Movie review – Alien: Romulus is not bad and not even the best of the saga
Carrying out a cinematographic saga with a coherent continuity that proposes new stories with old and new characters is not an easy task. We have seen good and bad stories, as an example we have the no longer-so-successful Star Wars franchise, or Terminator, which due to the stubbornness of innovating and modernizing have had great failures.
Each one of them has contributed great things to the history of cinematography in the genres they occupy, another one of them, and no less important is Alien, a science fiction, horror, and action franchise centered on a series of original films that show its protagonist, Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and her confrontations with an extraterrestrial life form commonly known as Xenomorph, a species dangerous to the balance of all life forms, it is destructive and a relentless killer.
Created by writer Dan O’Bannon who collaborated with screenwriter Ronald Shusett on a story initially titled Star Beast and eventually changed to Alien, set in a dystopian future where humanity has advanced technologically and explores new planets for their resources, it features the work of Swiss painter and sculptor HR Giger who designed the adult form of the Xenomorph and its ship while French artist Mœbius created the futuristic/modern look of the spacesuits and Ron Cobb provided most of the industrial design for the sets.
Without the aforementioned this franchise would not have had the success that 20th Century Fox Studios expected after investing millions of dollars in its production, the person in charge of bringing the script and this peculiar and terrifying story to life was director Ridley Scott in 1979, this was followed by 3 more sequels Aliens in 1986 directed by James Cameron, Alien 3 in 1992 directed by David Fincher and Alien Resurrection in 1997 directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2 prequels directed by Scott Scott also directed the prequel series films Prometheus in 2012 and Alien: Covenant in 2017, each with a very personal point of view on these adventures and their characters.
Alien has been present and its stories have also been told outside the big screen, novels, comics, action figures, and video games are what have kept it within the taste of both locals and strangers, not everything has turned out to be as interesting as it was initially proposed, in this 2024 it is the director Fede Álvarez who tells us an interquel that pays tribute to the entire franchise in Alien: Romulus.
What is Alien: Romulus about?
A group of young people trapped on a mining planet owned by the Weyland-Yutani company plan to escape to a new world, to do so they need cryostasis chambers that will allow them to escape to the planet Yvaga while exploring the depths of the Rebirth space station that was abandoned years ago is an experimental laboratory where there are still traces of the terrifying life form in the universe, this group will have to use all their knowledge to work as a team and achieve their goal, to survive.
After the failure of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant and the betrayal of the franchise by telling the supposed origin of these beings at the hands of a synthetic called David (Michael Fassbender) things seemed to have come to a standstill, there was still a lot to tell and the studios decided to take the easy way out, telling a story before any event that would explain where these deadly and dangerous beings come from, the result as we have seen did not work.
Alien: Romulus is an experiment that tries to clarify and return everything to its original sequence using elements from the prequels, the black liquid, and the engineers, the film itself is a fan service, a hybrid project that is taking shape-taking key references from the rest of the franchise, a tribute if we want to see it that way to everything that was not explained and that in turn went wrong from the previous installments, the plot holes and the incoherent continuity and now the follow-up they want to give it along with the television series Alien: Earth that will serve as a prequel and will take place three decades before the events of the 1979 Alien film.
It seems that 20th Century and The Walt Disney Company are in a hurry to give another franchise a hard time, although Fede Alvarez finds small and diverse ways to innovate a classic this may not be enough to fix everything wrong in the entire saga and this same film, each sequel and prequel of this franchise has been at war with itself, it has not managed to have a sequence of events that are up to date level of what they want to present and even more so to works that have already been done in novels, comics and video games that are the ones that form a canon that they want to forget to modernize it for the new generations.
It’s already annoying that studios want to come out with the same stupidity of wanting to reach a younger audience, one that doesn’t care at all what is done or not in their favor, there are simply things that shouldn’t be touched in this way and the question remains the same: will this be the definitive film that rescues the public’s interest in a film franchise that should have been left alone years ago? The answer is that very few or almost no one cares whether this is successful or not, the golden age of Alien happened a long time ago and proof of that is that all this takes the best and tries to transform it.
The first and supposed “great innovation” of this film is that it focuses on a group of stupid teenagers instead of adults and space marines led by Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) who is trying to leave the mining planet after the death of her parents and stop being an exploited worker who sees her dream of escape very far away thanks to the oppressive policies of the omnipresent and evil Weyland-Yutani Corporation, a company that only cares about its development and the profit it can get from others, for them no one is expendable and this concept is obvious to us with the crew of the Nostromo.
Alien: Romulus exists between Alien from 1979 and Aliens from 1986 but it also takes in parallel the timeline of the Alien: Isolation video game from 2014 acting almost at the same time in different places and scenarios, while the film takes place in the year 2137 the game is in the year 2142, it is inexplicable how the same Xenomorph from the Alien film from 1979 coexists and is discovered in space, likewise the plot is very similar, while on one hand, we have the Rebirth station that is divided into 2 parts the Romulus and the Remus on the other we have the Sevastopol space station that is only a screen to continue studying, cloning and trying to control these creatures and make them a biological weapon, and here we ask ourselves: a biological weapon for what, to conquer uninhabited planets? or only to satisfy the desire that the human being has to want to control everything?
Very little or almost nothing has been told to us in the cinema about the cursed Weyland-Yutani company, being better explained in the Dark Horse Comics publications, an idea that was taken to be part of the script of Prometheus where they told us in more detail the origin of this mega-corporation and that in the end was discarded by Scott himself, and then, we are left the same, with more questions than answers about a material that stays halfway between an I want to but I can’t and as spectators and many fans of the saga we will have to start accepting that this is not giving for more and that we are already tired of clumsiness.
This story gives Fede Alvarez the chance to do something new that feels thoroughly studied and at the same time completely modern, the script written by Rodó Sayagues and Alvarez himself is more concerned with the multiple references than with doing something more decent and coherent, it is inexplicable how the xenomorph is not now the protagonist and has so little presence and time on screen, in fact this is a major failure if it is a movie with the title of Aliens what we want to see is this creature doing its thing and in what we see it fails to transmit that feeling of constant horror and danger, perhaps the real protagonists are facehuggers that we see slightly mutated and in a new color the rest are just there to make a pretext for the previous to be what looks like that without more, there is no memorable death being Andy the android the most outstanding character of the rest that lack that charisma and personality that we have seen before and although all this seems to be a good idea it is poorly executed.
This group decides to steal a ship from the company to go to an abandoned scientific space station that has floated in the orbit of their planet without any consequences, that is, nobody notices and they can do whatever they want or after searching for this life form for so long they leave it just like that in an abandoned space station, the personality of each one of them tries desperately to resemble the protagonists of other films in the saga and they don’t even manage to be minimally memorable because from the beginning we know that everyone will die except for the artificial person and its protagonist, who we don’t see at any time that transmits to us a feeling of being in imminent danger, everything is resolved by chance and to the benefit of a weak script and its references that once again advocate nostalgia.
Álvarez and Sayagues realize that they have to make the most of the comfort zone they are in and they do so in the way they integrate elements from the previous six films including the two prequels in an equally desperate attempt to make this not seem like such a bad idea, references such as the axis of the creatures having as its origin the first Xenomorph that Ripley fights in the first film and that was frozen in space, the android Ash from the first film along with the computer called mother, the company directives to safeguard and prioritize the specimens, the use of footwear and weapons from James Cameron’s Aliens, the mention of the refinery/prison planet Fiorina “Fury” 161 from Alien 3 or the new half-human and half-xenomorph/engineer hybrid from Alien Resurrection as well as the black liquid from Prometheus and the evolution of the creatures from Alien: Covenant to mention only the most interesting ones.
The film itself suffers from little or no commitment to continuing with the canon, the idea of a Xenomorph creature that can adopt characteristics of its host makes it extremely fascinating and that has only been presented as such in Alien 3, at this point what was done here had everything to pave the way to present new things and as a result, we have something that helps us see what happens later, something that doesn’t care about contributing or being successful in itself, a whim to maintain and now modernize and make a new saga based on another that also doesn’t care whether it has a continuation or not, in short, we take another story with other characters, we give them some references and that’s it.
Not everything is so bad, it has some technical advantages. Director of photography Galo Olivares tends to recreate dark and sinister settings, something as claustrophobic in a more industrial and retro-futuristic style as what Scott did in Alien. At the same time, production designer Naaman Marshall relies almost entirely on the sketches of conceptual designer Ron Cobb that we already saw in Alien and Aliens and also takes elements from the Alien: Isolation video game, which makes everything we see more concrete and rounded, returning to science fiction and horror.
The special effects mix CGI with practical effects, at every moment they make us notice the sets, the animatronics, the costumes, and the makeup, everything is perfectly well cared for and balanced so that at all times its narrative surprises us momentarily and not because of how guessable it may be but because it strives to constantly recreate past scenarios and as an audience it makes us think that things can be turned around and used to our advantage.
The first film was not conceived to start a saga, it was the need that cinema had at the end of the 70s to innovate and at the same time compete with others that took space themes very lightly, it renewed the belief that space science fiction had to do with silver suits and shiny ships with attractive main characters who could solve anything at any time, it went from being simple to showing the horror that can be facing a hostile and dangerous creature from another planet and the risk that it represents for whoever has the misfortune of crossing paths with them.
HR Giger created this being but it was Scott and his team who gave it that personality that became iconic in the history of cinema, a meta-story that still has a lot to tell if it is in the right hands, proving that all this can stand out without a character like Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is extremely difficult, her character and performance marked a before and after for the leading women, her participation has been relevant and of utmost importance in this saga and having said all the above is not a direct comparison, it is the fact of recognizing that this is a mix of everything to get something that later may or may not work.
The cast is made up of Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, and Aileen Wu, teenagers who play other teenagers where the only one who stands out is Jonsson and his character.
The music composed by Benjamin Wallfisch follows the same line as the film, recreating with samples the scores composed by Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, Elliot Goldenthal, John Frizzell, Marc Streitenfeld, Jed Kurzel, Christian Henson, Joe Henson Alexis Smith, who appear at the right moment and are fully identifiable as a tribute to these great creators.
In conclusion, Alien: Romulus is not bad but it is not the best of the saga either, a closing and an opening of a very low-risk proposal from which one could expect more than what is delivered and which fulfills its purpose of entertaining. Let us hope that the already inevitable next installment can be more daring in itself and contribute more than just a simple and trite modernity and can finally take us to a truly unexplored territory of which, as was said before, there is still much more to tell.
Alien: Romulus is now available in movie theaters in your country.
Spanish review.
