"Alien: Romulus"

  ☆☆☆ 

Alien is a masterpiece of suspense and horror, a haunted-house film in outer space. Aliens is a masterpiece of tension and anxiety, an unrelenting action thriller set on another planet. These two movies are about as good as modern science-fiction movies get, so it was reasonable to have high expectations for their prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, both of which turned out to be duds that—to be fair—have their fans.

Those two Ridley Scott-directed films were so bad, and direct sequels like Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection were also awful. The less said about the Alien vs. Predator films, of which I've seen only segments, the better. In short: Eight Alien movies, two gems, six duds.

The track record going in to Alien: Romulus is pretty miserable, and its director, Fede Alvarez, directed a horror film called Don't Breathe that I found one of the most repugnant and offensive films I've ever watched. I sat down to watch Alien: Romulus with the lowest of low expectations.

That the film far surpasses those expectations is a genuine surprise. While Alien: Romulus will be nonsensical if you've never seen at least the first two films—and will test your power of recall for Prometheus, a film otherwise best put out of your mind—as Alien movies go, it's in the top three.

It can't come close to the pure visceral terror of Alien or the exhilarating, exhausting experience of watching Aliens. Those movies are rare achievements. Alien: Romulus is a streaming-era reboot, a movie that at every turn recalls both the 1979 original and its 1986 sequel, steals from them gleefully (and sometimes unwisely), and does its best to match their style.

The most difficult trick Alien: Romulus needs to achieve is getting the film back into space and finding a sufficiently tight location to set its action. To that end, the set-up of Alien: Romulus is both perfunctory, contrived and almost needlessly complex, but it works. A young woman who has lived her entire life on a mining colony 65 light years from Earth is ready to leave the unhappy world, which is cloaked in eternal darkness. But the company for which she works—the company that, in the world of Alien, rules everything—won't let her go.

She and a ragtag group of young friends hatch a scheme that strains credulity as they hijack a ship they intend to use to go to a ... well, look, never mind. It's all complicated and dense, not helped by a sound mix that emphasizes loud noises over crisp dialogue. Just know that in many regards, Alien: Romulus could also be called Teen Alien. With one glaring and awkward exception, the main cast here is young, reasonably good-looking, and filled with comparisons to characters in the earlier films.

They wind up on a space station called Romulus (well, half of it is, at least), where they run smack into the aliens, which fans know as Xenomorphs. There are the face-hugger versions that previously lived in eggs, there are the full-scale versions, whose metamorphosis we see in slimy, icky detail here, and all of them move fast. Of the group of kids who walk onto the space station, only one or two will survive, that's a given. The purpose of Alien: Romulus, then, is to dispatch the others with as much suspense as possible.

It's done pretty well. The movie is sometimes suspenseful, almost never scary, and moves quickly. In its final act—driven by the unwise reappearance of a character from an earlier Alien movie, which feels inappropriate and grotesque—it becomes downright silly. A plot twist that relies on information from Prometheus is at first head-scratching and then borderline laughable, but Alien: Romulus moves at a fast enough pace that we never care all that much.

That's really the biggest downside to the film: It doesn't give us characters that resonate. Except for its lead, Rain (played by Cailee Spainey from Civil War), and David Jonsson, who's very impressive as her android, Andy, the cast of characters is interchangeable and unmemorable. But the movie moves swiftly, it looks fantastic, and it has a muscular, impressive score by Benjamin Wallfisch that, like the rest of the movie, nicely recalls the first two films.

Alien: Romulus has been given one task: make a better Alien movie than we've seen in the last 38 years. It does that task well enough. Considering what's come before it, that's a pleasant surprise.

Viewed August 24, 2024 — AMC Burbank 6

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