You Have My Sympathies

My thoughts on Alien: Romulus

The inherent flaw with making a sequel to a film like Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror masterpiece Alien is that there is no way to really recreate the extraordinary sense of startling surprise that moviegoers experienced back then when they first sat down to watch the original back in the day without any real idea of what exactly they were about to experience. For all of their virtues (and I think they are all great to some degree), none of them have quite conveyed that sense of discombobulating, blood-freezing shock that they felt the first time they saw Alien. That was a film that took all of our expectations of what one might find in a film of that type at the time and thoroughly upended them, from the infamous and graphically depicted evolutionary cycle of the title creature to killing off putative hero type Tom Skerritt halfway through and placing the spotlight on the then-unknown Sigourney Weaver as what would become one of the most iconic characters in genre film history in Warrant Officer Ripley. The problem with the sequels is that unless you were somehow going into one of them without having seen the original or having any idea about its most infamous elements, you knew more than nearly all of the on-screen characters about what they were going to experience and just how messy it was going to get for them—you weren’t so much anticipating the dread of the unknown as you were waiting for the now-familiar elements to kick into gear.

This is not to say that any of the subsequent installments in the startlingly durable franchise have been failures by any stretch of the imagination. With the exception of the dreadful Alien vs Predator spinoffs, I think that all of the follow ups have been eminently fascinating works that have utilized intriguing new approaches to the basic premise established by the original. James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) reconfigured it as an ultra-gripping balls-to-the-wall action spectacular. David Fincher’s 1992 debut Alien 3 (1992) transformed it into a grim existential nightmare that none of the characters could wake up from (or as we call it today, a David Fincher film). Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection transformed it into a weirdo European cult film freak out seemingly destined for a midnight movie circuit that no longer existed.  Returning to the franchise fold after a long absence, Scott’s Prometheus and Alien: Covenant prequels took a more metaphysical approach—essentially asking “What if we met our actual creators to get answers from them and what if they didn’t take to that particularly well?”—that also tried to fill in some of the blanks regarding the original that viewers had been contemplating for years.

Of course, with the exception of Aliens, many viewers evidently had little use for the attempts made by the sequels to try different things instead of just giving them the kind of stuff that they had already seen before—it seems that they wanted to see the stuff they already knew and loved and had precious little interest in all the other stuff on display. Now comes the latest installment, Alien: Romulus, and it seems to have been made with those viewers in mind. Rather than following in the ambitious footsteps of his predecessors, director Fede Alvarez, taking over the reins from Scott (who serves here as co-producer), has elected to lean more towards the familiar with a story that doesn’t exactly break much new ground and which, like so many legacy sequels of late, is more interested in presenting callbacks to the earlier films than in giving viewers anything new or interesting to contemplate. It says a lot about the inherent sturdiness of the whole concept that the resulting film is still reasonably well done, at least as largely unnecessary sequels go, but despite the undeniable levels of sheer filmmaking craft that have gone into it, this is still the least interesting of the sequels to date (again, I hasten to add, not counting the Alien vs Predator crapfests).

Set roughly 20 years after the events depicted in Alien, this one stars Cailee Spaeny as Rain, a young woman struggling to eke out a living on a particularly dark, desolate and disease-ridden mining colony run by that most beloved of corporations, Weyland/Yutani, along with her only companion, Andy (David Jonsson), a once-junked robot that was refurbished by her late father with a directive to look out for her above anything else, a penchant for dad jokes and a seemingly permanent setting on Lennie Small mode. Rain dreams of getting the two of them off the colony in the hopes of a better life but when the corporate overlords arbitrarily double her period of servitude, all seems lost until she is contacted by old friend Tyler (Archie Renault), who has a proposal for her. He has picked up signals from what appears to be a derelict spacecraft that may contain the necessary equipment that would allow them, along with his sister Kay (Isabela Merced), his cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and Bjorn’s pilot girlfriend Navarro (Aileen Wu), to make the extended journey away from the colony on their own. Ironically, it is Andy and his long-outmoded technology that is the key to allowing them to gain access to the ship once they arrive.

Despite misgivings, Rain agrees and the group is soon flying up to the ship, only to unexpectedly discover that it is actually a research facility that does not appear to be precisely a derelict, though no one seems to be on board. As Andy, Tyler and Bjorn (the latter a hothead with a deep-seated loathing for androids) explore the station looking for their items, them stumble upon a lab facility and wind up getting locked inside. While Rain and Navarro try to figure out how to get them out, it becomes apparent that they are not precisely alone after all and things predictably snowball in the grisliest ways imaginable as our heroes are stalked by hordes of ravaging xenomorphs that want to do various icky things to them. To complicate matter further, Andy has found himself the recipient of an unexpected system upgrade that makes him far more advanced and capable than before but which has also changed his prime directive from protecting Rain at all costs to something more sinister.

In terms of style and technique, Alien; Romulus is perfectly fine. Alvarez (who co-wrote the screenplay with Rodo Sayagues) stages the material in a slick and efficient manner that gets the job done without suffering from a bloated run time and which utilizes a blend of practical and CGI effects in a way that evokes the distinct industrial-style visual approach that Scott utilized in the first film without devolving into overly self-conscious retro-fetishism. There are a couple of big set piece sequences that are fairly ingenious in terms of both conception and execution and those of you with a taste for the gross stuff will be pleased to learn that there is plenty of gore and nastiness on display throughout. On the more human side of things, Spaeny, in a role a million miles removed from her spectacular turn in last year’s Priscilla, delivers a strong and sympathetic performance that manages to stand out amidst the mayhem surrounding here—while she may not be as overtly imposing as Sigourney Weaver so famously proved to be over the course of the first four films in the franchise, she still comes across as fairly badass even though she at times almost seems to be dwarfed by the giant gun that she is toting around for most of the second half.

And yet, while all of this adds up to a film that is more or less satisfactory—certainly more so than a lot of the dud sequels to emerge over the past couple of months—it never manages to go beyond that into something that is genuinely memorable. For example, considering that practically everyone going into this film has a pretty good idea of how the storyline is going to play out, at least in the broad strokes, you would think that perhaps a little more care might have been given to creating characters that were interesting enough to follow along the way. Unfortunately, with the exception of Rain, none of the others are that interesting and so—unlike the cases of Alien and Aliens for certain—when they meet their inevitable dismal fates, they don’t have much of an impact.

A bigger problem with the film is, perhaps wary of the uneven reactions that the more ambitious recent entries in the franchise have received from the fan base, Alvarez, who demonstrated a certain fiendish ingenuity in his 2016 thriller Don’t Breathe, goes to such lengths to follow in the creative footsteps of the original film that the result here often feels like an elaborate bit of fan fiction featuring characters and story ideas that are ostensibly “new” but which feel familiar to the point of deja vu at times. This is especially evident in the numerous bits of fan service that have been thrown into the mix throughout, presumably so that they can all be noted by the film bros in the audience to those unlucky enough to find themselves sitting next to them. I don’t mind the occasional in-joke or reference designed to be caught by long-time fans but the film goes ways overboard in this regard, especially in the second half, with callbacks referencing pretty much every other title in the franchise ranging from the reprisal of certain memorable bits of imagery (not too bad) to direct dialogue quotes (one of which is particularly groan-inducing) to utilizing the new technologies to bringing back a deceased actor to deliver a posthumous “performance,” a development that is ultimately more sickening than any of the overtly barfbag moments on display.

In the end, Alien: Romulus is a film that exists primarily as an attempt to revive a valuable piece of IP for Disney that has lain fallow as of late and hopefully make a few bucks off of ticket sales and designer popcorn buckets without upsetting the fans in the ways that the previous installments clearly did, thereby hopefully leading to further pre/sequels down the line. On that basic level, it sort of succeeds and if you have been down on the franchise as a whole for a while, you may react to it with genuine enthusiasm. As someone who has been genuinely impressed by the nerve and audacity of the more controversial sequels and the big swings that they contained, I just couldn’t quite shake the sense that, despite the obvious sense of style and energy on display, I was watching the first Alien movie (again, not counting the AvP films) that was little more than a piece of product—the kind of thing that the bean counters at Weyland/Yutani themselves might have wholeheartedly endorsed. Frankly, that is a notion more ultimately terrifying than anything seen on the screen here.