When it comes to ethically dubious DNA-splicing lab experiments with a medium-to-high failure rate, Hollywood definitely knows what time it is. Those pony-tailed execs love nothing more than to test out a dodgy-looking booster, or give the green light to a high-wire surgery which involves fusing two genetically-competing organisms together – to hell with the results!
Indeed, just like the comically nefarious Weyland-Yutani Corporation, whose operatives go to self-annihilating ends in their attempts to preserve a specimen of the vaunted evolutionary miracle, the Xenomorph, Hollywood too just keeps hatching new crazy schemes to keep these fetish-styled, acid-blooded murder geckos on our screen. Thus, welcome to the seventh canon entry into the Alien saga, this time brought to you by genre journeyman Fede Alvarez – the guy known for his very bad remake of Evil Dead.
First thing’s first: timeline. So, Alien: Romulus takes place between the events of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), with the film opening on a successful (but unwise) salvage mission to locate the floating corpse of the Xenomorph that Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley blasted out of the airlock in the first film. We’re left to guess how that all turned out.
Down on the ground, The Company’s attempts to terraform planets for human habitation are not going so well, with industrial disease from strip mining ripping through the population. Rain Caradine (Cailee Spaeny) and her synthetic sidekick Adam (David Jonsson) want off this rock, but The Company has other ideas. A tearaway gang of similarly-miffed rebels have hatched a plan to break free of their sorry lot by nipping up to the dormant space station that’s hovering ominously overhead, pinching the unused cryo chambers and taking a nine year sleep en route to sunnier climes. Simple.
The quick in-and-out mission, however, quickly denigrates into a self-administered bloodbath as the dormant vessel, named Romulus and Remus, is actually the one from the salvage mission which – non-spoiler alert! – did not go well at all. One wrong button pressed and suddenly the face huggers are defrosting and, as it transpires, extremely horny, and we’re soon back in very familiar territory.
There’s no getting around the fact that this feels like a frisky, well-made but unnecessary addition to the wider franchise, more interested in hitting a series of carefully placed nostalgia pressure points than offering up something new. The slow burn set-up doesn’t work, simply because the “kids unwittingly walking into the haunted house” trope has been done to death in the previous episodes. We sleepwalk through the whole alien birthing process with sundry gory dispatches along the way, and it’s only about an hour into the film that the stage is set for Alien: Romulus to evolve into its own species.
And it kinda does, with Alvarez setting off a bunch of stopwatches to have various cataclysmic countdowns occurring simultaneously as a mini squadron of Xenomorphs do their usual hunter/gatherer thing. Although the filmmaker has come up mainly through horror films, this might actually be the proof that he’s actually a better action director, with a couple of intricate and original set pieces capping off the final act.
Spaeny’s Ripley homage, meanwhile, comes through without being too on-the-nose, as she is essentially a background figure until the spotlight is eventually shone on her for the finale. Jonsson is excellent as Adam, nodding back to Michael Fassbender’s technically-adept dual-role work in the belated Scott sequels (Prometheus and Alien: Covenant). His character also leans into the fact that he’s essentially an indentured slave, and Alvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues turn some uncomfortable stereotypes on their head in a way that’s never too pleased with itself.
In the end, though, this is little more than another gene-splicing experiment where all the constituent parts are still far too visible for it to be considered an unmitigated success. The late game fan service nods are extremely ick, to the point that you can just about hear the makers slightly retching when they arrive. That said, it’s superior to the stuffy, lore-obsessed recent Scott films, yet doesn’t hold an atmospherically flickering candle to the original or its sequel. It also doesn’t have the rough-and-ready, overreaching character of Fincher’s famous folly. Yet it makes for a decent time at the pictures, and the grinding first half is worth enduring for a pleasantly rip-snorting finale.
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ANTICIPATION.
Do we really need to do this dance again? Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson sweeten the pill. 3
ENJOYMENT.
It does enough to get it a passing mark, but adds precisely bupkis to the overall saga. 3
IN RETROSPECT.
It’s a minor-level runaround with a couple of killer moments. 3
Directed by
Fede Alvarez
Starring
Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux
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