Directed by Fede Alvarez. Written by Rogo Sayagues and Fede Alvarez
Imagine you’ve arrived home from the funeral of a loved one. The person was close to you, and even if they didn’t go prematurely, but at the end of a long and by all accounts successful life, there’s still an empty feeling within you now that you know won’t ever go away. You get into bed in an attempt to sleep and hopefully awake at a greater distance to this present keen sorrow.
Without noticing, you’ve drifted off, only to be jarred awake by the din of your phone, snarling on your bedside table. Disoriented, you answer: It’s your recently deceased relative. Some ghoulish company is using AI to impersonate them. The voice is trying to sell you life insurance. Hell is a place on earth.
Alien: Romulus, Fede Alvarez’s mercenary installment in the long-running franchise, is such a phone call. A technical feat, untouchable in its mechanisms and successful application of the familiar, but an uncanny, alienating watch all the same. It walks, talks, stalks, screams, and pounces like an Alien movie, but a certain something is missing, and at times, it sinks to deplorable levels in order to find it.
Cailee Spaeny plays Rain, a mine worker who’s trying to get off the sunless planet whereon she’s employed by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. She’s reached a quota for hours put in, granting her a ticket to another planet of her choice, but when she makes it in front of a company bureaucrat, wouldn’t you know it, that quota has just doubled. Dejected, she walks off holding the hand of Andy (David Jonsson), a slightly malfunctioning humanoid that’s like a half-brother to her.
She’s not alone in her wanderlust. Her friends, fellow blue collar 20-somethings, are equally dissatisfied with being ground to dust in the corporate cogs, but they’ve got a plan. There’s a planet far away, outside the company’s control, and they’ve got a spaceship that’ll take them there. All they need are some cryo chambers to sleep the journey away in, cryo chambers they think they’ll find in an abandoned space station hovering ominously above the planet. Not totally abandoned, turns out.
Rain and Andy are the only real people amidst a cast of uninspiring characters who escape the corporate grind just to land themselves in a more literal meat grinder. Horror movies do have a turnover rate that rivals crypto startups, so the time to familiarize yourself with characters before they’re brutalized is brief, but most of Rain’s friends have the charisma of people in medical ads, regardless of how foul-mouthed or innocent Alvarez makes them to fulfill certain narrative functions.
Alien: Romulus is a sleek machine, though, where things work and work well. It has high-intensity frights to make your stomach flip, plenty of gore to make it squirm. It’s creepy, and crafty at times too, with Alvarez finding new ways for the monsters of the Alien universe to terrify you. There aren’t many bloody fingerprints to put on the handiwork of Romulus, which makes the dissatisfaction with its underlying nature all the more conflicting.
Call him a gun-for-hire, call him a genre enthusiast, but Alvarez has made a career of helming new installments in pre-existing franchises. He directed a reboot of Evil Dead by the same name in 2013 before directing a TV-series based on From Dusk Till Dawn. His last movie before Romulus was the off-brand The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo sequel The Girl In The Spider’s Web. Fede Alvarez is a hermit crab, shuffling along with a name-brand seashell lodged on his head before discarding it for a new, shinier one. More than a passion project, Alien seems simply the next project.
To his credit, it’s not hack work. For fans, there are so many callbacks and nods to previous installments that it seems Romulus wants to pay tribute to the franchise in its entirety. Those tributes range from well executed and enriching, with the sets and props paying full homage to the original Alien of 1979, to awkward, as classic lines are inserted with the grace of a jackhammer. While clunky, the overzealous fan service is not calamitous, but it’s unfortunately far from Romulus’ gravest sin.
Without spoiling too much, I’ll say Ian Holm, who died in 2020, reprises his role from Alien in Romulus, which began filming in March of 2023. New technology and its abilities has led to abominable decision-making, as there is little reason to AI Ian Holm back into life. Worse yet, the execution is flawed, with artificial Holm appearing rusty and decidedly un-real.
It feels like an artistic decision based on a capitalistic motivation to please a fanbase that doesn’t want to let go of the thing or things that first drew them to a given universe. It feels out of place in the case of Holm’s character, who’s hardly iconic in the context of Alien, but it’s easy to see where it leads, with actors from popular franchises, say Marvel’s Avengers, getting digitized so AI may churn out content forever with little to no human creative involvement, a digital security blanket for a viewing public desperate for the comfort of the familiar.
I don’t begrudge anyone’s want for escapism and comfort in what can feel like uncertain times, but decisions like Alvarez’s in Romulus will ultimately create an unnatural world where no one ever truly gets to die, their corpse made to dance for our half-invested amusement. It’s like a bowl of fake fruit arranged for decor in a model home, looking like the real thing until you engage with it. It won’t fill you or provide any sustenance. It’s just something pretending to be what you want.
All in all, Alien: Romulus is warmed-over fare, rehashing lines, plot points, and characters in increasingly mortifying ways, all of it made more cynical because of how convincing the construction is. A genre movie at its core, with Alien skin pulled over itself to disguise that fact, its existence is like when some faceless company buys up licensing rights for a known and loved brand with tradition behind it, then outsourcing production to mercenary strangers yielding an experience that’s strangely amiss.
Mikkel Frederiksen 