For a franchise whose major theme centers on the natural blind spots of humanity, it’s admittedly a good joke that Alien: Romulus is as simple a concept of: what if Alien was remade using modern horror gimmicks? One would think they would run out of ideas after the ambitious scope of Ridley Scott’s divisive revival films, and Alien: Romulus partially proves this to be true while also proving that there’s still some life left in the formula.
It’s a typical story if you’ve seen an Alien film — a group of people go to space, touch something they shouldn’t, and 30 minutes later there’s an invincible predator with acid blood slithering around in the air ducts. This group includes Rain (Cailee Spaeny), an indentured worker under Weyland-Yutani Corporation’s thumb who breaks into a space station to steal supplies for an escape; Andy (David Jonsson), Rain’s android brother whose defunct programming leaves him with a slight mental impairment; and four or five young people that you look at and instantly know they won’t be making it to the credits. It’s not like this franchise prefers to hide that 80 percent of its roster is xenomorph fodder.
Still, it does leave a little to be desired in the character and writing department. The others play their characters just fine, but their dialogue comes off a little banal at times. The film’s heart is Andy, who instantly endears himself with his meek shuffle and jaunted movements that strike a perfect balance between awkwardly robotic and convincingly human. Jonsson’s performance operates on several levels, and all of them work. Andy is temporarily reprogrammed around halfway through the movie, and he embodies the character’s personality change through subtle shifts in his voice and movements that retain their robotic origin.
Spaeny, who’s already been having a very good year with the box office success of Civil War, does her best with the large slice of nothing she’s given in the first hour and really turns up the heat in the second. She mixes a determination to survive and protect her brother with raw human fear, which comes out naturally through panic in her voice that threatens to spill over if and when the next horrible thing happens. The plot she hurries through is expected from an Alien film, but there are some fun twists — putting the facehuggers, the creatures responsible for impregnating its victims with alien eggs, underwater makes for a sequence so exciting that it’s a marvel it’s never been thought of before. Despite this, it’s almost as though the film is too tightly paced. The first act comes and goes without taking its time and building the dread of what the group is about to uncover, even if that payoff is largely satisfying. The sense of escalation is a little lost.
What Alien: Romulus somewhat lacks in writing, it makes up for in filmmaking. The opening presents Weyland-Yutani’s discovery of Alien’s original xenomorph as a foreboding ritual, emphasized by the shadowy symmetry of watching scientists. The room where the group first discovers the facehuggers is full of liquid, bathed in red light, and shot tightly in a way that evokes the feeling of a uterus and emphasizes the unholy seeding that’s about to take place. Director Fede Álvarez understands what made both Ridley Scott and James Cameron effective directors, and knows when to play things tense as well as when to go big. The transition from act two’s simmering horror and act three’s bloody shootout is seamless rather than jaunty, as it so easily could’ve been.
Unfortunately, there are the aforementioned modern tropes to deal with. There are cheap jumpscares aplenty, mostly in the shape of an atrocious CGI reconstruction of the dead Ian Holm’s android character from the original film. Even the 2010s Aliens managed to avoid these, and yet, when Alien: Romulus gets its horror right, it gets it right. The depiction of a facehugger’s attack has never felt more violent and invasive than it has here, nor have the brutal effects of the xenomorph’s corrosive acid blood on the human skin. There’s an unbearably tense scene involving a bunch of blood floating around that probably makes for the best setpiece in the film. The best part is that a lot of this is practical, and it shows. The xenomorphs look great, the facehuggers look their best, and there’s something in the finale that is so bold and bizarre that I’m impressed it looked as good as it did.
I’ll admit that I was not expecting to enjoy Alien: Romulus this much. The idea of an Alien movie by the director that rebooted Evil Dead and made it oddly self-serious seemed confused at best, but Álvarez proved he understands the visual language behind what made the originals so good. The question — what if Alien was remade using modern horror gimmicks? — has been answered, and if the answer is this flawed but overall very enjoyable film, then I’m okay with that.
