus and Alien: Covenant accustomed us to scientists and doctors, Cailee stands out as a salt of the earth woman, a survivor on the breadline. Even better is David Jonsson, who plays the innocent Andy with a delicate mix of emotional and physical authority. He’s a broken robot of awkward jitters and pained expressions. If there’s any VFX applied to his performance, it’s deftly hidden.
Analogue technology makes a welcome return. Set shortly after the events of Alien, it seems the visuals have more to do with the video game Alien Isolation than they do with Ridley Scott’s latest futuristic tales. The ship our thieves explore is a retro callback to 1970s futurism, with green CTR monitors and a soundscape full of bleeps and bloops from another time. Cinematographer Galo Olivares lights his sets in overlapping layers, effectively reminding us of the Nostromo’s greasy-green tinted nuance but later embracing the primary blues and reds of James Cameron’s Aliens to great effect.
This is probably the best looking Hollywood movie you’re likely to see this year, if only because the details of its cinematic heritage are painted on every wall. The exhausts of spaceships spit liquid, the coolant pipes leak water, the original xenomorph triumphantly returns with organic detail in tact.
We know what’s coming. It’s accurate to call this a greatest hits package, a film intermittently laced with direct callbacks to earlier entries. Entire lines of dialogue are repeated from Alien. There’s another chest-buster scene. There’s even an entire character that’s been recreated with deep-fake trickery. All of these elements are the weakest parts, only achieving a diluted thrill because we know these conventions all too well. And yet unlike The Force Awakes, the fan-service doesn’t overwhelm the experience. Whilst Fede Álvarez is using every trick in the Alien book to get his point across, he still intimately understands how to make the thrills sing within a derivative landscape.
There’s still a few surprises. For the first time, the infamous facehuggers are shown as a primary threat. Here they scuttle in terrifying groups, breaking through glass and viscerally fighting for reproduction. A set piece involving a silent ‘they can’t see us’ sneak is a highlight as it temporarily eschews jump scares for moment of quiet dread. And the best surprise of all – you continue to root for Andy and Rain because their decision making remains largely rational. They make choices that feel right. We like them enough to put ourselves in their shoes. The spine of this movie is sibling love and we want them to survive the trial.
So what is it that we expect from sequels? More of the same or something different? Or the impossible – both? After the pathetic rock-bottom of Alien vs Predator and Ridley Scott’s attempt to steep an unnecessary origin story with philosophy, Alien as a franchise needed someone to remember its core strengths – elevating monster movie material. Álvarez proves he’s fluent in the language of corridor horror, even if the fanfare remains shallow. The reality is if we want something new and different, we first have to be reminded why Alien was successful in the first place.
