*****
Sponsored announcement: Welcome back, Alamo Drafthouse: Cedars in Dallas, TX! I was overjoyed to be able to see a movie there again! Five dollar tickets are available 08/16/24-08/30/24, with 25% off select food and beverage. You can find tickets to any of the back-in-action DFW Alamos here.
*Alamo Drafthouse provided me with a free ticket to a movie and a $30 food/beverage voucher in exchange for a mention of their grand reopening.
*****
Alien: Romulus (2024)
dir. Fede Álvarez
Rated: R
image: ©2024 20th Century Studios
Alien: Romulus is a nepo movie. Like nepo baby – the original term I’m borrowing and adapting for this new cinematic designation – I’m using nepo movie to describe offspring that coasts into success (of the kind which those without the famous pedigree could only dream) on the sterling reputation of famous progenitors. We’ve had movies like this before, as we had children of the rich and famous using their connections to jump start a career before the invention of the term nepo baby.
What made this oh-so-clever turn of phrase spring into my mind was Romulus mimicking the best, most memorable elements from both mom and dad in its pursuit to build its own legacy. Uruguayan director Fede Álvarez wrote the screenplay for this seventh installment in the iconic sci-fi/horror franchise with his longtime collaborator Rodo Sayagues. His movie plays like a best-hits mashup of both Ridley Scott’s genre defining Alien and James Cameron’s sci-fi/horror-by-way-of-war-movie follow up Aliens, with a splash of Prometheus added in for good measure.
The overall effect is that of a thin imitation of past glory.
Romulus begins with an opening sequence showing us an unmanned Weyland-Yutani space probe collecting samples from the derelict USCSS Nostromo, the setting for the horror of Alien. For the uninitiated, Weyland-Yutani is the nefarious multi-planetary conglomerate corporation at the heart of the Alien franchise. When shady human motivations surface in an Alien movie, it’s a sure bet that they’re for the benefit of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation.
Romulus takes its place in the Alien timeline between the first two films in the series. It’s set twenty years after the events of Alien and nearly four decades before Ellen Ripley is rescued from permanent cryo-sleep at the beginning of Aliens. The W-Y space probe collecting the alien Xenomorph samples from the Nostromo is all the hand-waving the movie feels obligated to do in order to get things going.
The inconsistencies of no one in Aliens besides Ripley being aware of the events of Alien – therefore making it harder to believe a W-Y probe would have collected anything from the Nostromo – can be explained by the duplicitous nature of the company and the amount of time that passes between the first and second installments. Still, I couldn’t avoid the sensation that I, as an audience member, shouldn’t be required to do this much mental leg-work to make it all make sense. Being a fan of these ever-expanding screen franchises (I’m looking firmly in your direction MCU and Star Wars) is beginning to feel more like a field of study than anything else.
Following the picture’s prologue, we meet Rain. She’s an orphan who’s working what seems to be an indentured servitude contract for Weyland-Yutani at a mining colony named Jackson’s Star. When she applies for discharge at the end of her contract, Rain discovers that W-Y has unilaterally decided to extend all contracts.
The 12,000-hour requirement Rain needs to earn her freedom has now doubled to 24,000 hours, which, according to the pitiless bureaucrat who delivers this news to her, Rain should complete in another five to six years. On top of that, W-Y is currently experiencing a shortage of workers for the mine (the most dangerous job at the colony, as is hinted at by the literal canary-in-the-coalmine that we see), so Rain will be transferred to begin work underground on her next shift.
This desperate situation – in which the movie glibly employs the worst inclinations of humans towards oppression and exploitation – is, for Álvarez and Sayagues, all the character building they need to do. Rain is practically a slave, and, outside of the relationships she has with the other characters in the movie – which are all about as thinly drawn as you could imagine – as far as Romulus is concerned, that’s all we need to know about Rain in order to care about her. It’s a depressingly impoverished approach at creating a fictional character, using the laziest shortcuts to secure emotional buy-in from the audience.
Determined to escape the hellish fate that awaits her in the mines, Rain tells her adoptive brother, a kind-hearted and meek android named Andy (get it?!?), that their plans have changed. Andy was programmed by Rain’s father before he died to act as her surrogate brother and protector.
Right on cue, a few acquaintances of Rain’s approach her about a too-good-to-be-true opportunity to escape the mining colony for a better life on a planet that actually experiences sunshine, unlike the bleak, depressing Jackson’s Star. Rain’s ex-boyfriend, Tyler, convinces her to ride with him, Tyler’s sister Kay, their cousin Bjorn, and Navarro, Bjorn’s girlfriend and the ragtag team’s pilot, into space for a salvage operation.
The world that this little family unit wants to set a course for will take nine years to reach. Therefore, they need cryo-chambers so they can hibernate during the journey. The group has discovered a derelict spacecraft orbiting Jackson’s Star; they hope to use Andy’s ability to communicate with ship computers to gain access to the derelict craft and take any cryo-chambers they find on board. There’s one wrinkle. This craft’s orbit will cause it to crash into the rings of the planet, but not for 36 hours. The mission should only take about thirty minutes. What could go wrong?
Immediately upon arriving, the band of amateur pirates discover that the derelict ship is an abandoned research facility split into two distinct wings, named Romulus and Remus. This is where the Xenomorph samples we see the W-Y probe collect in the film’s opening minutes ended up.
As you might imagine, this leads to some complications.
There’s really no need for me to describe any more of the plot. If you’ve seen any other movie in the Alien franchise, you likely could come up with the broad strokes yourself. The Xenomorphs are revived by our unwitting heroes, causing all hell to break loose on board the ship.
I was a fan of Don’t Breathe, Álvarez’s 2016 twist on the home invasion horror subgenre. (Before that, Álvarez made his feature debut with the 2013 reboot of the Evil Dead franchise.) From what I remember of Don’t Breathe, that film had a similarly stripped-down approach to its characters that worked in its favor. In Alien: Romulus, every character is a non-entity. They are simply grist for the Xenomorph’s bloody, terrifying mill, unlike the cast of unforgettable characters we get in both Alien and Aliens.
Any attempt by the filmmakers to build emotion between characters or with the audience falls to the floor with a thud. We discover that one in the group is pregnant, a twist that had me literally rolling my eyes when that fact is used by another character as the best, most salient reason to save the pregnant woman’s life.
The main antagonistic dynamic among the human characters (and Andy) is a direct retread from Aliens. One of the crew has lost a loved one because of the decision of an android. (I’ll be completely honest here and admit that I can’t remember which one suffered this trauma. The characters are so thinly drawn and forgettable that I simply couldn’t care enough about any of them to bother remembering.) Because of this earlier betrayal by a synthetic person, this character doesn’t trust, and actively antagonizes, Andy. If that sounds familiar, it’s because this dynamic is lifted almost whole cloth from Aliens. Ripley initially fears and despises the android Bishop in that movie because of the actions of Ash from Alien.
Regarding the subject of the murderous android from the first film in the franchise, Álvarez spared no expense on fan service by making the synthetic human that turns up on the derelict research station in his movie the same model as Ash. Since the actor who portrayed Ash, the legendary Ian Holm (whose memory deserves better), died in 2020 at the age of 88, Álvarez and his crew used AI-aided CGI to squeeze a posthumous performance out of the dead man, whatever Holm’s wishes might have been be damned. The result is distracting and uncanny, pulling the viewer out of the movie precisely when they should be most invested.
Álvarez’s complete devotion to fan service in Alien: Romulus is overwhelming. His effects and art department teams were meticulous in recreating the tech idiosyncrasies of the first two installments. The diegetic computer visuals and sound effects within the world of the movie attain complete fidelity to what we see and hear in Alien and Aliens, down to the sound of the guns that our heroes use to defend themselves.
A minor plot beat late in Romulus concerning the number of rounds in the guns also mimics exactly the sequence in Aliens in which the creatures systematically drain the automated guns in that movie of all available ammo. This exacting attention to detail makes Alien Romulus feel like a cheap facsimile of the best of the franchise. It feels like content produced to fit established IP specifications instead of being what it should be: an engaging and pulse-pounding story.
Why it got 2 stars:
- Alien: Romulus is competently made, but it failed to move the needle for me beyond that. It squeezes the original two movies in the franchise for shameless fan service and for their best plot ideas.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- The movie uses (and abuses) the idea of a gravity generator “purging the system” “every few minutes” on the derelict ship to cause chaos and a way out for the humans in a few tight spots. The second that one of the characters described this process, I said to myself, “Welp, Chekhov's gun just showed up.”
- There is one first in this Alien movie. (There is a greater than zero chance I’m wrong on this; if so, let me know in the comments!) At one point, we get zero-G Xenomorph acid blood floating in the space station, which was, I’ll admit, pretty cool.
- The moment when one character says to a Xenomorph, “Get away from her… you… bitch,” elicited an audible “boo” from me.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- As mentioned at the top, Rae and I got to see this for free at the grand reopening of Alamo Drafthouse Cedars in Dallas. If you aren’t aware, all five DFW Alamo locations (and, randomly, one out of state) were closed a few months ago because the franchisee declared bankruptcy. When Sony bought the Alamo Drafthouse chain — sidenote, it is disconcerting how many people I’ve heard say that a studio buying an exhibition chain is a good thing. Ever heard of vertical integration and antitrust law? One company should not be allowed to gobble up anything it wants. Break ‘em up! — they announced that they would be reopening the DFW locations. We didn’t get the best seats (which was down to me not requesting tickets until a few days before the screening), but the food was good and it was nice to see a movie in an Alamo in my hometown again. It was a packed house, but I never got a sense of if the crowd was into it.
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The FFC’s political soapbox
Lone Star Left has published a good explainer/comparison piece about Texas Democrats vs. National Democrats, and whose policies are more progressive. If you’ve never been involved in politics or have never really looked at Democratic party platforms before, take a look. You might like what you find.