A group of young colonisers come up against an alien life form while
scavenging an abandoned space station.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Fede Alvarez
Starring: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn,
Aileen Wu
Has any mainstream franchise been so heavily manipulated by individual
directors as the Alien series? Each new director has taken
the series in their own direction, for better or worse, but usually worse.
Ridley Scott's 1979 original had a very simple premise, essentially a
1950s b-movie with post-Star Wars FX and '70s gore. With
Aliens, James Cameron delivered a war movie, replacing Scott's slow burn horror
with balls to the wall action. David Fincher gave us a prison movie with
Alien 3, while dealing with much studio interference.
Alien: Resurrection saw Jean-Pierre Jeunet give
us...well, whatever that was (all I remember is Sigourney Weaver's
basketball skills, or am I thinking of Kurt Russell in
Escape from LA?). Scott made a surprise return to the series and bored the pants off us
with the Chariots of the Gods-influenced Prometheus and
Covenant, though they did feature the memorable sights of Michael Fassbender
snogging himself and Noomi Rapace performing a self-abortion.
Fede Alvarez is the first filmmaker to helm an
Alien sequel who appears to have no interest in taking it in
a new direction. Alien: Romulus has been touted as a "back
to basics" sequel, which usually means a retread of what has gone before.
The film is set between Alien and Aliens, and it's something of a mash-up of those two movies. Its biggest
mistake is that it doesn't understand that if you have one monster you
have a horror movie but if you have multiple monsters you have an action
movie. Alvarez gives us multiple monsters while attempting to make a
horror movie, and it simply doesn't work. The facehugger was terrifying in
Alien but when you now have scores of the little buggers
scurrying around they lose that individual threat and might as well be
spiders. Multiple xenomorphs means they can be dispatched too easily to
make them as threatening as the original solo xenomorph. Scott and Cameron
both understood this, which is why the former made a horror movie and the
latter made an action movie.
The plot here follows a group of youngsters whose parents have all been
killed while working in the mines for the infamous Weyland-Yutani company.
Ringleader Tyler (Archie Renaux) comes up with a plan to raid a
space station for its cryogenic chambers, which they can use to escape to
a new life in a galaxy far, far away. He needs the aid of an android that
can override the station's systems, which is where his ex-girlfriend Rain
(Cailee Spaeny) comes in. Rain just happens to have a robot buddy
in Andy (David Jonsson), a malfunctioning droid programmed by her
late father to devote its life to her service. Along with Gen-Z red shirts
Kay (Isabela Merced), Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and Navarro (Aileen Wu), they head off to the space station, where of course they run into
trouble of an alien variety.
It initially seems as though Alvarez is set to give us a sci-fi reworking
of his excellent gnarly survival thriller
Don't Breathe, which similarly saw a group of youngsters fighting for their lives
following a botched break-in. But Don't Breathe only had one
villain, which made him scary. One blind psychopath makes a for a horror
movie, scores of blind psychopaths not so much. Every time an alien threat
is established here, be it a facehugger or a full blown xenomorph, it's
taken out with the relative ease of an insect being dispatched by a can of
Raid. It just doesn't work as a horror movie, and Alvarez is no James
Cameron, so the action sequences are blandly constructed and fail to get
us off our seats.
It doesn't help that the characters are equally bland. Within minutes of
the first Alien you feel like you know exactly who this
bunch of space truckers are, and you figure out their dynamic of who are
buddies, who are rivals and who are frenemies. By the end of
Romulus you'll still be confused as to how these kids all
relate to one another. The synopsis tells us Tyler and Rain are former
romantic partners, but there's little to no evidence of this in the actual
film. The colourblind casting adds unnecessary confusion. At one point the
American-accented Latina Kay mentions that one of the guys is her brother,
leaving us scratching our head as to whether she's referring to the white
guy with a strong British accent or the mixed-race guy with a strong
British accent, neither of which seems a plausible candidate. Casting a
black actor in the role of an android subservient to a white female master
adds an uncomfortable element that results in a Driving Miss Daisy 2.0
subplot. There's very little difference between Andy and the sort of
stuttering black comic foils played by Willie Best and Mantan Moreland in
tone deaf 1930s mysteries. And yet just as Best and Moreland were often
the best parts of those movies despite their treatment, so too is Jonsson
the highlight of Romulus, ironically making his android the only character that feels human. When
Andy shuts down to reboot and his eyes cloud over white, he takes on the
appearance of the undead Haitian plantation workers from Jacques
Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie, but the movie never interrogates this loaded imagery. There's probably
a more interesting version of Romulus that gives Andy some
agency rather than having him exist to make the white female lead come
across as a good person.
On the plus side, Romulus looks fantastic. Its smoky
aesthetic seems inspired by the early work of not just Ridley Scott but
that entire movement of 70s/80s British visual stylists that included his
brother Tony, Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker, Barry Myers and Roger Christian.
There are some clever touches like a handheld x-ray device that allows for
a new spin on chest-bursting and a striking sequence in which the
silhouette of a chasing monster is glimpsed in flashes through puffs of
steam. But such moments are few and far between, with too much of the
movie devoted to poorly realised set-pieces and exposition delivered by a
returning character from a previous instalment. In space no one can hear
you scream, but your fellow cinemagoers might hear you snore during
Romulus.
Alien: Romulus is in UK/ROI
cinemas from August 16th.
