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Alien: Romulus review

Contains some spoilers.

Twin brothers Romulus and Remus are credited as the founders of Rome, but it was Romulus who became the first king of the city state. Remus was killed after the brothers disagreed on which of the seven hills of Rome to found the city upon; in some tellings, it is Romulus who kills Remus. Quite what the origin of history’s most powerful city and possible fratricide have to do with the Alien franchise is anyone’s guess, beyond the brothers being name-checked as the two halves of the Renaissance research station. Perhaps the reversed-engineered “parasitoids” (face-huggers), reared by scientists onboard the research station are akin to the twins’ rearing by la Lupa Capitolina; perhaps, the genetically altered Big Bad of the film’s denouement is brother to both human and Xenomorph, killed by one as Remus was by Romulus; maybe it just sounded coolAlien: Romulus opens with the first of many nods — some earned, some forced into place with all the subtlety of a Xenomorph’s second jaw smashing through a skull (much like this sentence) — to the films that have preceded it. The lights of an autonomous deep space search vehicle glint over the shredded remains of a larger craft, catching some, but not all, of the name “Nostromo” on a panel still spinning from the force of the explosion that destroyed it some unknown years before. Into the debris field the small craft floats in silence, extracting from the exploded remains a single rock, which it holds unevenly in its cargo bay, before returning to sleep and retracing its flightpath to unknown origins. Upon arriving there, anonymous figures in biohazard suits and black visors look on as an automated laser perfectly splits the rock and its lower half is removed from the room. In the relief of the remaining half is the perfect impression of the original Xenomorph. Unlike the crew that lasers into Ripley’s escape pod during the opening of Aliens, the figures will get to keep their salvage.

An alarm sounds through a colony’s dorm, requiring all farmers to be in the mess hall in 15 minutes, requesting anyone with viral symptoms to report to Medical — because the Company cares about the health of its employees. On this terraformed planet, populated by a colony of indentured serfs, everything is old, battered, well-used, only just working. Even the film’s “artificial person”, Andy, is reclaimed and reprogrammed, recycled into guardianship and an elder brother role for lead character Rain. Rain is played with precariously balanced vulnerability and toughness, and rare intelligence by Cailee Spaeny, who was excellent in Alex Garland’s Devs and criminally underused in Kate Winslet starrer Mare of Easttown, experience from both she brings to this role. Spaeny’s Rain and her crew of miscreants — ex-boyfriend Tyler, his sister Kay, their cousin Bjorn, Bjorn’s adopted sister Navarro — bring much of the world-building to life with their heavy handed use of ageing technology that fights against them and often fails. Throughout, the technology of Alien and Aliens will seem more real and better-suited to its environment than at any point since James Cameron’s entry into the series. Even if much of the technology in film has long been surpassed by the technology of today, in all but the most obvious exceptions (it’s rather more difficult for us to pilot what is essentially a dump truck into orbit, accompanied by our android elder sibling), robust CRT-like displays and Fisher-Price-style buttons are necessary in this harsh environment, to withstand the punishment of mining operation that is claiming the lives and health of the colonists; including the lives of Rain’s parents and Bjorn’s mother. It furthers the creation of a hard-knock live on the terraformed planets and adds contexts to production design that might otherwise look anachronistic. The aesthetics of the film borrow not just from the original two films, but much of the processes of Building Better Worlds is taken wholesale from 2012 video game Alien Isolation, deservedly bringing the details of that excellently conceived and constructed game to the attention of a wider audience; the success of film, and Isolation’s influence on it were both such, that sequels to both have been greenlit, thirteen years after the game was released.

These early scenes LV-410 set this film apart from its peers, where the anti-capitalist sentiment is laid barest: in the original films, and later in Prometheus, the Company is represented by the actions of single characters: Ash’s pure interpretation of his directives; Carter Burke’s murderous ambitions; Weyland himself and his daughter in the prequel. Here, the Company is the antagonist, propelling Rain’s group of misfit spacefarers into orbit to escape life as part a Weyland-Yutani colony, which is shown to be even more miserable than previously seen. Arguably, there’s a more original entry into the franchise to be found here, a polar opposite to the vanity mission of the Prometheus, with its holographic displays, custom medical chambers, and book-lined private quarters with access to other media libraries: no one is watching the films of David Lean on LV-410. No one sees the star around which it orbits, or even the rings that orbit the planet, such is the dense, storm-infused cloud layer of the planet. Our characters relish what literal brief time they have in the sun, though the rings will become an increasing threat as the machinations of the plot crank up through gears of tension.

Rain’s ex-partner, Tyler, has discovered an abandoned vessel 200 miles above the dense clouds on LV-410. Presumably a classified secret, and drawn into the planet’s orbit, the vessel has gone undiscovered by the rest of the corporate Weyland-Yutani drones, literal and figurative, running the lethal mining operations on the planet. Tyler needs Rain because he needs Andy, her android elder brother, once her carer, now cared for by her in a touching, if sentimentally exploited, relationship. The vessel he has discover is a Weyland-Yutani craft and he needs Andy to converse with the ship’s MUTHER operating system as part of a plan to liberate it of its cryogenic sleeping chambers, which the crew of misfits can then use to escape colonial life and head to the sunlit uplands of Yvaga III, as seen in Rain’s dreams. And so our setting changes from the colonial mining world and its denizens, to the Renaissance, the station split into twin modules Romulus and Remus and gritty space drama becomes more familiar, Alien-esque, haunted spaceship fare — which is what an audience expects when they pay to see an Alien movie.

And the Alien movies is what we get, in a manner that can at times make it feel more like a collage assembled from outtakes of the preceding films. For all its good ideas and set pieces, such a carbon copy is the film in places that only a few of its own scenes stand out, and those are mostly because they take a familiar setting and add subtle twists, a late fight scene in zero gravity being the standout. The addition of a cast member who died five years before the film’s release is distracted at best, needless in many ways, and entirely uncalled for on consideration. Obvious and telegraphed though the introduction of the character is, nothing quite prepares you for the uncanniness of this particular valley, and a valley-like low it is.

Exposition is highlighted against the amount of swearing writers Fede Álvarez (also director) and Rodo Sayagues pepper the dialogue with, and not all of the performances are of Spaeny’s calibre. Nor are any of the characters here as rounded as those of the crew of the Nostromo, even if the cast of Romulus are offered more screen time. This rests on on the shoulders of Álvarez and Sayagues, who create cutout characters on whom to inflict their drama, whose destinies are predetermined from introduction, rather than the characters born of improvisation, like Yaphet Kotto’s Parker and Harry Dean Stanton’s Brett, or even like the quick-patter, rapid-fire, tight staccato that establishes the characters of the Marines aboard the USS Sulaco.

Unlike prequel Prometheus, and Charlize Theron’s character running in the path of a falling spacecraft, like Tom the cat trying to escape a toppled telegraph pole in his eponymous cartoons, Romulus isn’t completely crushed by the weight of its ideas, even if some that needlessly tie it back to Prometheus could have been dropped for a tighter film. It’s a sign of how much cinema has changed in the near-forty years since Aliens that Romulus is a fine enough entry into a franchise whilst being entirely derivative, half-constructed as it is from callbacks to other films in the cannon — with the notable exception of Alien^3, which, with its music video (derogatory) inflected visuals, terrible plot choices, and dragging third act, might be the worst entry in the series. By contrast, Romulus is a high point, the best in the line up since Aliens, if a pale shadow to that and its preceding sibling. Romulus sets out to re-immerse us in the wider world of the Alien Universe, building on what has come before more successfully than all but the original two films, and it does so, in part, by being truer to the horror genre than Alien was, with suitably nasty jump scares, and a permeating sense of dread that builds from the moment the motley crew enter the Renaissance and meet a dead rat, to the tension and brutal violence of the finale and the destruction of the Big Bad in a suitably grim manner that can only be inflicted on a creature by the horrific and utterly inhospitable environment of interplanetary space. The borrowed lines, the most obvious of which was so dreadfully apparent it can be seen coming minutes before it drops, and the copied scenes oddly heighten the film above what it might have been as a standalone — Romulus stands out because it is the better one in a series. Were this a film without the titular creature, it’s hard to imagine it spawning its own franchise, but if you’re hard-pressed to find time to watch both Alien and Aliens, and if you’ve not played Alien: Isolation, Romulus presents the edited highlights of both and will at least save you some hours — until you remember why you enjoyed Alien and Aliens so much and decide to watch them again. And then buy Isolation in the Steam Sale and start to play through that.

Header image: 20th Century Studios