Alien: Romulus
The new Alien movie wears the franchise's skin but neglects its soul.
The Alien films play host to iconic nightmare imagery: a scuttling creature that lays its eggs inside a human, a glistening monster with acid for blood, vulnerable humans stranded in space. Those same humans are exploited by their employer in a conspiracy to collect samples of alien life for scientific development. Like the titular alien, which takes on the form of a warped version of its host, the series readily adapts itself to different readings and directorial visions. The unifying theme among these disparate movies—beyond the alien itself—is that exploitation is the ultimate act of evil.
The Alien series continually reharvests its own DNA, reinventing itself with each new outing. Alien is cold, calculating science-fiction horror; Aliens is action powered by a pumping heart. Alien 3 is a meditative prison drama, and Alien: Resurrection is an acidic farce. The twin prequels Prometheus and Alien: Covenant take a detour toward introspection about creation myths, the origins of humanity, and whether we can escape the cycle of sin and death. Alien: Romulus slots neatly between Alien and Aliens in the franchise timeline, looping back to the series’ preoccupation with blue-collar workers being exploited for profit. This time, the main characters consciously try to break out of the cycle of exploitation in which they’re trapped by stealing precious resources from a derelict space station. Romulus is a new genre mash-up in the series: Alien as a heist movie.
Rain (a game stand-in for Ellen Ripley played by Cailee Spaeny) and Andy (David Jonsson, successfully walking a difficult tightrope with his role) live on a mining colony controlled by Weyland-Yutani, stuck trying to earn their way off-planet under ever-increasing work quotas. The company won’t let them go; their parents have recently succumbed to disease contracted from working in the mines. Residents of the colony are addressed only as “workers,” defined only by their ability to generate a profit for the company. Rain and Andy have nothing to lose, so they join a ship crewed by Rain’s friends, aiming to steal the valuable resources necessary for a long-term spaceflight from a derelict research facility orbiting their planet. They’ll find more than they’d bargained for on the space station.
Writer/director Fede Álvarez makes decent work of establishing the stakes and a unique sense of character for each member of the crew. He sketches out the setting using swift strokes: a ship hidden in the void of space until the lights come on, illuminating floating metal wreckage where the light hits its surfaces, leaving the rest of the structure shrouded in mysterious shadow. On a technical level, Romulus is impressive. The movie has a consistent sense of physics that grounds it in a believability that makes the science-fiction elements all the more frightening. When a ship is knocked off course, it keeps going, crashing into anything else in its way. When the station’s artificial gravity cycles on and off, we understand the consequences intuitively: a rat floats in zero-G, then falls to the floor when the gravity kicks in, then floats again when the system cycles off. The stakes are increased when humans are added to the equation: the bigger the person, the harder the fall.
This sense of consistency stems in part from the movie’s use of practical, in-camera special effects—by this point, one of Álvarez’s calling cards as a director. Romulus’s action sequences braid together animatronics, CGI, and even stop-motion almost seamlessly. When a facehugger alien scuttles past the camera, its movement is spider-like; the robotic body has a heft to it. The film revels in the goopy imagery of its predecessors in the series. It’s clear the filmmakers love the earlier Alien movies, seeding Romulus with set design details that call back to previous movies, all the way down to the beer cans the characters drink from, which appear to be replicas of the beer present on the Nostromo of the original Alien. Álvarez and crew seem to have set themselves the task of one-upping the original’s stunning, nightmarish practical effects, most memorably in a shot in which an entire nest of facehuggers pry open a metal door, their limbs poking through the gap like the legs of a horribly jointed spider.
This desire to simultaneously pay homage to and surpass previous Alien movies is Romulus’s calling card and its weakest point. The sets are faithful to the original movie especially, dotting in details like the dippy bird that appears in every film. Some of these details are organic—the semiotic standard signs around the ship signaling which doors are airlocks are a nice holdover—while some feel forced, like a shot of Rain descending a ladder that focuses on her limited-edition Reeboks, a callback to the shoes Sigourney Weaver wears as Ellen Ripley in Aliens. Recycling the plots of previous Alien movies is to be expected, given that these films are all tonal variations on a shared theme, but the references sprinkled throughout the film are legion, calling so much attention to themselves that they might as well be metatextual commentary on the series as a whole. Worse, the script doles out iconic lines from previous entries in the series for no better reason than to remind the audience that they are watching an Alien movie. These quotations feel like unnecessary frills on a story that works best when it’s efficient and mean, unconcerned with the enjoyment of the audience watching.
Ugliest of all is the film’s use of the image of a deceased actor as a storytelling device, resurrecting them for a role they’ve played before in the series. The choice feels exploitative. The entire point of the Alien series is that exploitation is the most evil act: the alien exploits human bodies as a cradle for its young, horribly killing the host in the process; the company uses human beings as tools to try to capture alien specimens for their own use and profit, rescinding all other priorities, including the sanctity of human life. It’s ghoulish to use the image of a dead person, who is unable to consent to such a performance, in order to weave in additional references to previous movies in the series. The filmmakers fall on the side of Weyland-Yutani by turning this actor’s image into a tool to goose the plot.
Yet the decision is in keeping with the Alien franchise as a whole. Each subsequent movie cannibalizes its predecessors, recombining their DNA with elements from other genres to make something sort of new and, in the case of Romulus, utterly vampiric. As an aesthetic exercise, the movie is a remarkable mimic and an impressive demonstration of Álvarez’s ability to stage a set piece. As a metacommentary on previous Alien movies, Romulus works entirely too well and also not at all: a Schrödinger’s cat wrapped up in a freaky alien skin.—Sarah Welch-Larson
★★☆☆
Alien: Romulus is in theaters nationwide now.
Sarah has a feminist, theological book about the Alien series called Becoming Alien: The Beginning and End of Evil in Science Fiction’s Most Idiosyncratic Film Franchise, where she engages in depth with some of the ideas she’s touched on in this review. You can buy it from the publisher here.