'Alien Romulus' Produces the Same Old Scares
Here we go again. Once more, we have an Alien film that plays all the familiar beats of its franchise. For both good and bad reasons, Alien Romulus is an extremely basic Alien flick that isn't any different from any other Alien movie. It has a dirty, used space environment, characters running from face huggers, Necromorphs bursting out of people's chests, space hatches opening up, almost sending our heroes into oblivion, last-minute saves, and robots conflicting with humans. It's the same stuff you've seen a million times before. If you don't mind more of the same, then Alien Romulus will fill your sadistic need for gore. Just don't expect to find anything new.
The pastiche nature of the film is welcoming on the one hand but derivative on the other. Comparing Alien Romulus to Ridley Scott's recent prequels, the film luckily doesn't have a ton of unnecessary exposition. The problem I found with Alien Covenant is that it answered too many questions, removing the mystery from the Necromorphs. We find out through Michael Fassbender's synthetic android how the aliens came to be. That mystery doesn't need to be solved. The true horror lies in the mystery of the creatures. On the opposite end of problems, Prometheus, unlike Covenant, sparked my interest. It started as an intelligent film, answering where humans come from. Then, in the second act, the film regresses into another run from the monster, terror in space story ending with a Necromorph bursting out of someone's chest for fan service.
Alien Romulus ditches the subtext for a two-hour thrill ride. The movie's plot is fairly simple. Rain (Cailee Spaeny) works in the mines on a nondescript rock/planet. She attempts to move out of the mines, but Rain has two years left of work she can do before she can leave. Lucky for her, one of her friends has a way out of their mess. The plan is to break into a Weyland ship and steal containers holding valuable resources. Tagging along with Rain is her friend/android, Andy (David Jonsson). After Rain lost everyone she cares about, Andy has been like a brother to her even if he isn't human. Outside of our two main protagonists, the other characters are disposable, as they most likely would be in a horror flick. There's nothing remarkable about them, as they're more like stock characters than living, breathing humans. I get that's kind of what the Alien films are like, but I think we can break that mold. There's the bald girl, the pregnant woman, the English guy, and I think there was another guy, but it doesn't matter since the supporting cast is meant to be dismembered. Not remembered.
From the start of the movie, it's clear this isn't a James Cameron Aliens action film. Alien Romulus is a straight-up slasher. The movie opens with an Aestroid floating through space that gets obtained by the Romulus crew. Composer Benjamin Wallfisch pays homage to Jerry Goldsmith's score from the 1979 original film with a touch of György Ligeti's Atmospheres, which was famously used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The slow-moving asteroid with disturbing music introduces a foreboding atmosphere for what's going to come for the rest of the film. With a mission to steal someone else's supplies from an abandoned ship, what could possibly go wrong?
Like any slasher, Alien Romulus has dumb characters who make suicidal choices. The heist itself is a stupid idea. Haven't these guys thought about why that ship is empty? Maybe there's something on there? Nah, just go ahead and rob the place; you'll all be fine. Not all the characters are idiots. The film centers its focus on the relationship between Rain and Andy. We only get a limited amount of backstory from Rain. But it's enough for us to care about her kinship with Andy. More than anyone, Andy earns our sympathy in the film. Since he's a robot he's mistreated by Rain's crewmates. Thanks to a nuanced performance from David Jonsson, Andy is a character who has more depth than the humans in the film. However, there's nothing particularly interesting about Rain. She's the usual protagonist who's an orphan with a weepy backstory. You could pluck her from any other film about a survivor, and she would be the same character from a number of films. That's my problem with Alien Romulus; it's generic.
Alien Romulus goes back to Alien's roots by taking out the backstory of the Necromorphs and just making a simple horror film. But it's the same movie we've seen a million times before. Everything from the flashing lights in dark spaceship hallways to the Necromorphs prolonging their kills so another character can be conveniently rescued, Alien Romulus is a predictable film. It doesn't do anything different so that it can retain its alienated audience from the last two films. There's even a character in the movie who reappears from the original. The usage of the character is cheap and morbid.
When the movie doesn't rely on the past, it's at its best. Sadly, that's not very often. I can't think of many occasions where Alien Romulus didn't repackage the same scare sequences from previous films. The movie acts as a reboot, bringing back all the elements from past films to woo old fans over. When the movie ends, things are set for a sequel to a franchise that could have done away with sequels since Aliens.
Alien Romulus opens nationwide on August 16th.
