Like the Terminator, Alien is a franchise in which no new installment stands a chance of being the best. The fight here is for third place, behind Ridley Scott’s chilling original and James Cameron’s action-packed sequel. Most of the subsequent efforts have catered to different tastes, leaning more towards cerebral science fiction (Prometheus), bleak character drama (Alien3), or goofy action schlock (Alien vs. Predator). With his first swing at the franchise, Alien: Romulus, director Fede Álvarez makes the daring choice to aim at the dead tonal center between Scott and Cameron’s twin masterpieces. The result is an adrenaline-fueled slasher movie in space that sacrifices the subtlety and creeping dread of the original for more shock, gore and thrilling, fist-pumping violence. It’s a shallower product than either of its inspirations, but it also has its own, distinct energy. It doesn’t totally jettison the franchise’s 45 years of baggage, but when it does, what’s left is a damn good monster movie.
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ALIEN: ROMULUS ★★★ (3/4 stars) |
The setup for Romulus is reminiscent of Álvarez’s own calling card film, 2016’s Don’t Breathe. A group of twentysomethings born into poverty on a corporate-owned mining planet seize on an opportunity to escape their miserable lot. It should be a simple heist—slip aboard a derelict spacecraft, steal the equipment they need to journey to a nicer planet, get out before it crashes. But the vessel isn’t as empty as they’d presumed. There are terrifying monsters onboard intent on either gutting or impregnating them. Will any of these young hard cases live to see their better tomorrow?
Leading this ensemble is Cailee Spaeny as Rain Carradine, the heist’s most reluctant participant and our obvious Final Girl. Spaeny gives a reliably solid performance, but the real star of the show is David Jonsson as Andy, a glitchy android who she sees as a brother. Andy was programmed to protect her when she was growing up, but now she’s become his caretaker. Their relationship is both charming and discomfiting. Andy adores Rain, but he’s programmed to. He’ll do what’s best for her at every turn, with a smile on his face, but is he also being exploited? It’s an interesting new wrinkle to the Alien franchise’s meditation on artificial intelligence, which has been depicted as either sinister or benign. As Andy, David Jonsson gets to play a little bit of both. The emotional core of Romulus is the way Rain and Andy are each transformed by their nightmare in space, and how it forces them to reevaluate each other.
This isn’t to say that Alien: Romulus is a predominantly cerebral or even emotional experience. Far from it. After roughly 40 minutes of establishing the characters and setting up potential future calamities, Romulus becomes an unrelenting thrill ride that fulfills every last one of its wicked promises.
Romulus leans harder into being a monster movie than any of its predecessors, and Álvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues seem committed to using the entire monster. Too many Alien sequels speed through the most viscerally terrifying part of the xenomorph’s bizarre life cycle, the “facehugger” stage represented by a skittering arachnid that latches to a victim’s head, forces its ovipositor down their throats, and implants them with their ultra-violent offspring. Romulus, by contrast, gives these little bastards nearly half the movie, allowing them their own chase and stalking scenes. As in Don’t Breathe, Romulus doesn’t move on to its next threat or premise until the last one is completely exhausted.
Álvarez shows admirable restraint in the introduction of the more famous eight-foot-tall adult xenomorph, treating it as an obscure new threat rather than an iconic character whose action figure stood on your cousin’s windowsill. There is a (hopefully, justified) assumption that this will be many viewers’ first Alien movie, and the effort to wring maximum suspense from the premise is valuable even to a longtime fan. The film does eventually make the typical third-act shift from horror to action, but until then, “scary” is prioritized over “cool.”
Nevertheless. Romulus still indulges in some of the worst impulses of the “requel” or “legacy sequel.” An original Alien cast member is digitally resurrected for a small role, and they look absolutely awful. This is the first new Alien film under Disney’s ownership of the franchise, and it seems as if they simply cannot resist employing this technology at every opportunity, regardless of whether or not it adds any value to the story. There are a few other cringy, incongruous nods to the franchise’s legacy that distract from what is otherwise a fully satisfying and self-contained space slasher.
The past decade has convinced audiences to expect less from Hollywood blockbusters, not just in terms of quality, but from how much of a story is told in each movie. At multiple junctures, Alien: Romulus teases a development that seems like a hook for a sequel or spin-off, but Álvarez doesn’t wait until the inevitable next Alien to play all of his cards. Romulus leaves nothing on the table. It is, for a change, an entire damn movie.
Could this be a portent of the franchise’s future? Might the xenomorph — the perfect movie monster — become less like Michael Myers and more like a zombie or vampire, a terror that can be used to tell a variety of horror stories rather than as a foil to a handful of protagonists or as installments in a dense mythology? This possibility is as exciting as the film itself.
