45 years after Ridley Scott made a milestone in horror movie history with the original HR Giger-steeped Alien, and with more years after rather decisive at best sequels and prequels, Fede Alvarez decided to throw his hat into the ring with his own followup to deep space phallic extraterrestrial cinema. Between nasty cases of stomach sickness and face-huggers, much of what the Alien series did has been imitated dozens or times or become as much of pop culture staples as anything, so how did Alvarez go about putting his own touch on it?
Fairly simply, as it turns out—by going back to basics, but simply executing it with enthusiasm. Alien: Romulus sets itself up pretty well with the opening scene, which calls back to the original film in ways I actually didn’t expect nor think of, and ramps up a nice sense of escalating creepiness very well while also at the same time indeed doing something new with the titular organism. That by itself got me in, and thankfully, most of the rest of the film carries on from there.
The biggest selling point is the visual sense—Alvarez returns to what some other works have done in imitating the 70s-80s conception of the future, complete with DOS monitors and chunky keyboards, but also giving it all that sense of worn grit that the 1979 film did very well. Each area has atmosphere--the earlier scenes are largely set on a corporate space colony owned by the omnipresent Weyland-Yutani company, where we get to see everything we need to know about this future with but a few visual cues and environment, which I always like. Later on we also have some genuinely beautiful space borne shots of stations and planetary rings—there’s a better sense of scale in this one than certain other films of this time, and on a technical level I give Alvarez major props throughout.
Our main leads are colony orphan Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her android friend Andy (David Jonsson), a malfunctioning model picked up by more despondent locals. With not much left to lose, both are roped on a mission by another group of young people lead by Archie Renaux to steal from a seemingly deserted station in orbit—until we find out it’s deserted for a reason.
Johnson as Andy steals the show essentially, as his character twists and turns in his allegiances while still keeping the viewer questioning how loyal he remains to Rain even as he upgrades himself. The rest of the characters aren’t anything to write home about, but mostly do their job, being annoying if they’re supposed to be annoying. A lot of what we see is technically carried over from past films, but at least with an effort to put a new spin on it—and once again, it’s all done with a solid sense of style, bringing back more practical effects to give it that visceral feeling so lacking in Scott’s own entries in the last decade or so. The key is using the old in creative ways we haven’t seen before—like one tense and very nicely done moment involving zero-gravity, shall we say.
For the fans, there’s no shortage of call-backs—there’s one major cameo that actually does play a critical role in the plot, and I was relieved to find that it was executed also with more practical on-set effects as opposed to some AI necromancy. One line that folks will remember also comes back…in one moment I felt went a little bit too far if I’m being honest.
Now, if there’s one flaw to pick, it’s probably the pacing, which can be a bit stop-start—but near the end, there is something that turns out to be one of the most memorable aspects, and is Alvarez trying something new after paying a lot of homage. It does prove actually genuinely disturbing and did shock the person I saw this with, so props there—I confess, after some uncertainty, I enjoy it the more I think on it!
Overall, this was certainly a film I had fun with, and while with some minor flaws and nits to pick I felt worked in bringing back the series to the current age while still paying tribute to the seventies-styled classic of yore. What we see feels solid and real as it once did, and stylish enough to catch the eye—it may not match what Ridley Scott and James Cameron codified in decades past, but it complements them fine enough, and does seem to make it work for audiences of now. In our age of reboots and resuscitations, this is one I mostly can get behind.
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