Alien: Romulus (2024)
Directed by: Fede Alvarez
Written by: Fede Alvarez, Rodo Savagues
Starring: Archie Renaux, Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Isabela Merced
USA
IN CINEMAS NOW
RUNNING TIME: 119 mins
REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera
Between the events shown in Alien and Aliens. Ripley hasn’t long killed that Xenomorph. A Weyland-Yutani space probe collects the creature. Meanwhile orphan Rain Carradine, an orphan, works with her adoptive brother Andy, a reprogrammed synthetic human, at the colony Jackson’s Star. After her contract is forcibly extended by Weyland-Yutani, her ex-boyfriend Tyler persuades her to join an expedition to a derelict spacecraft to retrieve cryostasis chambers. These chambers will allow Rain and her friends, plus Andy, to escape to the planet Yvaga. However, the spacecraft turns out to be a Weyland-Yutani research station. While retrieving the stasis chambers, Tyler, Bjorn, and Andy accidentally revive frozen facehuggers that have been stored, while Rain, by installing a chip intohim which overrides s lockdown, unintentionally makes Andy loyal solely to Weyland-Yutani….
Long-running franchises tend to be similar in the way that they evolve. Every now and again there’s a sense that things have gone too far, whether it’s being too silly, having gotten too far from the original concept, whatever. Sometimes it’s felt that a reboot is necessary, but more often just taking things closer to the way they used to be is considered enough. This is pretty much the case with the latest instalment of the Alien series, a series which many felt had lost its way a bit, declining box office seeming to prove the point. While it’s a bit sad that Ridley Scott won’t get to finish his conceptually very flawed but certainly not uninteresting series of sidestep Alien films, it has freed him up to make, after a blip in his career where it really felt that he had become a shadow of his former self, films which he seems to be more invested in. Series fans seem to be roughly equally divided on all this stuff which Prometheus introduced; the ideas did often provoke thought but were often poorly presented, and the horror element had been seriously diminished. Of course it might have helped if one particular scene hadn’t been cut, and that there weren’t several scenes which were just plain stupid. Alien: Covenant gave the public a bit more of what they wanted but seemed to be a bit lost, directionless – and lets not get into all those contradictions with established Alien lore [yes I know they’re explained on the internet but they should have been explained in the movie so in a way they still count as problems]. So now we have Alien: Romulus, which is modelled very much on the first Alien despite being much more action orientated. It has a general “back to basics” approach, though it goes too far in fan service; you’re never more than a few minutes away from some cringey nostalgia baiting which temporarily takes you out of the movie – and that’s a shame because Fede Alvarez has typically given us an often exciting if somewhat impersonal product with a lot of tense and scary sequences despite a rather underwhelming lead.
After some very mood-setting titles set to music which incorporates elements of Jerry Goldsmith’s score from Alien – though elsewhere composer Benjamin Wallfisch avoids doing such referencing and produces a decent if unremarkable soundtrack as is very common these days – we open with a direct follow-on from Alien, with a space probe investigating the wreckage of the USCSS Nostromo where most of that film was set, retrieving a small organic object. Transferred into a larger vessel, the object is opened and part of it removed from the room; the other part is focused on, revealing the shape of a Xenomorph within. But hang on! No explanation is given as to how the alien that was blown out of the shuttle’s airlock by Ripley and incinerated in its engine thrusters is still alive and intact. Not a good start, is it! Then we meet our heroine who immediately isn’t very interesting at all, but fortunately we’re also introduced to her android adoptive brother Andy who’s easily the best character in the film and one of the best in the whole franchise. A quite wonderful Davis Jonsson in the part provides not just some surprisingly welcome humour but is genuinely believable, though when the most human character in your film isn’t actually human that’s a bit of a problem. Having worked the contracted amount of hours requires, Rain wants to leave the planet for a new life on the distant Yvaga III; however the clerk instead doubles her contracted time, and an attack on Andy by three teenage punks prevents her from arguing further. Shortly after, Rain’s ex-boyfriend Tyler contacts her and asks to meet at their ship, the hauler “Corbelan IV”. Also present are Tyler’s sister Kay, his younger cousin Bjorn, and their pilot, Bjorn’s girlfriend Navarro. Character introductions are quite good, mostly lacking in that forced nature of so many similar films these days.
Tyler explains that a derelict spacecraft belonging to that nasty company Weyland-Yutani is coming close to the planet, and is due to crash into its rings in around 36 hours; the manifest for the station includes multiple cryostasis chambers, which if salvaged would allow them to finally go to Yvaga III. Tyler contacted Rain because, as a Weyland-Yutani synthetic, Andy can interface with the station’s computer MU-TH-UR 9000 and release any locks they may encounter. They fly to the spacecraft, which is revealed to be the “Renaissance” – a Weyland-Yutani research station divided into parts Romulus and Remus, a reference of course to a Roman legend. While retrieving stasis chambers, Tyler, Bjorn, and Andy accidentally revive frozen facehuggers and trigger a lockdown which is stopped when Rain installs a chip from a damaged android, Rook, into Andy, granting him access to the station while also updating his thought processing and general efficiency. Unbeknownst to the others, this also changes his “prime directive”, making him loyal solely to Weyland-Yutani, which we know is not going to be good. Nor is the discovery that Kay is pregnant. A facehugger latches onto Navarro, and Rain reactivates Rook, who discloses that the station’s crew was killed by the Xenomorph and its clones. While Tyler tries to remove the creature, Rook warns it may have implanted a “seed”. Despite Andy’s attempts to stop him, Bjorn flees with Navarro on the “Corbelan”. A chestburster emerges from someone causing the hauler, with Kay and Bjorn aboard, to crash into the Romulus hangar, jeopardising the station’s orbit and leaving less than an hour before it collides with Jackson’s planetary rings. This is a truly exciting set piece with excellent technical work, though it feels a bit gratuitous, as if it was felt that there had to be a large scale action sequence at this place in a film which spends a lot of time on buildup, even though it seems positively fast paced compared to Alien; but would we want it any different? Probably not.
Kay is knocked unconscious from the impact and the chestburster escapes into the ship. A great deal after this can be predicted, though certainly not everything even though most situations are variations on ones we’ve seen before, and not just ones from Alien films. Alvarez is well practised in putting together horror sequences, so a lot of the ones here are very expertly paced and staged. Are there too many of them? Possibly, and the climax goes 0n for rather too long, while most of the cast do seem to be killed off rather too quickly, though Alvarez is able to find a nice middle ground between the strong gore that today’s audience would generally expect and the more suggestive approach of the 1979 flick which, aside from the still horrifying chest burster and Ash’s head being knocked off, is actually pretty restrained. Alien: Romulus contains some very graphic shots but sometimes also leaves things to our imagination. Technically it’s superb, and I’m not just referring to the production design which becomes more and more H. R. Giger-like while still retaining its own identity. The special effects are superb, and this is largely because CGI has been combined with traditional ways of doing these things such as models and even suits. The space scenes are astonishingly realistic and even sometimes rather beautiful if you like such stuff [I do]. Is this the first time that we’ve properly seen a fully realised Xenomorph in the flesh? More scenes feature the facehuggers, though the fear they inspire lessens once we’ve seen them being rather too easily fought off. However, a certain creature at the end is genuinely unsettling in appearance, even though one can question whether it should have appeared at all!
I’m sure that I’m not alone in wishing that all that Prometheus stuff had been ignored, and that the screenplay by Alvarez and Rodo Savagues had not attempted to connect the four “traditional” Alien movies with the Scott “prequels”. However, it does do this surprisingly well while still keeping things fairly simple. Of course some gaps in logic do exist if you’re the type to think about such stuff as you walk or drive home from the cinema, such as the “Company” having left a space station out in space carrying something which is very important to them for 170 days without sending out a salvage mission. Huh? And, while Jonsson is superb, most of the other cast members fare considerably less well. Cailee Spaeny interacts with her co-stars well enough, but is rather dull, or was maybe just asked to be rather dull, the filmmakers perhaps having gone too far in not going for a Sigourney Weaver-type, which makes some of her heroics at the end seem even more silly than they already do. You may or may not have heard that a certain cast member from 1979 returns via the miracle [some of us would say nightmare] of digital graphics. Apparently said actor’s family were asked about this and they were okay about it, but it seems a bit disrespectful to me. Perhaps more importantly, aside from the increasingly pertinent question of whether they should just because they could, the digital recreation of a face here just doesn’t look that great. It’s certainly not terrible, but they still haven’t perfected this kind of thing yet, and here it’s still distracting enough to make one wonder if, at the very least, a subtler approach would have been preferable.
The increasingly irritating nostalgia baiting approaches breaking the fourth wall at times – though to be fair a lot of younger viewers wouldn’t even pick up on it, and it’s still probably possible to understand most of what’s going even if you haven’t seen the other films, which is actually quite an achievement really. Despite some notable missteps, Alien: Romulus is directed by a guy who obviously loves this franchise; his film exudes this. I’d certainly like to see him do the next one, but he doesn’t seem to like doing sequels, does he?
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