This review contains no spoilers.
Alien: Romulus is, in some ways, a perfect sequel for the saga fans. All the formal and expected ingredients of the franchise are here, including the familiar plot of humans trapped in an enclosed ship or structure with one or more xenomorphs taking them out one by one. This is how these movies have worked since the first Alien, and this is how they should work, with inescapable elements in the mix: facehuggers, eggs and slime, acid instead of blood, tiny mouths in big mouths, corridor races, artificial humans, computer retrofuturism, and an evil corporation.
In a way, it seems that director Fede Alvarez decided to make the ultimate Alien rollercoaster because when developing the script (in collaboration with his usual sidekick, screenwriter Rodo Sayagues), one could imagine he had a checklist from which he crossed off all the ingredients that happen on screen at such a breathtaking pace. Alien: Romulus is the work of a fan (perhaps for the first time in the series) who doesn’t want to give up on making the quintessential Alien movie, the ultimate sum of all its elements. You can already see it in the posters, which are a collection of images of iconic moments that make it clear that the intention here isn’t to revolutionize the franchise but to pay homage to it.
Alvarez is an exceptionally gifted director for such a task. Let’s not forget that his great Don’t Breathe is practically a movie of the series but without spaceships. What he achieves in Alien (as in Don't Breathe and Evil Dead), with a very closed script and a very studied staging, is that the set pieces flow naturally: The scenarios change shape, dimensions, and characteristics. The characters, the gravity, and the threats also change, all in a natural way and with a fantastic rhythm.
To be clear, Alien: Romulus looks like a real movie, not a series of action sequences designed in an office and pasted together by an editor with no creative vision. Though it falls short of Evil Dead or Don’t Breathe in Alvarez’s oeuvre, his stamp is evident in an extraordinary sense of rhythm that genre directors with much larger budgets have nothing to envy.
Admittedly, the movie takes a bit of time to get going (although this is in line with the series: the marine plate at the beginning of Alien isn’t precisely the most digestible thing in the world), and the characters aren’t the most charismatic of the saga, except the find that’s the defective synthetic, but that doesn’t matter. Once we get into action, the movie flows like a thousand miracles, all punctuated with the magnificent use of the tools Alvarez has at his disposal, from budgetary constraints to the use of sound (and silences) very much of the first installments of the franchise and unheard of in today’s cinema.
And then the last part. Which, of course, we won’t spoil, but where Alvarez invested more of his talent, rivaling the cataclysmic twists of Don’t Breathe and Evil Dead. This superb final act looks the series’ classics in the face and redeems the whole thing from all the flaws of its first two acts.
A Few Details
A few details prevent the movie from living up to the franchise’s glory and greatness. The first is the need to bow to the easy winking and bowing of the crowd of tweeters, for whom the only thing they find attractive in a movie is the ability to write a thread citing references to other movies.
For example, the screenwriter peppered the script with phrases from other series installments. Some of them fit better, but others feel entirely artificial, like the gratuitous quotation of one of the two or three most deservedly iconic lines of the saga. There’s also a particular need to quote and give coherence to the rest of the movies in the series, including the highly complex way of fitting Prometheus and Covenant together. Sometimes, it works better, and sometimes, not so much.
However, the worst thing in this sense is, without a doubt, the unjustifiable presence of an element from the franchise’s beginning executed in a rather mediocre way. It completely breaks with the movie’s analog charm. The practical effects are elaborate, so this extra element feels complementary. Most of all, it feels like an unnecessary ingredient and possible interference from the studio. Who knows, from a marketing standpoint, this is the kind of thing that sells.
And finally, a more intangible drawback: The films in the Alien series are quite different from each other and often show a specific authorial stamp. One could say each one has its father and mother, and they all share a DNA that’s impossible to express in a PowerPoint presentation for Disney executives. We’re talking about a certain existential asphyxia, an inevitable suffocation by the immensity and, above all, the cruelty of the cosmos. This has often led people to compare the Alien films to the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.
They all manage, in one way or another, to stare that abyss in the face, from the terrifyingly inhuman designs of graphic artist H.R. Giger in the first film, to the rust and iron scenarios of Alien 3, the discussions on the origin of life in Prometheus, and the denial of the self through the psychology of the clone in Resurrection. But Romulus lacks that magic (though it does cherish the pure horror of its final act, which is closer to Alvarez’s concerns than those of the series). Perhaps it’s a movie that's too busy pandering to viewers who want to see if the movie is unsurprising enough to please them.
In any case, these are partly unavoidable problems, which don’t completely detract from the undeniable results of a must-see movie for fans of the series. Good pacing, ideas never seen before, generous contributions to the lore, excellent and ingenious juggling to fit into the continuity, and a monumental use of sound make Alien: Romulus one of the horror movies of the summer.
This article was written by John Tones and originally published in Spanish on Xataka.
Images | Disney
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