Review Roundup: Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus
The Alien film franchise kicked off with a bang with Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), arguably the best sci-fi/horror film of all time. It was followed by James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), which upped the “action movie” quotient, also to great success and acclaim.
Subsequent installments, however, have been less successful. 1992’s Alien 3, for example, was hampered by script and production issues (director David Fincher ultimately disowned the film) while 2017’s Alien: Covenant suffered at the box office despite critical approval.
Still, for all of the franchise’s ups and downs, folks just can’t seem to get enough of xenomorphs and facehuggers. The Alien franchise has expanded over the years to include novels, comics, and video games, as well as cross over with the Predator franchise.
Which brings us to the latest Alien installment: 2024’s Alien: Romulus by Fede Álvarez (Don’t Breathe, 2013’s Evil Dead). Set between the events of Alien and Aliens, does Álvarez’s film breathe some new life into the franchise? Or does it suffer from the same issues as its predecessors?
The resulting movie is a technically competent piece of work; but no matter how ingenious its references to the first film (let down, however, by borrowings from the A Quiet Place franchise) it has to be said that there’s a fundamental lack of originality here which makes it frustrating. There’s isn’t a single person involved, from director to stars to people on craft services who wouldn’t have been better employed actually working on something new.
[I]n its sweaty attempts to bring the franchise back to basics, Romulus feels less like its own movie and more like a greatest hits of the Alien series. It’s a well-constructed sci-fi thriller that delivers plenty of gruesome gore and taut set pieces — without any of the bold creative swings of previous films. It’s a movie that is very much a part of the current “rebootquel” phenomenon sweeping Hollywood. And because of that, it’s too creatively cautious to fully embrace all the weirdest, most alienating parts of a truly great Alien movie.
It feels, as it happens, like Disney’s version of the Star Wars films. There is a shellac of safeness to Alien: Romulus, despite a closing 15-minute stretch that would be astonishing if its echoes of both the med-pod sequence from Prometheus and the chimera from Alien: Resurrection didn’t cause franchise déjà vu. Even the casual fan will be able to pick out the allusions to the other films: the “teaching how to use a pulse rifle” bit from Aliens, the “carefully getting into a spacesuit while in skivvies” from Alien, the fucking around with the Fox logo from Alien3. What does it all mean, these callbacks, these sophomoric Shrek-isms?
“Is it as good as Alien or Aliens?” is the obvious question franchise fans will ask when weighing whether to see Alien: Romulus. Álvarez and Sayagues seem to have been uncomfortably aware that this question was coming. They anticipated those five different answers about what Alien fans love from the previous films, and tried to split the difference between all of them and more. Like the Romulus and Remus stations, which serve as the film’s setting, Alien: Romulus is made up of roughly two parts: a haunted-house story in outer space à la Alien, and a crowd-pleasing horror-action spectacle like Aliens. The former element is stronger than the latter in this case, and the imbalance is one of the reasons Alien: Romulus feels like a by-the-numbers retread of the franchise defining it, rather than the resuscitative breath it so desperately needs.
[T]he longer the movie goes on, the more beholden it becomes to recycling key scenes and even dialogue from the previous entries, to diminishing returns. (When one of the franchise’s most famous lines is respoken late in Romulus, it’s delivered in a manner suggesting the character saw that scene a while back, and is having a little trouble remembering it.) There are a few original set-pieces here and there, most notably one involving the Romulus’ antigravity function, but largely a growing sense of been there, seen that. Even when the movie takes a truly berserk turn in the final act, it lands as more of a variation on a theme than a striking departure.
[W]hen I say that Alien: Romulus is one of the best Alien sequels, that it delivers the slimy creep-out goods in a way that none of the last three Alien films have, I don’t mean to suggest that the shock and awe is back, or that the movie has reinvented this series in any visionary mind-fuck way. Quite the contrary. This is closer to a grandly efficient greatest-hits thrill ride, packaged like a video game. Yet on that level it’s a confidently spooky, ingeniously shot, at times nerve-jangling piece of entertainment.
We’ve watched many a movie coast on nostalgia these days. Hell, just the last few months is enough to make you wonder if we’ve taken a time machine back to a multiverse version of the 1990s. But when nostalgia is done right, it truly can transport an audience back to a time and place where the wonder of filmmaking could induce all manner of reactions, from laughter to tears to fear. Director Fede Alvarez accomplishes that feat with Alien: Romulus.
Alien: Romulus is the ultimate piece of fan art inspired by the Alien franchise. If you think of each Alien film as a color of paint, and director Fede Alvarez as the artist, Romulus is all of them mixed together to create an entirely new picture. Each of the sequels and prequels is in there somehow. Often they’re recognizable. Other times they’re just a splatter on the side. But when viewed as a whole, the result is a unique, standout — and standalone — work that’s oddly familiar but still exciting and fresh. Fans will love it, but you don’t have to be a fan to enjoy it.
Director Fede Álvarez‘s new addition to the long-running Alien series smartly goes back to the franchise’s grimy, claustrophobic, gruesome beginnings, but ironically is hampered by reverence for prior installments. Alien: Romulus is bracing fun, buoyed by a stellar ensemble cast, but its narrative falls apart under any speck of scrutiny. It’s an especially frustrating film because you see glimmers of the magic that made some of its predecessors instant masterpieces.
Director Fede Álvarez’s new standalone entry in the long-running sci-fi / horror franchise feels especially primed to speak to a new generation of fans. But as fun as Romulus is to look at, its story plays more like a compilation of the Alien series’ greatest hits than a movie that’s trying to sing its own tune. And the few new ideas Romulus does bring to the table are undercut by its insistence on leaning into some very questionable optics.
The first Alien is notoriously known as a haunted house movie in space. It’s a single location with an alien instead of a ghost. At its best, Alien: Romulus understands this, seeking to replicate all of the ingredients that go into this time-tested formula. We want to feel as trapped as the characters in a haunted house or on a spaceship, wondering how they could possibly escape a nightmare that’s growing in intensity with each passing minute. And we do through most of the film. Honestly, it’s so artistically connected to the films that came before in terms of its top-notch production quality that I think that’s what makes the blatant callbacks more frustrating. It doesn’t need them to be an “Alien” movie, maybe even the one people have wanted for almost four decades.
Beyond the lived-in production design, the near-perfect visual effects, or the impeccably cast 20-something actors, Alien: Romulus stumbles only when Alvarez and his collaborators over-indulge their proclivities for fan service and digital resurrections. An occasional reminder visually, narratively, or even thematically is more than acceptable, especially for a decades-old franchise that’s been strip-mined to near-oblivion, but far too often, nostalgia-fueled fan service becomes a crushing, unrelenting distraction, a distraction that repeatedly comes close to undermining Alvarez’s instincts, talents, and skills as a filmmaker and turning Alien: Romulus into the world’s most expensive fan film.
Alien: Romulus arrives in theaters on August 16, 2024. Watch the trailer below.
