Dial 'R' for Romulusness

The latest instalment of the Alien franchise skilfully mimics the look, feel and tone of the originals without importing any of the substance

*Captain’s Log*

Welcome to the 25 Colonial Marines who signed up for this spaceship since last week’s post. As a reward, I’ve arranged for you to receive some black goo from the Weyland Corporation.

Double screening at my local cinema on Friday evening: Alien: Romulus, followed by a late-night showing of Blue Velvet. (Confectionary: Three beers, a small salted popcorn, some Padrón peppers, and a fake-duck wrap.)

I wasn’t planning on writing about Romulus, but I found myself with a beer and an hour to kill in between screenings, so scrawled a scratchy, just-about-legible draft on the back of a leaflet I found. A few hours of weekend editing later (just once, I’d love it if editing took less time than writing the damn thing), here we are.

*Ed William. Signing off.*

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Alien has always been the most sensory of franchises, dripping with sweat and slime, bursting with things that go bleep, bloop, scrape, and hiss.

As an exercise in aesthetic recreation, Alien: Romulus nails the brief. It is packed with visceral details: rusty doors groan, dusty red buttons click and clack, and jittery computer systems haltingly lurch in and out of gear. A grimy tactility seeps from every frame, as though just watching the film might give you tetanus. This slickly executed absence of polish is as good as it gets on a production design front, a perfectly rendered playground that director Fede Álvarez uses to play a fun but familiar set of games.

The Alien franchise has been in limbo since Ridley Scott’s ambitious but polarising one-two punch of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant (two films whose critical esteem has since experienced a Xenomorph-like metamorphosis). Enter Álvarez, who made his bones with his sicko-mode resurrection of the horror classic Evil Dead in the early 2010s. From the beginning, Álvarez’s vision for the franchise always veered more towards the emotional than the cerebral, and the result is Alien: Romulus, a film that replaces the highfalutin philosophising of Scott’s latest entries with a back-to-basics approach resembling a greatest-hits entry of the series’ best moments.

Alien: Romulus’ character drama centres on the relationship between Caely Spaeny’s Rain (Spaeny is quickly becoming the go-to actress for flinty vulnerability) and her ‘brother’, Andy (David Jonsson), an android her late father reprogrammed to protect her. Wisely, Álvarez resists the temptation to make Andy’s synthetic nature a mystery — instead, the film’s early sections dwell on his and Rain’s tender but unspokenly one-sided relationship. Andy, a stuttering, nervy presence whose eyes reveal a desperation for the humanity he fears he may lack, is the most interesting part of the movie. The growing tension between him and Rain hints at a tantalising new direction for the series, a promise the film ultimately fails to deliver. As the blood starts flying and the chests start bursting, it’s clear that Álvarez is far more interested in queuing up a series of gnarly horror executions than he is in pursuing his subtitle’s implication of fraternal conflict to its thematic conclusion.

The early films’ grimy aesthetic always doubled as a darkly ironic joke — even in a future of light-speed travel and super-strong humanoid robots, the working class still risk their lives getting their hands dirty for faceless corporate overlords. In premise, Alien: Romulus adopts a similarly oil-stained POV — the plot is set in motion by our protagonists seeking to escape a life of indentured servitude at a miserable, perma-dark mining colony — but this setup feels more like a plot device than a thematic preoccupation. While Alien allowed its ensemble to smoke, drink coffee, and moan about the boss, here, the supporting cast is wafer-thin, reduced to single-mode identifiers at best (‘hates androids!’) (‘is pregnant!’) to complete anonymity at worst.

Our band of desperadoes’ attempt to escape their miserable lives leads them straight to an abandoned space station, inevitably occupied by some rather unwelcoming hosts. Here, you can sense the 46-year-old Álvarez, who loved the franchise as a child, gleefully rubbing his hands together to play with his shiny new toys. Thematic throat-clearing now dispensed with, Álvarez gets to work on a series of well-executed, consistently entertaining set pieces. These scenes reel off the series’ high points with a mixture of vicious aplomb and eye-roll-inducing deference (one quote, in particular, will elicit an audible groan from those of you who have seen the original).

In some instances, the film’s use of franchise iconography is brutally effective. Álvarez knows how to play with our expectations, trusting us to connect the dots when introducing devices like an X-ray machine and Chekhov’s pregnancy. Anyone who has seen an Alien movie knows where these threads are leading, and the building anticipation of the inevitable payoff is a great tension-builder, a Sword of Damocles waiting to drop. But for every effective callback, another lands flat, not least a baffling cameo that fails on both a technical and story level. The decision to briefly embrace the machine-gun carnage of James Cameron’s Aliens is also misguided, rendering the previously methodical unveiling of the Alien playbook largely redundant from a plot perspective.

I realise this review has ended more critically than I intended. Make no mistake, Alien: Romulus is a great time at the cinema — never less than engaging, regularly enthralling. But perhaps the disparity between my experience at the time and my written thoughts now speaks to the film’s ultimate flaw. It’s a tightly sealed, skillfully executed two hours, but the way it treats the Alien franchise is so insular that it feels like an airlock — a secure, isolated experience with little connection to anything outside of itself.

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