By How do we expect a predator to lunge when its hind legs are sinking in mud? One of the more exhausting aspects of criticism in the 2020s is the mandatory contextualization of slop; you can’t just assess a sci-fi chiller on its own grounds, you must view it through the prism of previous studio regimes, toy lines, and inter-studio video game tie-ins. Staring down the barrel of ALIEN: ROMULUS, I dread having to resuscitate repeated dissertations on Giger, Paul W.S. Anderson, phalluses, claustrophobic sci-fi horror, and how this “modern recontextualization of the mythos is a savvy adaptation for our current times.” Brother, there’s like 50 fucking franchises we do this song and dance with, we all need a break from the same skeleton of discourse. Even this type of intro—go check the receipts—I’ve written at least three variations of this sentiment in the past three years of Merry-Go-Round articles. Give me something else to gab about!
And yet, on the other hand… Damn, there’s not an ALIEN movie I don’t like, give me another, bartender, and leave the bottle, I’m parked.
I like watching ALIEN movies! Sheesh, in this barren summer movie season, I, like many, was still cautiously optimistic for a new installment, even from a director I’ve never cared for. Admittedly, gorehound Fedé Alvaraez has traded in his gnarlier tendencies to focus on accurate mimicry: right off the bat, the screen explodes with touchable analogue bullshit, dingy space docks, and Weyland-Yutani’s crushing induction of the galaxy’s workforce into indentured servitude. The 2,781 inhabitants of Jackson’s Star all seem to be concurrently gathered so that even the largest civilian population in an Alien film still feels like a confined prison. All that’s missing from the intro is a bevy of oral violations, and what ROMULUS lacks in groundbreaking violence, it more than makes up for later in facehugger smooch sessions. Hell yeah, it looks like an Alien, it smells like an Alien, and it kind of tastes like an Alien.
But it’s a tricky recipe picking up dormant icons. You need foundational familiars to entomb the work in the same hall of its predecessors (a classic legacy sequel trope that works here: making a MacGuffin out of a sidelined decoration from the original, i.e. cryogenic chambers) but start praying too hard at the altar—digging your knees like the preacher’s lurching over your shoulder—and you risk breaking your sauce. You start fumbling the new vision, like center-framing a drinking bird dunking its beak while Cailee Spaeney and David Jonsson occupy the far edges in their first onscreen appearance. Speedrunning the life cycle of a Xenomorph (okay, fine, the giant wall-pussy is a fun addition to the canon) while never noting which anonymous twenty-something pirate does what on their ship. Girlypops, I look at your tiny round faces and cannot identify a single hour of labor in the space mines, let alone the ennui of an existence solely defined by earning less than generations before you had. The kids can’t sell it, but they also aren’t given much to work with: the generational deficit also lives in the form of no one having an original character to embody. Can anyone become a singular movie star if everyone is working in mandated reverence of who came before?
Some of the citations to previous works are quite cunning. What keeps the survivors of ALIEN running for their lives is a fear of pain and the preservation of dignity. Married characters—and pregnant ones—have immediate loved ones to grieve, but these space truckers and colonial marines just really don’t want to get mouth-fucked by a towering ebony weapon of biological destruction. They know they will die alone in space, but, by God, please don’t let it be like that.
The franchise has never provided a safe haven before now, this hallowed Sun-adjacent planet, Yvaga. The performances are more desperate now that they’re grounded by hope; Alvarez doesn’t achieve anything as primal as Amy Seimetz accidentally blowing the entire ship up in COVENANT, but you’ll believe the rug of a future that could’ve been has been pulled from under Archie Renaux’s bawling Tyler when Andy refuses to open the doorway for his preyed upon sister. The cocksure rationale for embarking on this suicide mission (“Everybody’s dying, right?” one young pirate utters in his pitch to a group so resistant to ending up like their wage-slave parents that they’ll risk killing themselves) disintegrates in seconds, and in this despair ROMULUS makes the most of its baby-faced cast by stripping their souls down to infantile flailing. As they circle monumental planetary rings like a starry drain, the vastness of the cosmos cleverly amplifies the hopelessness.
Benjamin Wallfisch’s score is the most impressive replicative feat in a film devoted to delivering that old flavor you like, his music an inspired mix of Goldsmith wonder and pulsating bass. Both are sewn together with bold stretches of silence, some in the name of tension (Kay’s excruciating crawl from the wreckage to her abduction by a Xenomorph) and others for the sake of letting an auditorium of moviegoers hear each other collectively gasp (the RESURRECTION downgrade of a Xeno-Human hybrid crouched in a doorway). In this all is satisfying cause-and-effect storytelling: everything has a set-up, a pay-off, and a reason.
It’s a good ALIEN film! Until it frustratingly is not! Blipping along at a pace that favors efficiency over mood, ROMULUS itself is the antithesis to ROMULUS’ antagonism of its pinkerton synthetics. When the heisters’ escape car crash landed in the hangar bay, my eyes darted to the top right corner of the screen expecting to read a new mission objective. Much more than pirates versus aliens, which would’ve been the more efficient thrills-per-minute route, ROMULUS is a tale of workers versus a trolley-problem-obsessed droid; it’s a movie primarily about battling logic that can’t help but dictate itself completely with it. The gears are so greased that it doesn’t leave room for terror, the atmosphere more akin to Disney World’s defunct The Great Movie Ride than ALIEN’s labyrinthine vulva of industrial decay. What is this supposed to be? A tried-and-true haunted house re-run or lore expansion? What does this bring that COVENANT didn’t? PROMETHEUS positioned pioneering scientists against a vengeful God, but here we have dutiful company men making a film that can’t stop chanting Hail Mary’s to appease its rodent overlord. Critically, what does ROMULUS contribute that Scott’s abandoned third installment—another spaceship slasher with a rogue android—wouldn’t have?
To address the corpse-fucked deepfake sitting in the room with us, yeah, the Ian Holm revival is positively grotesque, every sight of his tiny little face and BIOSHOCK radio call-ins more upsetting than the last. Though a catastrophically miswritten love letter to the Holm estate, it’s a greater injustice towards the ALIEN ethos. When you’ve got dead blokes stamping timecards in the same franchise where Ellen Ripley is chastised by a board of fraud executives in ALIENS for destroying over $47 million in company value (read: the USCSS Nostromo), you’ve lost the plot!
Fedé Alvarez, handed the keys to the candy shop six years after a dismal GIRL WITH A DRAGON TATTOO sequel while dozens of contemporary female directors sit on the sidelines with hits under their belt and zero greenlit projects in the pipeline, is too busy star-gazing at all the gizmos he’s drooled over in games and magazines to access an iota of sinister ideation. He’s in Heaven, and he’s not hiding it. I get it, maybe Disney could only afford to appoint their OMEN reboot to a femme artist, but we’ve been good little boys and girls, surely we could’ve been served Alexandre Aja’s ALIEN: ROMULUS. Please, Mr. Mouse, may I have a crumb of innovative violence or Xenomoprh tomfoolery? Sir, if you would be so kind, may I remember the main character’s name without having to look it up anytime I want to write her name (just did it again, apparently it’s “Rain”). To expect me to fear an android chanting his allegiance to “the company” when the very film I’m trying to enjoy shakes me by the shoulders—even during the good bits—to remind the world which copyrights and trademarks its allegiances lie in? Get away from me, you dumb bitch.
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