Review: ALIEN: ROMULUS

 by Rob DiCristino

In space, no one can hear your fan service.

Spoilers ahead.

Is there a more damning metaphor for the current state of popular cinema than the opening sequence of Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus? As the derelict pieces of the Nostromo float idly in space, a computer identifies something significant in the wreckage: a chunk of intellectual-property-shaped debris that, despite the disaster around it, remains immensely valuable to its creator, 20th Centu…the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. That’s right: It’s the original alien from the original Alien, a biological specimen so resilient that it’s endured the crushing pressure of sequels and spin-offs for almost fifty years. And why not? Ridley Scott and Dan O’Bannon’s vision is brilliant in its simplicity, a haunted house slasher that pits an unstoppable killing machine against a crew of unsuspecting space truckers in the ultimate triumph of human ingenuity over cold, merciless instinct. As that crew is slowly reduced to one legendary heroine, Ridley Scott asks us to consider — and challenge — the evolutionary subtext behind our urge to overcome, our need to survive. Fede Alvarez’s Romulus, on the other hand, asks, “What if there was another Alien film?”

There’s a certain charm to that unpretentious approach, of course, especially for audiences who’ve endured decades of convoluted sequels and Scott’s own ponderous, if underrated, prequels. Indeed, Romulus starts off strong: After foreshadowing the Xenomorph’s return — set your internal movie clocks to t-minus forty minutes — we travel to a Weyland-Yutani mining colony that hasn’t seen the sun in, well, ever. It’s a grim, hopeless existence for Rain (Cailee Spaeny, Hollywood’s Next Big Thing), an indentured laborer who toils to earn a travel permit back to her home planet. Orphaned early on, her closest company is Andy (David Jonsson), a discarded synthetic — “I prefer the term ‘artificial person,’” Andy, who has seen Aliens, protests — whose verbal tics and physical glitches render him a target for constant harassment from his peers. Rain’s found family is rounded out by the usual cast of teen movie miscreants: Her hunky ex-boyfriend (Archie Renault), his pregnant sister (Isabela Merced), a fast-talking wild card (Spike Fearn), and a flinty tech wizard (Aileen Wu).

Hunky ex’s plan? Grab a transport, steal cryo-sleep pods from a decommissioned space station orbiting above, and make the nine-year journey back home. Like any good Final Girl, Rain weighs the risks and accedes, cautiously optimistic that pillaging from the Renaissance — which is split into two halves, Romulus and Remus — will be worth the risk. Once aboard, the team has just over a day to recover the pods before the station crashes into the rings around the planet, and, unbeknownst to them, about forty minutes — check that; about fifteen now — before the Xenomorph specimens aboard break loose and wreak their usual havoc. And you know what? We’re in! After probing the existential horizon in Prometheus and Covenant, Romulus returns us to the chilling claustrophobia of Scott’s original adventure. We’re still interrogating human brutality, of course — the mining colony is a powerful symbol of corporate oppression, as is the black Andy, a literal slave who is frequently reminded of his non-personhood — but Alvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues seem focused on generating the visceral thrills that made Alien so iconic in the first place.

And Romulus does have thrilling moments, owing mostly to Alvarez’s choice to construct it with miniatures, animatronics, and full-sized sets whenever possible. In an age when audiences have all but acquiesced to the weightless artificiality of green screens and motion-capture — when even the latest Mad Max film suffers from a nagging tinge of unreality — Alvarez’s Herculean focus on texture and depth is a sight to behold. The director and his design team have recreated Alien’s used, industrial future in painstaking detail, an effort that pays off in spades in a large format like IMAX. Seasoned genre fans will be delighted by the old-school rod puppetry — get ready for some radio-controlled face-huggers and stunt performers wearing fully-articulated Xenomorph headpieces — and cinematographer Galo Olivares’ thoughtful approach to lighting and lensing these real environments is sure to give younger audiences weaned on Marvel movies a new appreciation for the analog methods that he and Alvarez so clearly delight in employing.

But for all the loving homage, for all the work done to recreate Alien’s visual aesthetic, Alvarez and Sayagues’ screenplay so catastrophically fails to properly service its characters that all the chest-bursting and pulse-rifling in the universe couldn’t make us care whether they live or die. Whereas Scott’s film took the time to set interpersonal stakes, to use the crew’s conflicting ideologies and ulterior motives as the crux of its drama, Romulus largely loses interest in its cast at the first sign of extraterrestrial trouble. This is never worse than with Andy, whose struggle for self-definition and social acceptance — his faulty machinery also connotes autism — is waylaid by a complicated alternate personality plot that spoils any meaningful development and renders his and Rain’s would-be emotional catharsis totally inert. Andy’s threads are further tangled by the arrival of a legacy character whose recreation is so dramatically redundant and ethically catastrophic that it could only have come from brainless studio executives determined to forge needless connections between their IPs.

Add in an exhausting double climax and some of the most painful fan service in recent memory — Have you ever wanted to hear cinema’s most iconic line delivered with the enthusiasm and grace of a deflating balloon? — and Romulus’ collapse becomes even more precipitous and regrettable. There’s no doubt that Alvarez is a talented stylist who rightfully jumped at the chance to explore yet another one of his favorite cinematic worlds, but perhaps the attention paid to slime, klaxons, and computer consoles might have been better spent on character and plotting. The Don’t Breathe filmmaker has a gift for generating shock but still struggles to understand that true tension comes through intervals, with patience and investment made toward a cumulative payoff. Romulus isn’t the worst Alien film by any stretch of the imagination, but it is perhaps the most disappointing. There was an idea here, a kernel of inspiration that could have taken the series beyond its roots and into a new era (era) of discovery. Instead, it’s back to cryo-sleep, drifting listlessly again through the empty void.

Alien: Romulus is in theaters now.