Alien: Romulus, Fede Álvarez’s addition to the iconic franchise, starts as lean, atmospheric thriller, but, like a face-hugger proboscis down the oesophagus, is forcibly impregnated with clumsy fan service.
Rain (Cailee Spaeny, effective but largely wasted in a straightforward heroine role)1, our new Ripley, is desperate to escape from the grimy, tenebrous mining colony of Jackson’s Star.
When her contract is extended without warning2, she and her guileless adopted brother, Andy (David Jonsson, ingeniously modulated), accept a desperate gig to get them off-world: scavenging corporate tech from a derelict spaceship on collision course with the planet.3
On a purely technical level, Alien: Romulus is incredibly well-executed. Naaman Marshall’s production design is, as per the original film, satisfyingly analogue – pipes, ducts, shafts, plenty of shadowy spaces for creatures to lurk, with Galo Olivares’ cinematography makes memorable visuals of sallow light and various shades of corporate grey.
Álvarez creates a number of memorably tense set-pieces, aided by Benjamin Wallfisch’s unnerving score, but the survival horror aspect is hamstrung by endless references to what’s come before.4 Fear is instinctual, callbacks are intellectual; and this is something akin to cinematic necromancy.
Less Alien: Resurrection than Alien: Revenant, ambulatory (at its best, thrilling) but bloated. Much like the Roman founder for which it’s named, the film is twofold, and, again, as with its namesake, one half kills the other. A shot of a star field – a black shape, a ship, revealed! – has more imagination in it than all the cheap iconicity. Keep the Helvetica font, ditch the rest.5
Sci-fi deserves better and we deserve better sci-fi.
- Though, like Sigourney Weaver before her, she looks great lit by gunfire.
- Employment by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation is closer to indentured servitude.
- I don’t think how W-Y haven’t discovered it already is ever addressed.
- At least one of which was, to me, truly immersion breaking.
- Though I could do without the computer beep we hear from *outside* the spaceship. Sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum. If only there was a more pithy way to put it…
