The Alien films have had its share of stumbles with the last few films in the franchise. Director Ridley Scott’s recent attempts at expanding the lore of the franchise had mixed results with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. After Alien: Covenant did little to reinvigorate the franchise, it seemed as if the franchise would go dormant. Thankfully, this is not the case with this weekend’s release of Alien: Romulus and the upcoming TV show, Alien: Earth.
Alien: Romulus succeeds where most of the films in the franchise have failed with its back-to-basics approach that emphasizes horror and favors the use of practical special effects. Even though, there is CG used in the film, it’s usage is restrained and blends nearly flawlessly with practical effects. However, what makes the film stand out is the tight, claustrophobic atmosphere created by director Fede Alvarez, which harkens back to the original Alien.
The film opens with a spaceship probe finding the floating wreckage of the Nostromo from the first Alien film. Among the wreckage the ship recovers the fossilized body of the alien xenomorph that was ejected into space at the end of Alien.
Alien: Romulus shifts ahead to a mining colony on the planet, Jackson’s Star, and Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny), a young miner who is desperate to leave the colony along with her adoptive brother Andy (David Jonnson), an artificial being who is an older model of the artificial beings featured in other Alien films. After her attempts to legally leave the planet fail, she is approached by her friend Tyler (Archi Renaux) to help him and his crew of his ship, the Corbelan, to raid a derelict space station that entered the planet’s orbit, but will soon crash. The crew of the Corbelan consists of Tyler’s sister, Kay (Isabela Merced), his abrasive cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and the ship’s pilot, Navarro (Aileen Wu). Like Rain, Tyler and his crew hope to leave the planet but need cryopods to make the long journey to the next world. Tyler plans to raid the station in order to salvage unused cryopods for themselves.
Once the group boards the station, they discover that the crew aboard the station are dead because the xenomorph they recovered from the Nostromo revived, massacred the crew and irreparably damaged the station. Onboard the station are dormant alien facehuggers, which are a crab-like form of xenomorph that forcibly impregnates victims in order to hatch infant versions of the skeletal xenomorphs. It turns out that the station is owned by the company, Weyland-Yutani, which as seen in the other films is dedicated to capturing xenomorphs at the expense of anyone else in order to carry out scientific experiments on the alien creatures.
During their efforts to retrieve the cryopods, Tyler and Bjorn accidently revive the facehuggers, which soon imperils the crew of the Corbelan, as well as Rain. Andy, meanwhile receives a software upgrade in order to find out how to deal with the facehuggers and adult xenomorphs that are nestled within the dark corridors of the station. However this upgrade overwrites his benevolent personality and his motives become more nebulous as Rain and the others try to escape the station.
While Alien: Romulus has a fairly simple storyline, it delivers with well-earned jump scares and a pervading sense of dread and intense suspense throughout the film. It also has a few homages and call backs to the other films, which are sometimes a bit too-on-the-nose. But overall, these references pan out and the film manages to add new wrinkles to the Alien lore as the motivations behind Weyland-Yutani are fleshed out, which leads to some truly horrifying moments in the final act.
Fede Alvarez deserves much of the credit for how well Alien: Romulus turned out. He injects the film with a back-to-basics approach that focused on horror, which is what made the first film so memorable. Alvarez knows how to keep audiences in suspense with his use of shadows and sounds, which made the station feel like a haunted house in space as the deadly xenomorphs stealthily stalked their victims. He wisely keeps the creatures in the shadows, which adds to the feeling of primordial terror we and the characters feel while confronting the deadly and opaque unknown.
The actors turn in solid performances with Jonnson being the best standout thanks to his portrayal of Andy. At first, Andy, being an obsolete model, comes off as a sympathetic character from the way he is mistreated by humans. We can see that although Andy is synthetic, he has emotions and only wants to protect Rain and the others. But once, he receives his upgrade he transforms into a cold and unfeeling being who is compromised by the goals of the Weyland-Yutani company to the point that the characters cannot be certain that he has their best interests in his artificial heart.
By going back to basics, Alien: Romulus reinvigorates the Alien franchise by focusing on what made the first two films work so well. That is the sense of cosmic terror one may encounter out there in the unknown regions of space.
José Soto
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