Ridley’s done enough. Ridley Scott came up with the concept for the 1979 Alien, one of the great films ever made. He also injected the franchise with a dose of something else interesting with Prometheus in 2012. After Alien Covenant, he decided it was time to step aside, and hand over the reigns of the franchise to someone new. Fede Alvarez is the new blood in Romulus, putting some of his essence into the Weyland Yutani investments made to keep the Alien franchise going. I don’t know if I want to keep going in this direction, but this one off film is perfectly fine for what it is.
Though unclear, we’re somewhere between Alien and Aliens in the timelines. On an ever midnight mining planet, Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) and her devoted but overly simple android Andy (David Jonsson from Rye Lane) are stuck. Every quota Rain/Andy meet to escape to another planet, the Weyland Yutani corporation ups the quota and keeps her there. Desperate, Rain gets an out from her friend Tyler (Archie Renaux). In exchange for getting off world, Rain will lend Tyler Andy to help break into an abandoned space vessel, to take the cryo sleep chambers needed for the voyage. Hmm, an abandoned space vessel you say? Wonder if some, um, strange creatures might be on board?
After Sir Ridley blew out the scope of the Alien franchise, Romulus brings the story back down to simpler stuff: scaring people to death. Fede Alvarez is no stranger to heart attack nightmare fuel, so for just an Alien horror film, he’s a good fit. Alvarez is most enamored with the face huggers, the secret weapon of the Alien franchise in my opinion. After Romulus, I’ve seen enough of them, as Alvarez basically turns lots of the movie into space Arachnophobia, with the creatures creepily ready to impregnate our crew in water, in heat, in the air, basically every possible element and scenario Alvarez can concoct. He also takes the beats of an Alien movie we expect (chest bursting, alien murder, etc), and grizzles them up to fit present day violence. That chest bursting: we get shots of it from the inside, and see bones break as the alien pushes itself out of someone’s body. I was most put off by the sulfuric acid blood, as we see gnarly dissolving of all sorts of body parts: a new fear I’m gonna have to unpack. The third act is where Alvarez cooks: where he gets to try something new. Without revealing anything, I’d say he goes 1 for 2: one a new spin on terrors we’ve seen before and the other too CGI’ed to leave a lasting impact other than how the big bad came to be (that was disturbing as hell). On the whole, I found myself more than a couple times clenching the seat, a feat only the great ones like Fede Alvarez can pull off.
If there’s any idea Romulus is exploring, it’s about artificial intelligence and humanity, the big question of the moment. For this story, it is not Cailee Spaeny, our top billed lady, but David Jonsson’s Andy who keeps the audience’s attention at least a little. It’s a great showcase for Jonsson, who gets to adapt his persona as it gets updated with new objectives, keeping the audience guessing whose side he’s going to end up on. Ironically, for a movie usually landing on the side of humanity, the AI character is the most interesting (well, one of them; the other is the worst decision in the movie), and the human characters are at best one note types that exist to be eviscerated by the “perfect organism.”
In today’s franchise driven world, sometimes you need to reset. Alien: Romulus is a scope resetter for sure. The question is: where do we go from here? If I had a vote, it would be nowhere, for a LONG time, maybe never seeing another xenomorph in movie form again. However, I hope this film gives Fede Alvarez some bank to make a whole new original thing. Cause when he’s cooking, there’s few better movie fear mongers in the biz today.