The first part of ALIEN: ROMULUS, after the prologue and as we’re being introduced to the characters and their situation, is about as transportive as I can ever expect from a sci-fi movie. The look and sound are stunning, and the sense of being thrown into a world that actually exists somewhere is overwhelming. Rain (Cailee Spaeny, PRISCILLA) and her brother Andy (David Jonsson) live on the mining colony Jackson’s Star. It’s a place that gets literally no sunlight, it’s crowded and dirty, and many of the workers (including their parents) die from some futuristic equivalent of black lung.
Today’s a big day, though – the day she thinks she can get a travel pass to sunny Yvago. Well, sorry, they tell her. The quotas have changed, she owes Weyland-Yutani more hours, another 5-6 years, approximately. Tough luck, kid. That’s Jackson’s Star for you.
Director Fede Alvarez (EVIL DEAD) absolutely goes to town with the ALIEN universe future tech – 1979 screen graphics, glitchy analog TV screens, chunky Commodore style keyboards. The booth Rain goes to to get her pass is the coolest and realest mundane sci-fi thing I’ve seen in ages. Life here is a symphony of voices distorted through radios, intercoms, mini-monitors. This all comes from what Scott and Cameron created, but it feels like an extension, not a copy, as if the camera from ALIEN pulled way back and tilted way over to show us what’s going on in a totally different part of the same universe. The systemic cruelty here is both in the spirit of the original films and our current impression of how it works here on earth circa 2024, so it feels very true.
Some of Rain’s friends have a plan, though. Her boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux, MORBIUS), Tyler’s sister Kay (Isabel Merced, SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO), their cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn, THE BATMAN) and his cool girlfriend Navarro (Aileen Wu) have access to a small mining ship called Corbelan, and its scanners have detected an abandoned, decommissioned ship orbiting the colony. It has working cryo pods on it, which they could use to make the 9 year journey to Yvago. She’s hesitant, but they need Andy, and she doesn’t want him to go without her.
The reason they need Andy is that he’s a synthetic, a robot. He “can read MU/THR,” meaning he can plug into and access the computers R2-D2 style, and you need something like that even just to open the doors. (You need an app for everything these days.) He’s an old model, in danger of being put out to pasture, acts twitchy and timid. But Rain considers him her brother, because her dad “found him in the garbage” according to Bjorn, fixed him up, programmed him to always do what’s best for Rain. (She seems uncomfortable with that.)
They also need Navarro, since she’s the pilot. They were willing to go without Rain, but she seems like the calm and sensible one who comes up with plans when shit goes bad. Tyler and Bjorn know how to get the pods, Kay seems to be along for the ride. She reveals to Rain that she’s pregnant, and though she’s kept it from her brother I wonder how much that has to do with the urgency to go through with this plan. She wants to have a kid, so she wants to live in a place that doesn’t suck.
One of my favorite little moments in ROMULUS is when one of those boys shows off by lighting a cigarette during the brief period when the ship jerks into space (I think Navarro calls it “the pull” or something like that). It causes the flames from his lighter to stretch about a foot high, and the cigarette to burn through in seconds. This goofing around shows how experienced and casual they are at this stuff compared to “space virgins” Rain and Andy, but also it’s just one of those details that shows you people are living normal lives outside of the needs of the plot. They have things they do for fun, for laughs. They have a lifestyle.
This really is an incredible looking movie. The stormy atmosphere of the colony, the floodlights bleeding through fog, the awe-inspiring ring of debris that surrounds it, threatening to devour the derelict outpost in 36 hours. Alvarez claims he tried to do everything practically first before redoing or enhancing with digital effects, so there are more giant sets, miniature models and animatronics (even a little stop motion) than most movies these days. But for the most part I wasn’t cognizant of the techniques – it just seems real. That’s not make-or-break for me, but it’s something I appreciate considering how much a beautiful and one-of-a-kind movie like ALIEN 3 can be held back by the compositing of the running xenomorph puppet looking so fake.
It goes without saying that there is gonna be one or more alien creature in space to make you scream, whether or not anyone can hear it. Alvarez chooses the ol’ “there’s a lab here and they were experimenting on something” set up, which I gather might be similar to the beloved video game Alien: Isolation. Even if not, there is definitely a video game feel to some of this, the Myst type where there was something that happened here that they piece together through clues and recordings. I’m glad they don’t spend too much time on that.
(Side thought: It occurred to me that this might appeal to COVID conspiracy kooks and anti-vaxxers, if they’re paying attention. First of all, a deadly contagion escapes from a lab. Second, the company offers a quickly concocted shot it says will protect from it, but it’s actually a way to experiment on people. Our hero convinces Kay not to risk taking it, because she’s pregnant, but later she takes it anyway, with disastrous results. I hope this is just a case of the conspiracies being inspired by the same sci-fi tropes as the sci-fi.)
I think ROMULUS could use more Alvarez brutality, but I enjoy what’s there. You don’t just get knocked down in your ship, you manage to bump your chin on each rung of a ladder as you fall. There are some great chestburstings and things but I notice that they cut away quickly, almost like they had trouble with the MPAA, though I doubt that’s the case. The best gore moment has got to be a guy watching his fingers dissolve to the bone from acid blood. He kinda deserved it for ramming a cattle prod into the vaginal xenomorph cocoon. That was a scene where I really felt like Alvarez was finding a new angle on old material.
The most interesting character drama involves Andy. Bjorn is, in Rain’s words, “being such a dick” to him because his parents were killed by a toon. I mean a synthetic. It sounds corny for a second but it’s effective because his parents died when a robot allowed three miners to die in order to save twelve. So it’s not only playing off of Isaac Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics, and our fears of cold calculations without empathy, but also the times in Ridley Scott’s films when humans made harsh decisions to leave people to die to enforce a quarantine. In ALIEN it was the hero, Ripley, in PROMETHEUS it was sort of a bad guy, Charlize Theron’s Vickers. And of course it comes up again in a gutwrenching scene when only Andy has the ability to open a door to save Kay, but he refuses because it would let the xenomorph out. If it was Ripley refusing they’d all yell at each other and she’d insist she was doing the right thing, but because it’s Andy he stands there emotionlessly as Rain and Tyler drop to their knees and beg him, to no avail, and it seems even harsher.
After that I thought it was time to get rid of Andy. Tyler implies the same in a scene where he teaches Rain to use a pulse rifle. For practice why don’t you aim it at – oh, I don’t know, let’s say Andy’s head. But Rain is smarter than me. She knows she needs him and also that she can change him. When they use him sort of like a disc drive to get information out of a more advanced model he basically gets firmware upgrades that improve his abilities but turn him into a company man. Suddenly he cares more about his job than his family. But he doesn’t have to be that way forever.
I’m glad Alvarez didn’t give these youths a bunch of made up space-slang or too many wisecracks, that can take you out of a movie like this. The only line that felt too current to me was when Rain calls Andy’s corny jokes “dad jokes.” But I suppose if Stephen Stills’ accordion survived until the 2093 of PROMETHEUS and people still made references to the 1970s TV show Ironside in the 2381 of ALIEN RESURRECTION then maybe the recent phenomenon of referring to bad jokes as dad jokes will stick through 2142.
This is the first ALIEN movie about a group of young people. Why? Maybe because Alvarez comes from the horror tradition, making his bones with EVIL DEAD and DON’T BREATHE. In the broad strokes ROMULUS is actually very similar to DON’T BREATHE. Its protagonists are more innocent, but they’re similar in that they live in a miserable capitalism-ravaged hellscape, out of desperation attempt a crime that they think will allow them to leave for a better (and sunnier!) place, but they don’t count on the dangerous monster up to weird shit in the place they break into. There are also direct connections through the pregnant character and the setpiece about sneaking quietly, trying not to be detected by a blind foe (we learn that facehuggers sense people through body temperature, so instead of don’t breathe it’s don’t sweat).
Come to think of it there’s a little EVIL DEAD also, because they come to this place where something bad happened in the past, and accidentally let the evil thing out. Plugging in a robot to hear what happened sort of takes the place of playing the tapes of ancient chants.
I think there’s also meaning and timeliness in the choice of characters. This is a generation that has been served up a shit sandwich of a life, not as much by the previous generations as by the corporation that pretty much seems to decide how humans are gonna live. The protagonists explicitly say they don’t want to end up like their parents, spending their whole lives mining for Weyland-Yutani, and they decide to try to find a better way to live. It’s easy to understand that as the corporations and others who control us fail to do anything about climate catastrophe, gun massacres, and soul-less Wall Street fuckfaces smooshing our culture into slimy piles of tax write-offs and a.i. vomit. If we could just steal some pods and go somewhere better we would definitely consider it.
On the other hand Spaeny is only four years younger than Sigourney Weaver was when she did ALIEN, so what am I even talking about?
Like every ALIEN movie after ALIENS, this is a movie I think is really great that I also have some misgivings about. One of them you’ve probly heard about, because it’s been very controversial. I’m marking it as a SPOILER because I saw people posting about it before the movie was even released, thankfully I didn’t get the specifics but I got an implication and I’m afraid that yes, intentionally interfering with a sacred religious activity like me seeing a new ALIEN movie fresh does make you an asshole, a chump and a weasel, even if you did it because you’re on a courageous crusade against the 20th Century Fox corporation for allowing Fede Alvarez to do a thing that you and I didn’t like in a movie.
The thing they did involves the character Science Officer Rook, voiced by Daniel Betts (FURY, ALLIED). He’s the torn off torso of a synthetic who they find in the outpost, they get information out of him and he becomes the villainous embodiment of the company’s priorities. Unfortunately Alvarez chose to give this character the appearance of Ian Holm when he played Ash in ALIEN.
An article in Entertainment Weekly says “The creation of Rook was achieved through a combination of animatronics built to resemble Holm and actor Daniel Betts performing his lines.” I don’t buy that that’s exactly right. My guess while watching it was that they built an animatronic and then added deep fake Ian Holm eyes and mouth over it. At any rate it doesn’t look natural. It bothers me because there’s not a reason to believe androids in this universe have to look the same. Andy doesn’t look like Ash. I don’t mind gimmicks, but this one distracts more than it adds.
That’s not why it’s controversial though. There’s a school of thought that’s very passionately represented on Film Twitter, including some very good critics who I respect, who have a sort of superstitious zealotry about likenesses of the dead. In this case, according to the EW article, Alvarez and producer Ridley Scott wanted to use Holm’s likeness because they thought Ash was a great character who was never brought back in any of the sequels. Alvarez worked closely with Holm’s widow and family to make sure they were happy with it and they supposedly thought it was a good tribute and acknowledgment of his importance to ALIEN.
I’d probly want my family to be happy (and get paid) if I was Ian Holm (and dead), but I’ve seen people saying it doesn’t matter if an estate says it’s okay, it’s still “ghoulish” (that’s the adjective used 100% of the time). I do understand it as a hardline stance, because I don’t want a world where it’s common to animate actors who had no say in it. But I’m not entirely convinced that’s something that would happen outside of gimmicks like this. What is the danger in this specific case? It does not look like a real person, it’s not even a real person in the story, it’s not going to make people believe that Holm was involved in the movie. So to me this kind of outrage about it, people calling it unethical, believing it is actually their moral imperative to not let people be surprised by it, it seems very silly.
But I agree it wasn’t worth looking wrong and pissing people off for an idea that doesn’t even make that much sense. In the article Alvarez says, “I can’t wait for the fans to lose their minds at seeing one of their favorite faces from the original.” That they did!
For me it broke the spell of a movie that had up to that point completely swept over me. Only then did I start to feel like it was becoming too much of a remix of things we’d seen before. Fortunately, I love Alvarez’s setpiece chops, he establishes all these dangers (attacking xenomorphs, zero gravity swirl of acid blood, broken elevator, space station on the brink of destruction), and before you know it he’s juggling them behind his back and under his leg. It’s thrilling. I just disagree with him that it’s good or even okay to throw in obvious references to the other ALIEN movies. Specifically, a character repeats a beloved one-liner from a previous movie in the series. The joke is that he says it in a different way, and there must’ve been some part that I didn’t pick up on setting up why he would say it, but I still think it’s below the ALIEN movies to pull that shit. Excluding the VS. PREDATORs, you’ve got four movies each by really great directors with their own visions. Then you have two prequels by Ridley Scott that defy expectations in their own ways. I believe the first two films are literally perfect. The flaws and mistakes of the rest are made in pursuit of something pure. Reaching and exploring, not looking back. That’s what I want in an ALIEN movie.
Others may disagree. The line I’m complaining about went over really well in my crowded IMAX screening.
I think ROMULUS is a gorgeous rendering of the ALIEN universe, and I don’t consider it a rehash – it shows us some new types of places and people and doesn’t follow the same structure. But I do have some apprehension that it doesn’t give us something new enough. It’s trying to fit onto the timeline, it’s trying to connect, it’s not trying to be reborn. Every previous sequel or prequel, less so COVENANT but even that one, did something truly crazy. And that was special. I was elated in the last stretch here when it started to introduce weird new imagery – a pod with glowing yellow goo inside, clawed footprints in ash, a strange new hybrid. And when we glimpsed the guy, this time, there were gasps across the theater. That’s more valuable than applause. But when I realized his face was that of an engineer from PROMETHEUS…
I don’t hate it. I love that movie, and that face, and I see how they set it up. I get it. But that’s sort of the problem. I want something I don’t get. I want something I’ve never seen or thought of before. I don’t want the same ingredients mixed up in a different order. This is a good movie. If it had some wilder, newer flavors it would be great.
Alvarez wrote ROMULUS with his usual co-writer Rodo Sayagues. He’d already worked with production designer Naaman Marshall on DON’T BREATHE and costume designer Carlos Rosario on DON’T BREATHE and THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER’S WEB. But he’s got a new director of photography (Galo Olivares, GRETEL AND HANSEL) and editor (Jake Roberts, HELL OR HIGH WATER). His brilliant EVIL DEAD d.p. Pedro Luque came along as second unit director. I like the score by Benjamin Wallfisch (A CURE FOR WELLNESS), which at first sounds like Goldsmith but starts layering in eerie space odyssey choirs and then fritzes out into synthesized electro stabs and weird electronic rhythms.
If ALIEN 3 and PROMETHEUS are any indication, time will reveal the true measure of ROMULUS. If on further viewings our complaints about certain choices melt into acceptance, and other things start to poke out from beneath the surface and capture our imagination, it will be worthy of the series. Until then it’s at least pretty damn cool. Either way, I’m itching to see it again.
August 19th, 2024 at 8:03 am
Great review, Vern. Yeah the “necromancy” of using Holm’s likeness wasn’t what I found so onerous about that character, it’s the way he hijacked the movie to send the kids on exposition-laden missions. The secret at the core of the space station was…nostalgia. The black goo from Prometheus. The alien life cycle. The company’s priorities. It was all demystified immediately after he showed up. I think some energy came back into the movie in the final stretch but from that character’s frequent inclusion I felt such a supreme lack of confidence from the filmmakers. They used to call these things “Easter eggs” but now they’re entire sections of the film.