This coming weekend will see the release of the new sequel Alien: Romulus from the Disney-owned 20th Century Studios. Laughing Place was provided with the opportunity to see the movie early, and below are my thoughts.
Right off the bat here I want to establish that Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi / horror hit Alien and its equally well-regarded 1986 James Cameron-helmed sequel Aliens are two of my favorite movies ever made. In fact I’d go so far as to say they are both pretty close to perfect films, and that the numerous other sequels that have followed over the decades since then have generally followed the law of diminishing returns. Most recently, Scott returned to the franchise for the well-crafted but perhaps overly ponderous prequels Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017), and now director Fede Álvarez (of Don’t Breathe and the 2013 Evil Dead remake) has been assigned the task of bringing the concept back to its roots. I’m pleased to report that he does so successfully, though the latest entry in the property– entitled Alien: Romulus– is not without its flaws.
Our protagonists this time around are back to being sub-working-class grunts slaving away for the omnipresent and oppressive Weyland-Yutani Corporation– there’s the central character Rain (played by Cailee Spaeny from Alex Garland’s Civil War), who’s trying to work off enough debt to escape her dystopian surroundings with her adoptive and endearingly defective android brother Andy (David Jonsson from the BBC show Industry)– essentially the Alien series’ first robot on the far end of the autism spectrum. Screwed over by the company one too many times, Rain and Andy fall in with a bad crowd of scavengers (Morbius’s Archie Renaux, Transformers: The Last Knight’s Isabela Merced, The Batman’s Spike Fearn, and newcomer Aileen Wu) who want to try and pull off a heist on a derelict WY research station named… you guessed it: Romulus.
Earlier in the movie’s opening scene, we saw a drone collect [SPOILER] from the wreckage of [SPOILER], and that recovered artifact becomes the catalyst for the downfall of both Romulus’s crew and Rain’s friends, who you can probably also guess start to bite it one-by-one after they come into contact with some familiar creepy-crawlies aboard the station. Some of this is of course already treading familiar territory, but what makes it interesting is how these new characters react to situations that we in the audience have experienced previously more times than we can count. The real standout here is Jonsson– why are the androids always the most memorable characters in these movies?– who gets a switch flipped partway through the story, altering his personality and showing off the actor’s sizable skills in embodying what are basically two dramatically different roles.
The Alien movies have always thrived on simplicity, and it’s when things start getting over-complicated that the franchise starts to go off the rails. It can be a difficult thing to balance while bringing new ideas to the concept, I’m certain, but Álvarez does so with a steady hand, delivering a more-than-satisfying number of thrills, scares, and gross-out moments that are sure to please fans of this series. But it’s when the director and his co-screenwriter Rodo Sayagues (also from Don’t Breathe) lean too far into that fan-service that my eyes started to roll– at one of the more egregious points I even let out an audible groan. It’s possible to make a sequel that references the iconography and continuity of its beloved predecessors without directly quoting them, be it visually or in literal dialogue, and I wish that this creative team had left the most obvious examples of that inclination on the cutting-room floor.
There’s also a couple iffy example of visual effects that border on the uncanny valley (think Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian), and those beats took me out of the film, though when the creatures exist practically they’re still as bone-chilling as they were 45 years ago. And ultimately, there’s a whole lot more to like than to dislike in Romulus. Even when I was ready to call the movie a qualified triumph by around the false dawn, the revelation of its nightmare-inducing third-act threat made me respect it even more. If anything, Fede Álvarez has proven that when it’s in the right hands, the Alien franchise still has some juice left in it. And for fans of atmospheric, slow-burn horror set in the desolate void of outer space, this installment is probably the closest anyone has come to recapturing the spirit and tone (mashing up the sheer existential terror of Alien with the thrumming, gung-ho action of Aliens) from the original two.
Alien: Romulus will be released into theaters nationwide this Friday, August 15th.
My rating: 3 ½ out of 5 drops of white android blood.