Has any mainstream franchise been so heavily manipulated by individual directors as the Alien series? Each new director has taken the series in their own direction, for better or worse, but usually worse. Ridley Scott's 1979 original had a very simple premise, essentially a 1950s b-movie with post-Star Wars FX and '70s gore. With Aliens, James Cameron delivered a war movie, replacing Scott's slow burn horror with balls to the wall action. David Fincher gave us a prison movie with Alien 3, while dealing with much studio interference. Alien: Resurrection saw Jean-Pierre Jeunet give us...well, whatever that was (all I remember is Sigourney Weaver's basketball skills, or am I thinking of Kurt Russell in Escape from LA?). Scott made a surprise return to the series and bored the pants off us with the Chariots of the Gods-influenced Prometheus and Covenant, though they did feature the memorable sights of Michael Fassbender snogging himself and Noomi Rapace performing a self-abortion.
Fede Alvarez is the first filmmaker to helm an Alien sequel who appears to have no interest in taking it in a new direction. Alien: Romulus has been touted as a "back to basics" sequel, which usually means a retread of what has gone before. The film is set between Alien and Aliens, and it's something of a mash-up of those two movies. Its biggest mistake is that it doesn't understand that if you have one monster you have a horror movie but if you have multiple monsters you have an action movie. Alvarez gives us multiple monsters while attempting to make a horror movie, and it simply doesn't work. The facehugger was terrifying in Alien but when you now have scores of the little buggers scurrying around they lose that individual threat and might as well be spiders. Multiple xenomorphs means they can be dispatched too easily to make them as threatening as the original solo xenomorph. Scott and Cameron both understood this, which is why the former made a horror movie and the latter made an action movie.
The plot here follows a group of youngsters whose parents have all been killed while working in the mines for the infamous Weyland-Yutani company. Ringleader Tyler (Archie Renaux) comes up with a plan to raid a space station for its cryogenic chambers, which they can use to escape to a new life in a galaxy far, far away. He needs the aid of an android that can override the station's systems, which is where his ex-girlfriend Rain (Cailee Spaeny) comes in. Rain just happens to have a robot buddy in Andy (David Jonsson), a malfunctioning droid programmed by her late father to devote its life to her service. Along with Gen-Z red shirts Kay (Isabela Merced), Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and Navarro (Aileen Wu), they head off to the space station, where of course they run into trouble of an alien variety.
It initially seems as though Alvarez is set to give us a sci-fi reworking of his excellent gnarly survival thriller Don't Breathe, which similarly saw a group of youngsters fighting for their lives following a botched break-in. But Don't Breathe only had one villain, which made him scary. One blind psychopath makes a for a horror movie, scores of blind psychopaths not so much. Every time an alien threat is established here, be it a facehugger or a full blown xenomorph, it's taken out with the relative ease of an insect being dispatched by a can of Raid. It just doesn't work as a horror movie, and Alvarez is no James Cameron, so the action sequences are blandly constructed and fail to get us off our seats.
It doesn't help that the characters are equally bland. Within minutes of the first Alien you feel like you know exactly who this bunch of space truckers are, and you figure out their dynamic of who are buddies, who are rivals and who are frenemies. By the end of Romulus you'll still be confused as to how these kids all relate to one another. The synopsis tells us Tyler and Rain are former romantic partners, but there's little to no evidence of this in the actual film. The colourblind casting adds unnecessary confusion. At one point the American-accented Latina Kay mentions that one of the guys is her brother, leaving us scratching our head as to whether she's referring to the white guy with a strong British accent or the mixed-race guy with a strong British accent, neither of which seems a plausible candidate. Casting a black actor in the role of an android subservient to a white female master adds an uncomfortable element that results in a Driving Miss Daisy 2.0 subplot. There's very little difference between Andy and the sort of stuttering black comic foils played by Willie Best and Mantan Moreland in tone deaf 1930s mysteries. And yet just as Best and Moreland were often the best parts of those movies despite their treatment, so too is Jonsson the highlight of Romulus, ironically making his android the only character that feels human. When Andy shuts down to reboot and his eyes cloud over white, he takes on the appearance of the undead Haitian plantation workers from Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie, but the movie never interrogates this loaded imagery. There's probably a more interesting version of Romulus that gives Andy some agency rather than having him exist to make the white female lead come across as a good person.
On the plus side, Romulus looks fantastic. Its smoky aesthetic seems inspired by the early work of not just Ridley Scott but that entire movement of 70s/80s British visual stylists that included his brother Tony, Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker, Barry Myers and Roger Christian. There are some clever touches like a handheld x-ray device that allows for a new spin on chest-bursting and a striking sequence in which the silhouette of a chasing monster is glimpsed in flashes through puffs of steam. But such moments are few and far between, with too much of the movie devoted to poorly realised set-pieces and exposition delivered by a returning character from a previous instalment. In space no one can hear you scream, but your fellow cinemagoers might hear you snore during Romulus.
Directed by: Fede Alvarez
Starring: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, Aileen Wu
