***SOME SPOILERS AHEAD***
Everyone's favorite sci-fi/horror monsters are back for another romp through Ridley Scott's grimy truckers-in-space universe, in Fede Alvarez's new film Alien: Romulus. Set about twenty years after the original film, Romulus stars Cailee Spaeny as Rain, a young colony worker attempting to flee the harsh, sunless conditions of the mining settlement she and her friends grew up on. She and her adoptive "brother" Andy, a reprogrammed synthetic, meet up with four fellow orphaned settlers and hatch a plan to capture a block of cryo-tubes from the deserted, orbiting space station Romulus so they can make the nine-year journey to the much more habitable planet of Yvaga. But it just so happens the station houses dozens of xenomorph facehuggers, grown from DNA taken from the original Nostromo alien recovered from deep space. And of course, all hell breaks loose.
As with all the films in this franchise, Alien: Romulus is superbly atmospheric and technically marvelous. The world-building is on point here; Alvarez remains true to the dingy, lived-in look Ridley and his collaborators created 45 years ago. And unlike Ridley Scott's two awful prequels, the technology in this world is actually consistent with that of the original Alien. No fancy LED screens, no three-dimensional cave-mapping drones. We're back to clunky CRT monitors and Christmas light circuit boards.
The characters as usual are pretty crudely drawn - Rain is a plucky, caring lead character, Andy is a damaged and pretty fragile android who's been programmed to take care of Rain, Rain's ex-boyfriend Tyler is a brave and capable group leader, his pregnant sister Kay is....there too, his cousin Bjorn is a jerk who hates synthetics, and Bjorn's girlfriend Navarro is the cargo ship's pilot. The script gives us just enough to care about the characters before picking them off, much as the original film did.
Structurally the story mostly hits all the familiar beats for an Alien film. Group of blue-collar space workers explores forbidding derelict place, one gets impregnated, xeno bursts out, runs amok, people die, remaining characters discover sinister Weylan-Yutani plot to utilize xenos for corporate gain, etc. But Romulus does have some very neat horror set pieces, like when the facehuggers first get out and chase our heroes all over the station, or when the group comes up with a method for removing a facehugger without killing the host, or when Rain figures out a rather ingenious way to be able to shoot at the xenos without their acidic blood eating through the ship's hull. For the most part these characters are written as smart and resourceful, as opposed to so many of the imbeciles populating some of the earlier films (Frank Elgyn from Alien Resurrection, I'm looking at you).
About halfway through this film I was thinking to myself "This might be the best Alien film since the second one." Granted there's not much competition but still, things seemed to be going pretty swimmingly. But then it started to happen....
Big, dumb, shovel-to-the-face obvious fan service burst its way through the script, in the form of four inexcusably terrible quotes from the first two films. Andy the android is responsible for three of them. When Bjorn starts giving Andy shit about being a synthetic, Andy replies "I prefer the term 'artificial person' myself." Yes, the exact phrasing Bishop used in Aliens. When a surprise passenger on the space station is discovered and hooked up to the computer so our heroes can get an exposition dump delivered by the very bad CG likeness of yet another deceased actor, he tells them "I can't lie to you about your chances, but you have my sympathies." Yes, the exact phrasing Ash used in Alien. When our heroes discover a hallway that's been overtaken by a xeno hive, Andy comments "Busy little creatures," just like Burke did in Aliens. And the worst and most egregious of all, the one that made me want to stand up in the theater and let out a Darth Vader sized "NOOOOOOOOOOO," is when Andy saves Rain from an attacking alien and intones, "Get away from her......you bitch." So if I understand this correctly, in series canon, Ellen Ripley is no longer the person who came up with that iconic line, Andy the fucking android said it 40 years earlier. Unacceptable. This moment completely took me out of the film and lost so much of the goodwill it had earned up to that point. Why do movie studios insist on shoving totally unnecessary references to previous films into new films? No one involved with this production could possibly have thought any of these lines improved the script. I refuse to believe Alvarez and his colleagues are so obtuse.
There are also multiple visual callbacks to earlier films, such as Tyler showing Rain how to use a pulse rifle, a la Hicks and Ripley, or Rain in her underwear slinking into a space suit a la the end of Alien. Do we need to repeat EVERY moment from the old films?
There are also multiple visual callbacks to earlier films, such as Tyler showing Rain how to use a pulse rifle, a la Hicks and Ripley, or Rain in her underwear slinking into a space suit a la the end of Alien. Do we need to repeat EVERY moment from the old films?
So on balance I'd call Alien: Romulus a solid effort, falling somewhere between "near-miss" and "one of the better sequels in the series." There were some third-act shenanigans I wasn't crazy about; for some reason they decided to recycle one of the least popular elements from Alien Resurrection. Was Alvarez trying to prove to himself he could execute this particular plot twist better than Joss Whedon? Anyway, the film has fun exploring this detailed universe and introduces some new spins on familiar xenomorph carnage, but often can't get out of its own way due to some just atrocious, fan-servicey, unforced errors. Note to Disney/Fox: STOP DOING FAN SERVICE. It doesn't ever make your movie better.
If I were going by the Roger Ebert rule of "3 stars is a recommendation, 2.5 stars is a non-recommendation," Alien: Romulus should probably sit at 2.75, but I'll be generous and give it the trifecta. If you enjoy Alien films you'll like this one - it's pretty, pretty, pretty good, but Prey it ain't. I'm still, STILL waiting for someone to have the balls to make a sequel where the xenomorphs finally make it to Earth and we get to see what would happen, along with what Earth looks like in this universe.
I give Alien: Romulus *** out of ****.
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