After the... ahem, headscratchable choices in the Alien prequels, a course correction was supposed to do more than rehash the exact same original formula
Unwary team visits inadvisable place. Inadvisable place has toothy critters. Toothy critters munch on unwary team. Yummy! Final girl survives. The end.
I get that many viewers were disappointed in Prometheus and Covenant, but that doesn't mean we should settle for the bare minimum. Alien: Romulus, a film burdened by the masses' anxious expectation to finally see a good Alien movie for the first time in decades, but also burdened by the curse of being plotwise an inconsequential interquel, fulfills exactly what was required of it. The problem is that it doesn't do anything beyond that. The beats of a monster/slasher/space/survival adventure are followed to the letter, the supporting characters recite their lines one by one before dutifully becoming xenomorph chow, the topic of robot rights is addressed with less lip service than plausible deniability, and characterization is kept at just enough thickness above cardboard to prevent this film from being reclassified as stop-motion.
I'm not saying Romulus doesn't have its moments. There's nothing to complain about re: visual spectacle. The shots of the characters' spaceship moving around the falling station convey a good sense of relative positions and sizes, the mandatory explosions are dosed responsibly, the interior lighting matches the emotional tone of each scene, the background planetary rings are a gorgeous sight, and the xenomorphs look as threatening as they should (even though a real-life biologist can nitpick their tendency to pose dramatically as not believably predatorlike). For the ends of a people-eating monster movie that aims to reliably jump-scare you for two hours, Romulus does the job.
But we should be asking more of an Alien movie. The themes of nature refusing to be controlled by human ambition; the fear and uncertainty inherent in motherhood; the way workplace exploitation resembles predatory violence; the impersonal cruelty of corporate calculations; the horror of forced pregnancy; the open questions about robot morality; the symbolic mirroring between the classical Marxist analysis of people alienated from their production and the franchise's repeated image of victims alienated from their reproduction—all the key preoccupations that define the Alien series are present in Romulus at the level of mere allusion without development.
The closest that Romulus gets to an interesting exploration of the canonical themes of Alien is the subplot where the robot gets a temporary upgrade with another robot's knowledge and personality. The robots aren't useful to the xenomorph breeding strategy of incubating their young inside living hosts, but having another digital consciousness in your head, supplanting your motivations and controlling your choices, comes quite close. And yet, the resolution of this subplot goes nowhere. The robot has a Blue Screen of Death, the upgrade is uninstalled, and all is back to normal. What's that I hear you mutter in grumpy tones? Character growth? Never heard of it!
As I said, the strength of Romulus is in its spectacle. But even this is delivered unevenly. There's a wonderfully tense scene near the end with xenomorph blood floating in zero gravity, but it comes immediately after a very silly fight where an entire herd of supposedly deadly xenomorphs gets dispatched in quick succession à la whack-a-mole. Soon after that, we get the predictable arrival of Chekhov's fetus and another extended fight that feels superfluous in a movie that should have ended by that point. It's a repeat of other fights we've already seen in other Alien entries.
And that's the final sin of Romulus: it's too reverent. Just like the catastrophic misfire that was The Rise of Skywalker, the Alien franchise under Disney control is now overeager to please old fans of the original movies and apologize for the audacity of the recent ones. Visual and spoken callbacks are thrown at the viewer for the instant dopamine rush, regardless of whether they make sense in their new context. And that's without getting to the ghoulish recycling of a dead actor's face with a Mummy Returns level of care.
If we don't count Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (and by all means, let's not count it), Fede Álvarez is the first Alien director whose childhood coincided with the first Alien movies, and his attitude toward their legacy is noticeably deferential. Being a relatively younger director tasked with reviving a legendary franchise, it's understandable that he has created a cast of YA stock characters who venture into the ruins of the Nostromo expedition. As if to reinforce the point, what these newcomers find is the mess left by their predecessors' attempts to experiment with the alien.
Alien: Romulus is exactly the return to form that you demanded if you found Prometheus and Covenant blasphemous to the spirit of the franchise. But Romulus has mistaken returning to form with staying frozen inside a stasis pod.
Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
