What a mess
In terms of cinematic quality, there’s only really been two great Alien movies. Alien and Aliens. Since then, the franchise has really struggled to grasp what made these two films so revered by fans. Everything from Alien3, Prometheus, the god-awful Covenant and the Alien VS Predator films have lost sight of what made Alien so good to begin with. A lot of the marketing material for Alien: Romulus seemed to show director and writer Fede Alvarez very aware of this fact.
With a promise of steering back into horror territory and a story nestled between Alien and Aliens (sorry guys, this isn’t an adaptation of the excellent Alien: Isolation game), Alvarez’s story feels like if someone fed every Alien script into ChatGPT and spat out an amalgamation of everything iconic about the franchise. Remember the Facehuggers? The Androids? The iconic sound design? The acid blood and, of course, the Xenomorphs? They’re all here baby!
And to coin a term I’ve heard written out by someone else online, this is pure D.F.C – Dopamine Fuelled Cinema. The very idea here is to smash in as many memorable moments as possible so fans of the franchise can literally do the Leo DiCaprio meme of pointing at the screen every time something iconic pops up. And for those wary enough to see through this facade, Romulus has a lot of issues.
Now, on the surface Alien: Romulus isn’t a bad movie. From a filmmaking perspective, this is a very well put-together picture. The aesthetic harks back to the iconic retro-futuristic style of the past films and there are a lot of references and Easter Eggs to the earlier films. We have everything from monitors showing loading bars to little background details on planets or areas that foreshadow bigger events or lean into the worldbuilding.
These touches are great, and it’s backed up by a really solid colour palette and sound design. Sure, there’s still the occasional “Inception whomp” for some reason, but for the most part, every part of the production really hits it out the park. Unfortunately, the meat and potatoes of the story – that being plot and character – falter in a big way.
The film begins over at a mining planet, which is its own kind of hell. It receives zero days of sunlight and the officials in charge there are as crooked as the company they work for which is, of course, Weyland-Yutani. Rain is an orphan who has grown up all her life on this planet, dreaming of feeling the sun on her face.
Her parents died several months back following an accident in the mines. So for now, it’s just her and her Weyland-Yutani android, Andy. Quite why the company have allowed this young teen to keep this android around without it being decommissioned or brought back to the company for new directives remains a mystery, especially as this plays a key role in Andy’s development later on in the movie.
I mentioned the crooked workers here, and we see that early on with Rain. She is, presumably, a good worker and despite hitting her quotas, the goalposts are moved, her request to leave the planet denied and she’s forcibly kept on the planet “for a further 5-6 years before she can try again”. This seems to be a widespread issue here, and you can see from the imagery and pans across the colony (including graffiti marked “fuck” under Weyland-Yutani and people in the streets attacking Androids) that there’s disdain toward Weyland-Yutani that could end in an all-out war. It’s your typical rebellion iconography we’ve seen in plenty of dystopian movies in the past.
We don’t explore this angle though, as instead we stick with Rain who, alongside Andy, seize an opportunity to get off the planet. This stems from heading off with her ex-boyfriend Tyler to a derelict spacecraft to retrieve cryostasis chambers. These chambers will allow Rain, Tyler, Tyler’s pregnant sister Kay, cousin Bjorn, and Bjorn’s girlfriend Navarro to escape to the planet Yvaga. Andy, being a company android, has the ability to interface with the onboard computer system, basically making him a walking deus ex machina device crucial for the mission.
Rain is hesitant to send Andy but is convinced by Tyler and Andy himself to allow him to assist. They fly their hauler, Corbelan, to the spacecraft, which is revealed to be a station divided into two parts – Romulus and Remus. However, despite finding the pods, they also need fuel and as they retrieve the stasis chambers, Tyler, Bjorn, and Andy accidentally revive frozen facehuggers and trigger a lockdown, bringing about their own doom as a result.
As one may expect, we then get into proper horror-thriller territory, with all the characters finding their way onboard the Romulus and making a litany of stupid, face-slapping decisions along the way. Look, I know as well as everyone else that stupidity is a staple of the core horror experience but Romulus turns that up to the nth degree at times. One scene shows Tyler, Andy and Rain creeping past a bunch of facehuggers (we’ll circle back to this in a second) and they’re told not to make a sound. So naturally, Tyler ignores all of that and while surrounded by facehuggers, decides to talk through his head-set pretty loud, forcing them all of them to run. Great work mate.
This is particularly egregious because it comes right in the wake of the film’s two true creative uses of the environment we haven’t seen in this franchise before – Gravity and temperature. The idea with this facehugger scene is to raise the temperature to such a level that they can walk on through and essentially be invisible to these critters. It’s actually a neat ploy and works quite well (until it doesn’t).
Similarly, we get gravity and anti-gravity thrown around in the one sequence that feels like it was inspired by the games. This comes into play later on but much like the temperature scene, is undermined by one of the stupidest scenes in the entire franchise. And that’s not me being hyperbolic either.
To preface here, a lot of people are torn on this scene, with Joe Russo even commenting on Twitter that those who don’t like the scene “clearly don’t like movies”. So with it confirmed that I definitely don’t like films, the scene in question sees Rain armed with an auto-aimed pulse rifle and a bunch of xenomorphs stalking her along a tight hallway. We’re told early on that if any of the alien’s acidic blood hits the ground, it’s game over. They’re on the bottom level of the spaceship and so this gun shouldn’t really be used because it could trigger a vacuum in space if any blood hits the floor and it’ll kill them all.
Rain however, has the idea of flipping on the anti-gravity and when she does, she blasts through waves of xenomorphs and sprays acid blood through the air. The blood doesn’t penetrate any electrics, the ceiling, the walls or the handrails. It just lazily spins in circles. And that’s just as well because then we get a scene of Rain and Andy slowly floating through the hallway past globs of acid. They make it without incident, with Rain at one point even using her pulse rifle to fire wildly into the air and knocking herself back. It’s a cool scene visually but it’s also incredibly stupid to watch, especially as none of these bullets do any damage to the walls, nor do they move any of the acid closer to the edges of the ship. And really, this scene typifies the film as a whole.
Romulus has a lot of interesting visual cues and ideas but the narrative fails time and again through a use of either stupid characters, deus ex machina or inconsistent plotting that relies on breaking established pieces of lore already. I won’t go into the specifics around how Romulus doesn’t work to watch between Alien and Aliens, or quite how Weyland-Yutani managed to find all the wreckage of the Nostromo and the alien corpse floating in the same area (despite being hit with a nuke, floating off into numerous directions and Ripley not being found for decades but whatever). Suffice to say, Romulus is a film where you’re required to “switch your brain off and not think too much”.
Some of this could be overlooked if the characterisation was good but Romulus has some of the worst character writing in the whole franchise. And that’s saying a lot given some of the crap we’ve been dished out in recent years. In fact, coming out of the cinema, with the exception of Andy and Rain, I couldn’t remember a single character’s name or what their arcs were. Everybody here is so utterly one-dimensional and stripped of characterisation that it makes it really hard to care what happens to them.
There’s one scene where Kay is panicking while she’s holding Navarro, who’s about to “give birth” to the alien xenomorph and the pair have a tender moment as Navarro is scared of death. This parallels and foreshadows Kay’s fate during the final act of the movie, where she’s in the same position Navarro was, uttering the same sort of words, asking for help. Scenes like this are really welcome and hark back to the themes of Alien as a whole but they’re not explored in all that much detail.
These moments are always overshadowed by the characters basically playing up to their one-note tripes with zero growth for anybody. Bjorn is the asshole in the group and has disdain for Andy, as an android, because of an incident in the past where his parents were killed due to the Weyland-Yutani android locking them in the mines. He hates androids and uses every moment to antagonize him. And that’s it, that’s his arc. Bjorn doesn’t learn to accept the androids, there’s no redemption and he’s swiftly killed.
Meanwhile, Kay is just “pregnant woman” while Tyler and Rain have a few moments where they look like they could rekindle their previous relationship. Tyler helping Rain with her pulse rifle or the duo waiting for the temperature to rise before entering the facehugger arena are two such examples. But then we don’t really get anything substantial between them, nor do we touch on their past or see any of the chemistry that made them an item beforehand. And it’s frustrating because there are a lot of deaths in this film and absolutely zero weight behind anything. The actors certainly do their best here but by the end, I genuinely couldn’t care less if everybody lived or died – even Rain.
The only character here who really stands out is Andy. His inner conflict around his prime directive (which has always been to protect Rain) takes on a surprising turn when a returning Rook, who has icky AI facial and vocal references added in, throws all of this into whack. Of course, it also helps that Andy has an “upgrade” in the middle of this which turns the relationship he has with Rain upside down. In fact, this is probably the one highlight of the whole movie – the relationship between Rain and Andy. It’s just a pity that the same couldn’t be applied to everybody else. Hell, Alien managed to make us care about everybody in the span of 20 minutes but yet, Romulus can’t do that across a 2 hour run-time. It’s so frustrating.
And I guess frustrating is the best way to describe Romulus. This is a movie that could have been great but it feels like its been churned up and spat out by an AI machine that only knows about Alien on a surface level, rather than the deep, inner-workings of the franchise. The characters are poor, one-note playthings to be killed off one by one by the xenomorph and it’s hard to care about any of them. Likewise, the film struggles with its narrative, which feels like a re-tread of what’s come before with a few sprinklings of originality thrown in for good measure. Romulus is a cheap, chewy knock-off; a film that relies so heavily on its nostalgia bait and iconic visuals that it forgets to write a good story to go with it.
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Verdict - 4.5/10
4.5/10