When Ridley Scott released “Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant,” the main criticism levied against them essentially boiled down to that they didn’t provide the same kind of sci-fi thrills as “Alien” and “Aliens,” two of the most beloved films of all time. Anyone who dislikes those films because they have too much philosophy and not enough acidic alien spit will be satisfied by Fede Alvarez’s “Alien: Romulus,” a movie with so many callbacks to the entire series (even both Fincher’s “Alien 3” and William Gibson’s unproduced script for that film have echoes here, as do the prequels) that they sometimes feel like extra weight on this movie spaceship. Luckily, Alvarez’s skill with pace and use of setting, along with his obvious love for this series, keep “Romulus” afloat. It’s fun, tense, and slimy. It’s also nowhere near as ambitious as some of the films in this series deemed failures. We can’t have everything.
There’s a definite sense that Alvarez is going back to the basics of Scott’s first film (which is a good thing). Once again, we’re introduced to a crew of interstellar blue-collar workers, led by a heroine who we know will be forced to mine veins of courage in herself that she didn’t know were there. In this case, it’s Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny of “Civil War”), a woman who believes that she’s reached her quota of hours in a mine on a planet that never gets sunshine, only to learn that the goalposts have been moved and she can’t get off of it for nearly another decade. While mourning her murdered future with her friends, she discovers that they have a plan to raid a space station that they’ve discovered floating above the planet. Get on board, take the cryo pods needed for the trip, and wake up in a new galaxy. What could go wrong? Weyland-Yutani always has a bad answer to that question.
Rain is joined closely on this journey by Andy (David Jonsson of “Rye Lane”), a synthetic whose objective is to care for Rain like a brother, and she cares for him as much in reverse. Most of the “Alien” films have used androids to ask some of their thorniest moral questions, and that’s the case again here in a number of twists that make Andy’s choices – the ones that should be guided by programming instead of human emotion – into some of the most interesting of the film. Without spoiling anything, Andy’s objective changes when the crew gets to the space station, and everyone discovers they’re not alone. Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, and Aileen Wu star as the other travelers who will learn what a Facehugger is the hard way.
Eschewing the complex narratives of the prequels, “Romulus” has an almost charmingly direct plot: Five people and a synthetic find their way aboard a space station carrying some truly perfect killing machines and have to fight to escape. That’s about it. The thin plot allows Alvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues to focus on world-building and set pieces. The production design here by Naaman Marshall (who worked on “The Dark Knight” and “The Prestige“) is some of the best in a blockbuster sci-fi movie in a very long time. Like the original, there’s a sense that the space these characters occupy isn’t a sterile set but a place that has been lived – and died – in before. It’s hard to overstate the importance of that in a film like this. When we feel like the people in jeopardy are in real, three-dimensional places with histories of their own, we can feel like their plight is real too. Alvarez and his team have created a phenomenal setting on Romulus and Remus, the two halves of the space station on which almost all of this film takes place. It’s not quite as brilliantly claustrophobic as the first film, but it’s close enough, and indicative of how much Alvarez understands about why that film remains a masterpiece.
He also knows how to stage a sequence. It’s hard to pick a fave here, whether it’s the hallway run with an army of Facehuggers or the stunningly well-crafted elevator sequence, or the bonkers final scenes that are likely to be the most divisive aspect of this film. (For me, the “crazy twist,” without spoiling, fits in the legacy of a series that has always had elements of body horror embedded in it, and I wish the film took more of those kinds of big swings before the final fifteen minutes.) Editor Jake Roberts (“Hell or High Water”) does phenomenal work here, too, knowing exactly how to cut this film to amplify tension, and cinematographer Galo Olivares pays homage to past imagery from this series while also giving the film a sweaty, dark, foreboding visual palette of its own.
Performance has always been an essential aspect of this series, whether it’s Sigourney Weaver or Michael Fassbender, and Spaeny and Jonsson shine. The star of “Priscilla” gives a very physical turn, allowing us to feel Rain’s terror in subtle ways. She never resorts to histrionics, playing Rain like a person who has been forced to “get the job done” before and will do so again today. While Spaeny’s work is likely to be underrated, people will almost certainly respond to the excellent turn by Jonsson, an actor who knows how to use his expressive face to maximum effect. Again, Andy has arguably the most notable arc here, and Jonsson nails every turn in it.
With all of these great pieces of the “Romulus” puzzle, it’s disappointing how often Alvarez and company felt like they had to go back to what could be called fan service with lines and easter eggs that feel overly calculated for our referential culture of late. One major connection to the first film that I won’t spoil but will almost certainly be mocked on social media by the end of the weekend is a wild miscalculation: a bit of janky CGI that looks more like an AI-created character than anything tactile. In a film that so clearly values practical effects, it’s jarring to experience a central aspect of it that is so clearly animated. There’s no reason for this. The character could have been rendered differently or at least an animatronic without a level of CGI sheen that makes it look like something out of a Robert Zemeckis mo-cap movie.
The first “Alien” is notoriously known as a haunted house movie in space. It’s a single location with an alien instead of a ghost. At its best, “Alien: Romulus” understands this, seeking to replicate all of the ingredients that go into this time-tested formula. We want to feel as trapped as the characters in a haunted house or on a spaceship, wondering how they could possibly escape a nightmare that’s growing in intensity with each passing minute. And we do through most of the film. Honestly, it’s so artistically connected to the films that came before in terms of its top-notch production quality that I think that’s what makes the blatant callbacks more frustrating. It doesn’t need them to be an “Alien” movie, maybe even the one people have wanted for almost four decades.
