Review: Alien: Romulus

Director:  Fede Álvarez

Stars:  Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Spike Fearn

At one point in time I had the habit of referring to the Alien series as ‘my Star Wars‘ – denoting a sci-fi universe in which I was prone to rosy-eyed fandom at best, gate-keeping at worst. I’d like to think I’ve shrugged off most of my more negative fanboy tendencies. Matured. But the sobriquet might be more apt now than ever as the series takes its most self-conscious turn toward content-focused nostalgia bait. With Noah Hawley’s TV series also on the horizon, the Star Warsification of Alien has begun.

Discounting the AvP films (obviously), the Alien franchise has endured thanks to its risk taking, shifting tones and genres over the course of the ensuing sequels. Even Ridley Scott’s two divisive prequels proudly, stubbornly swung for the fences, refusing the pander or take the easy route. Fede Álvarez’s effort – the first to be made since this universe was swallowed whole by the House of Mouse – takes place in the same bridging space that the sensational videogame Alien: Isolation inhabited, between Alien and Aliens. It’s brutal. Ruthlessly efficient. Doggedly faithful to established aesthetics. And the first film in the core canon to feel decidedly shorn of innovation or character.

Rain (Cailee Spaeny) is an early twenty-something bonded into servitude to the mega-evil Weyland-Yutani Corp on mining colony Jackson Star; a dismal little planet where the sun never shines. She and her nearest and dearest packrats see potential salvation when an unmanned derelict drifts into the colony’s orbit. The plan is to utilise the craft’s cryopods to sleep their way to the nearest habitable star system. With the aid of her ‘brother’ Andy (David Jonsson) – an obsolete and poorly salvaged synthetic retooled by her deceased father – Rain rolls the dice and takes a six-strong crew of young hopefuls on the hunt. The derelict transpires to be a company R&D station, itself the site of a far more terrible salvage operation – that of the xenomorph jettisoned by Ripley into the deeps of space.

Our motley crew’s shocking youth and inexperience is perhaps Romulus’ boldest gambit in mixing up the Alien template, and Álvarez and regular co-writer Rodo Sayagues feather plenty of scrappy potential into the bunch, including a secret pregnancy to underscore the propulsive desire for a better life elsewhere. There’s an insurgency to their mission. A fight for the future that’s likely to resonate with their respective audience demographic. But also a conspicuous naivety. Even Andy is locked into a holding pattern of boyish shyness, a sympathetic Peter Pan program with a penchant for terrible dad jokes. Jonsson may be the cast’s secret weapon, and its a nice deviation from the outwardly Machiavellian legacy of David.

Once it gets down to brass tacks, Romulus has enough neat set pieces and lore expansions in it to pass muster. A missing link in the alien’s life-cycle is gooily explored in a manner that Giger himself would have probably found pleasingly vaginal, while sections of the story that tinker with climate and gravity conditions allow for some smart experiments in tension and tactics. Romulus feels keenly indebted to the mechanics of the series’ video game heritage in these sections, but Álvarez pulls them off with a kind of gruff, dogged panache.

The science experiments aboard the twin vessels Remus and Romulus might subvert the need for the series’ iconic leathery eggs, but there are more than enough problematic Easter eggs to contend with, and its the mire of overt and artless nods and rehashes that start to become a millstone around the movie’s neck. Inelegantly shoehorned drinking birds and prototype pulse rifles are one thing, but Romulus conceals a wildly unnecessary and completely unsuccessful bit of graverobbing in its darkest depths. Artless and tasteless, the only thing worse than the choice itself is how often the movie uses it; a piece of deep-fakery that also muddles the story’s own clarity regarding the moral principles of AI technology.

Álvarez and Sayagues are clearly dedicated fans of the franchise, but this isn’t always put to good use. Lifting iconic dialogue wholesale from past (and, technically, future) movies and putting it in the mouths of their young pups comes off as awkward and ill-advised, and only encourages some ultimately unflattering comparisons. Similarly, the story’s ‘surprise’ third act manages to fold nicely into a lineage of go-for-broke genetic experiments gone awry… but it too feels lifted – start-to-finish – from another of the series’ sequels. In the end, Alien: Romulus cribs a little bit of something from all pre-existing instalments in the franchise, too often eclipsing its own potential to surprise or subvert. This is the first main movie to feel like an anxious, needy copy of its parent pictures, and it feels minor as a result.

Still, as a mean little Dead Space runaround in the Weyland-Yutani universe, it’s decent enough. Safe, sanitised and lacking a little in conviction, it often excels on a technical front, and – that one contentious element aside – the mix of practical and digital effects work is top drawer. Spaeny caps quite a versatile year with Rain – an eminently likable Ripley facsimile – and the aforementioned Jonsson is the clear acting breakout. If only it didn’t all feel so rehearsed and routine. From the facehuggers to the xenomorphs, there’s little sense of the sheer terror these perfect organisms are capable of conjuring. It’s all rather functional. Robotic, ironically.

If Alien is to forge ahead on new fronts it’s going to need to jettison its slavish relationship with its own past, but I fear how that need tessellates with the mandates of Disney. Scrabbling for its own identity, the series is presently subsumed by the blinkered best interests of The Company…