(NEXSTAR) — In space, no one can hear you… head to the cinema for yet another installment in the decades-long “Alien” franchise. It’s been seven years since the last film and 45 years since director Ridley Scott scared audiences with the first — so where does “Alien: Romulus,” now in theaters, take Hollywood’s favorite space horror story?
It turns out, by reminding audiences what they’ve always liked about “Alien.” And while this tack fails in some ways (more on that below), the “greatest hits” feeling one gets while watching “Romulus” may be just the way to re-introduce the franchise to audiences.
While “Alien” maestro Scott still serves as producer, he takes a backseat to director Fede Álvarez (“Don’t Breathe,” “Evil Dead”), who peppers the film with various aesthetic choices reminiscent of the first film (notice the opening credits font) and James Cameron’s 1986 action sequel, “Aliens,” while also imbuing the film with a slick, modern look and construction.
This melding of old and new feels like the “Alien” franchise’s version of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” the 2015 J. J. Abrams film that served as a “requel” (an internet term for movies that are both sequels and reboots) and helped launch a new trilogy in the space opera series. “Romulus” works much the same way, though it’s been called an “interquel,” since it’s set between the events of “Alien” (1979) and “Aliens” (1986). In this sense, “Romulus” also serves as the series’ “Rogue One,” too.
The set-up is familiar: A group of poor manual laborers go into space. Corporate greed and bureaucracy muck things up. Here, we meet Rain (Cailee Spaeny, “Priscilla”), an orphaned, indentured mining colony worker who teams up with friends to leave the mines and head to a terraformed colony called Yvaga.
WARNING: Spoilers ahead.
Rain is joined by her adoptive brother, Andy (David Jonsson, “Industry”), damaged but functional synthetic human created by the Weyland Yutani company. The film’s emotional core lies in the relationship between Andy and Rain, the former of whom serves only to keep Rain safe and the latter of whom is keeping a big secret from Andy.
There’s only one major problem with Rain and Co.’s plan to head to Yvaga — they need cryonic stasis chambers to survive the journey. Thankfully, there happen to be a few left behind on an abandoned space station nearby.
You can guess where this is going.
From here, Álvarez takes audiences through the expected machinations of an “Alien” movie, which generally takes viewers along the intense and graphic life cycle of the parasitic xenomorph. Álvarez’s direction shines, however, when he’s taking established “Alien” concepts and pushing them further. For instance, “Alien” fans have experienced the terror of being trapped in a room with a Facehugger — but what about a roomful of Facehuggers? And what if those scary crab creatures broke out of the lab and started chasing you en masse?
One of the film’s most inventive sequences involves the xenomorph’s deadly sulfuric acid blood and an anti-gravity machine.
The most delightful (though controversial) “Romulus” surprise comes in the film’s climax, when (major spoiler), a pregnant crew member’s fetus mutates and bursts forth — a terrifying and grotesque alien-human hybrid that Rain and her remaining crew must find a way to remove from the ship before an impending ship crash. The hybrid may conjure memories of 1997’s “Alien Resurrection,” which also features a semi-human xenomorph, but the nightmarish creature of “Romulus” flips that weirdly sad and pathetic hybrid on its head: giving audiences a truly unrelenting new monster to squirm at.
It’s the film’s climax that neatly ties the film to both prequel films (“Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant”), while also serving as a departure from those film’s scope and ambition. That sounds like a negative — and it partially is — but it also feels like a step in the right direction for the franchise.
While Scott’s “Alien” prequels are well-regarded by many people with Letterboxd accounts, the two atmospheric and odd (even by “Alien” standards) pieces were met with confusion and derision by many general audiences. Scott’s sometimes-frustrating-but-still-fantastic prequels contain lofty ideas: ancient humanoid giants called “Engineers,” who created humans, planned to use a mysterious DNA-editing black goo to wipe out the human race, but before they could, a rogue synthetic human (Michael Fassbender) released the pathogen across their home planet, wiping out their civilization. Oh yeah, the black goo can also create xenomorphs but it doesn’t always.
It’s all a lot to explain.
Luckily, “Romulus” does a pretty nimble job of including the black goo (here referred to as the “Prometheus strain”), which is explained as a pathogen extracted from xenomorphs by Weyland Yutani scientists and believed to be able to “perfect” humans by adapting their DNA for space. That’s the gist of explanation the film gives a fictional substance the internet has spent more than a decade theorizing about.
And honestly, that’s a plus.
Ultimately, “Romulus” serves as a bit of throat-clearing after two polarizing and dense movies by integrating and streamlining their larger concepts while placing them in the framework of a traditional “Alien” movie. In this sense, “Romulus” feels like an advance in movement of the franchise, if not in ambition.
It’s clear Hollywood will keep making “Alien” vehicles — a TV series titled “Alien: Earth” is set to premiere on FX next year — and for as wonderful as many consider both “Prometheus” and “Covenant” to be, “Romulus” attempts to extricate the series from the various creative corners it painted itself into. Scott’s heady prequel narrative is appreciated but where else could it possibly go? For as much as one can admire the scope, some parts of “Covenant” could make even the biggest fans wonder: “How did we get here from a simple alien-on-a-spaceship movie?”
It was time for “Alien” to just have some fun. “Romulus” feels light because it doesn’t view the “Prometheus” backstory as baggage. What’s more, while it reveres the original “Alien,” it doesn’t seem overly interested in being cheap fan service. It may be fan service but it’s not the cheap kind.
That’s not to say the movie doesn’t feature one of the most egregious fan service moments you may see this year, when one of the new characters echoes Ellen Ripley’s iconic “Get away from her, you b—h!” line. Someone in your theater will likely cheer but I groaned.
All-in-all, “Alien: Romulus” is an effective and tight 2-hour horror thriller that arrives and leaves without spilling anything on the carpet. It’s not the best dinner guest you’ve ever had but it’s not the worst, either.
In fact, you might even invite them over again just to see what happens.
Score: B+.