Familiar Ground
Uruguayan horror maestro Fede Álvarez delivers an ‘Alien’ better than many, but not even close to the first one-two punch.
Alien: Romulus
Director: Fede Álvarez • Writers: Fede Álvarez, Rodo Sayagues
Starring: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Aileen Wu
USA • 1hr 59mins
Opens Hong Kong Aug 15 • IIB
Grade: B
Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus begins in the darkness of deep space, with some kind of automated scavenger ship scouting the wreck of the cargo hauler Nostromo, looking for the frozen, perfect organism warrant officer Ripley “blew out the fucking airlock” at some unspecified time. Lightyears away on a Weylan-Yutani (uh oh) mining colony, Rain Carradine (Priscilla, Civil War’s Cailee Spaeny, making no one forget Ripley) is trying to work her way out of indentured servitude so that she and her android “brother” Andy (standout David Jonsson, Industry) can get the hell off world and away from the sunless dead-end moon they’re on. But of course in a corporate dystopia no one ever gets away from The Company, so Rain is forced to team up with a ragtag (they’re always ragtag) gang of frustrated WY chattel who have stumbled upon a derelict space station just a few space blocks away. One with enough working cryobeds to get them out of the system.
There is a very, very fine line separating getting back to basics from irritating fan service, and I’m sad to report that Álvarez falls on the wrong side of that line in the late stages of Romulus after a truly promising start. Not for the entire film, but enough to make you roll your eyes even though deep down you knew it was inevitable: that you’d get a desperate rescue on a rickety industrial elevator, a narrow escape by EVA suit, a quip here, a pulse rifle lesson there, creepily cocooned human bodies primed for birthing. For all the creative detours Álvarez takes in Romulus, and man are there some pretty huge ones, he (or overlord Disney) can’t shake franchise demands long enough to honour the source material by finding new interpretations of it, the echoes of Twitter-ish “Not my Alien” no doubt ringing in his ears. Despite all that? Romulus is still an entertaining time at the movies.
Is that Sigourney Weaver?
There’s no denying Álvarez is an excellent candidate to take Alien back to its haunted-house-in-space roots, and he’s proven his aptitude for handling gooey biological fluids (Don’t Breathe) and splattery gore (the Evil Dead reboot). He can comfortably add brutalist science fiction to his list of genre mastery (at least at the feature level) because the space action, particularly the third act impact event, in Romulus is some of the best in the series. As an interquel – no shit, that’s a thing now – landing somewhere between Ridley Scott’s original and James Cameron’s stellar Aliens, Romulus leans into the Scott aesthetic when it comes to traditional horror, and into Cameron’s faster-paced, guns and ammo vibe for the action. Nonetheless it feels as if something’s missing – or maybe it’s a matter of not enough is missing. The quiet dread, ratcheting tension and reliance on dark corners is toned down to appeal to our Insta/TikTok attention spans, which dilutes the despairing isolation. But for the most part Álvarez strikes an effective balance between the contrasting styles, at least until he starts ticking off boxes for a reference to every single Alien film.
Unofficial ragtag leader Tyler (Archie Renaux, Shadow and Bone) comes looking for Rain because he needs Andy’s WY-compatible OS to access the station once they all get off the moon. All, in this case being Tyler’s pregnant sister Kay (Isabela Merced, Madame Web), pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu), and racist (androidist?) grease monkey Bjorn (Spike Fearn). Off they go to what turns out to be a WY science station, where the science got out of control and killed everyone. We know what the science is, and it’s just a matter of time before the perfect organism known as the xenomorph starts hunting them. It’s also just a matter of time before the blaring alarms, flashing blood red lights and random wind tunnels appear alongside some kind of countdown clock.
There’s plenty to like in Romulus, and there’s plenty of vagina imagery in homage to the scads of “female other” dissertations that have come down the pipe since 1979. The bonkers final… evolution shall we call it makes you wonder what took the series so long to go there. But there’s a dissonance between the old school terror and what we know is coming that ultimately neuters that terror. When you see the curving tail it’s not quite as suspenseful as it used to be. Maybe it’s too fast. The same could be said of the skittering face huggers – now cuter than ever? Zero G acid blood, though? Cool. And that pupa state xenomorph… squirting on that dude? Holy shit.
The film’s biggest hurdle, though, may be the anonymity of the supporting crew. Returning to the intimacy of Alien, Romulus revolves around a small crew who, ironically, we never get to know. Even though Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) and poor Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) had minimal dialogue, we knew them. Parker (Yaphet Kotto) was chief engineer for a reason. Ditto for Vasquez, Apone and Gorman (Jenette Goldstein, Al Matthews and Mark Rolston). Roger Ebert once said the mark of a good film is remembering character names days later – never mind years. It’s unclear if anyone will remember Tyler, Kay or Bjorn by December. But hey. It’s still better than fucking Prometheus. — DEK