These days, the most we can seemingly hope for with our blockbuster franchise extensions are fun twists on old formulas. This can be done well, like with Prey, or interesting but malformed, like Terminator: Dark Fate. They’re not my preferred kind of film, but I’m always curious to see what blood we can get out of these stones. In the capable hands of noted gross guy Fede Álvarez, Alien: Romulus puts a gnarly spin on classic Alien tropes, sending a handful of young actors to their violent gooey deaths. Hope you like slime!
Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) has spent her entire life on a terrible Weyland-Yutani mining planet, dreaming of daylight. Having lost her parents to the mines, she is left alone with her “brother,” a malfunctioning android called Andy (David Jonsson). After being denied freedom from indentured servitude, Rain is desperate enough to join her friends on a dangerous scavenger mission to a decommissioned space station in an attempt to steal some cryopods. Tyler (Archie Renaux) needs Andy to access the space station, despite some anti-robot sentiments among the group. Of course, there’s something strange happening within the dark depths of the Romulus lab…
What follows is pretty standard Alien fare, though the setpieces are creative and remixed enough to not feel like a total retread. The skittering of the tactile-looking facehuggers is deeply unnerving as they endlessly pursue their prey. One sequence in particular makes great use of zero gravity, forcing our heroes to float through a maze of acid blood. As fun as this all is, and as phenomenal Jonsson is as an android going through multiple software updates, there’s one big sticking point that must be addressed.
Spoiler alert: Our heroes encounter a bisected android named Rook, a brother to the original film’s Ash, with the terrifying digital recreation of Ian Holm’s face and voice, the face and voice of a man who has been dead since 2020. It does not look good at all, and is in sharp contrast with the excellent practical effects throughout the rest of the film. The resurrected Ash is a jarring moment that is extremely ill-advised and creepy, especially for a character that takes up a lot of the narrative. Surely it couldn’t have been hard to find a guy who kind of looks and sounds like Ian Holm? Why go this extra step? Similarly jarring are the dialogue callbacks to Alien and Aliens that don’t really make sense in context, but that happens in every lega-sequel these days.
Besides this hideous affront to god, Alien: Romulus is a thrilling haunted house movie with good kills, great shot compositions, and loud explosions. We may no longer have new things to say with our friends the xenomorphs, but it sure is fun to watch them get blown up.
Alien: Romulus
2024
dir. Fede Álvarez
119 min
In theaters Friday 8/16!
