2024 | rated R | starring Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson | directed by Fede Alvarez | 1h 59m | 3 1/2 out of 5 |
A lot has been written about each movie in the prime Alien quadrilogy. Regardless of what one thinks about each individual movie, the series as a whole is an artistic standout. Rare for a franchise trying to preserve what people liked about the original at all costs, Alien movies were handed over to different filmmakers to apply their own tones, flavors and visions to the central tale of a parasitic alien monster in a retro-future world. Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher (sort of) and Jean-Pierre Jeunett made 4 distinctly different takes. After a detour into Ridley Scott’s prequel series with the Prometheus movies, Alien: Romulus returns and seeks to plug itself back into the prime series. There are some inspired moments here, showing that director Fede Alvarez was the right man for the job, but ultimately this is a tale of two films here that for all of it’s good stuff, fails to establish it’s own vision for a franchise built on variety.
Rain (Cailee Spauny, Civil War) is a young miner for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation whose dream of escaping the grind are haunted when the corporation raises the credits needed to get out of her contract. This causes Rain and her protector android brother Andy to join with a group of scavengers raiding an abandoned ship just outside of orbit for it’s cryostasis technology and with it the chance to escape across the stars. Once on the ship, Rain, Andy and crew encounter a malfunctioning gravity program and a rapidly growing alien species that wiped out the former crew.
The set-up for Alien: Romulus is a knock-out and right in-line with director Fede Alvarez’s style of lean-mean chamber films. The man already stripped down and rebuilt the Evil Dead remake as well as his own chamber film Don’t Breathe. For those keeping track, yes, the set-up of a group of young thieves breaking into a place they shouldn’t be and encountering an evil inside is exactly the set-up already used in Don’t Breathe. Right off the bat, Alvarez sets up several things just right. He re-establishes that grimy, dusty, neo-future look Ridley Scott used in the original Alien. This has never been a series, at its best, that delivered a shiny, glossy sci-fi future. It feels lived-in and workman-like. Weyland still runs the entire universe in Scott’s misplaced satire of capitalism that really represents a corporatist monopoly (you don’t get as powerful as Weyland without some even bigger space government greasing the wheels for you, but that’s another essay). He also sets up Andy’s programmable state, one that gets corrupted into a robot Rain can no longer trust in one of the movie’s best plot points.
He also establishes how lean and mean this ride is going to be. The Romulus is going to crash into an asteroid belt in 36 hours, so we have a ticking clock. Then he sets-up a fun environmental mechanic, that the ship’s gravity is malfunction, flipping on and off at inopportune times. It’s shocking that we’re 7 films deep here and this is the first time we’ve gotten an action scene with a Xenomorph in zero gravity. Soon our heroes and being thrown from one disaster to the next, a chain reaction of events that will lead them into the path of the rapidly growing Xenomorphs. The first big set pieces in the film, involving a trove of charging face-huggers, is terrific. Alvarez sets the film up like a game of Mouse Trap with several fun chain-reaction sequences of environmental danger: none-better than the film’s first climax involving that gravity malfunction and some alien blood. A sequence as absurd as it is wonderfully unique. Alvarez’s use of practical puppet effects on the Xenomorphs make for some effectively slimy reveals.
Slowly and steadily, Alien: Romulus starts to fall apart. It’s tragic. Even as I was rooting for it, it kept making turns and decisions in the exact wrong directions. Shrinking away from taking the sequel into different territory and retreating back to the familiar. The movie finally ends up in a grotesque orgy of nostalgia porn. With characters brought back to life through abominable CGI and other characters quoting lines from the previous movies they would never have known about in a way that invokes cringing second-hand embarrassment. When we should be yelling at the characters to not “go in there”, I was begging that someone wasn’t going to tell the alien to “stay away from her you bitch”.
They do, because Alien: Romulus becomes a highlight reel of the previous films. Where previous movies established their own styles, this one cribs from all of them and fuses them into a single thing. The environment of Alien, the action of Aliens, the studio noted destruction of Alien 3 and the wacky mutants of Alien:Resurrection. It’s all here. Alvarez (or more than likely Fox) can’t leave well enough alone, dragging out every clever idea (like a portable x-ray that lets you see through to the alien inside your chest) or set piece until it’s been beaten to death. The film’s final climax is ripe with potential, but introduces a lot of new ideas at the last second, throws them all together haphazardly and squashes the film’s thriller elements in a flurry of unearned mayhem.
The film is gorgeous. It’s the best looking Alien movie in a very long time. But Alvarez and his movie works keeping things lean and streamlined, and in the first half at least, that’s the great alien sequel we got.