After Ridley Scott’s grandiose (and, I think, severely underrated) Alien prequels Prometheus and Covenant divided audiences and didn’t quite set the box office on fire, here we are with a new franchise instalment stripped back to the bloody basics. Alien Romulus (from Evil Dead and Don’t Breathe director Fede Alvarez) is a scrappy and thrillingly nasty slice of proper sci-fi horror, with all the gruesomeness and psychosexual trauma that has been the bedrock of these stories since 1979. Of course, it doesn’t really measure up to the original two masterpieces (even as it remains, often for the worse, utterly in thrall to them), but there’s a sick sense of gloopy fun from start to finish that reminds just why this series has such a long life in it.
Into the Ripley role steps Cailee Spaeny, playing Rain, a young employee (read: indentured servant) of the Weyland-Yutani corporation on a mining colony on a planet with no sunlight and even less hope. Out of options, and desperate to flee to a more pleasant world alongside her synthetic companion/’brother’ Andy (David Jonsson), Rain agrees to accompany her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) and his ragtag crew on a heist to steal some cryo-pods from an orbiting but abandoned Weyland-Yutani outpost.
Of course, this ship is less abandoned, more infested with and then slaughtered by xenomorphs, and what follows is the classic Alien recipe of a team picked off one by one amidst a desperate search for escape and survival. Unlike Alien or Aliens, this crew really is just fodder for the xenos, none of them having the sort of lived-in charisma of the Nostromo crew or the colonial marines – with the exception of Andy. Easily the best character in the movie, he starts as a bit broken and dull-witted, yet kind (a phase in which Jonsson plays him with an American accent), before an encounter with another AI makes him smarter and more sinister (amusingly also switching him to Jonsson’s native English accent).
He’s consistently fascinating to watch, though he does highlight the film’s weaknesses – not just that the rest of the cast are pretty bland, but also his ‘upgrade’ comes in the form of an encounter with a CG version of the original Alien’s Ian Holm (though this time his synthetic science officer is named Rook rather than Ash). Not just a morally dubious decision, this ghoulish CG resurrection is also just poorly executed, with mouth movements that mostly look like an AI filter. It’s nostalgia-baiting at its worst, not helped by the script’s commitment to having characters constantly spout off the most iconic lines from the first two.
It’s a shame whenever Romulus retreats into the shadow of the originals, because Alvarez is more than capable of conjuring up his own horrors and set-pieces that do new and terrifying things with what is by now a pretty familiar premise. Sneaking past an army of facehuggers, a zero-g firefight interrupted by swirling pools of floating acid blood, and the litany of genuinely queasy nightmares that befall pregnant crew member Kay (Isabela Merced) – all of these are heart-in-mouth, sweaty palmed excellence, tense and immersive and often just gross.
Though it is too reliant on nostalgia stuff, Romulus is also nicely self-contained, expanding the Alien universe a little bit but mostly aiming at just two hours of thrills within this perfectly designed chunky, clunky, analogue future (the set design, prosthetics, and puppetry here are all incredible). It’s a target that, at its best, Romulus flies past with gory aplomb. I do still (seven years after the release of Covenant) really wish that Ridley had gotten to finish his religious/mythical/Michael Fassbender-y prequel trilogy, but if we can’t get that, Romulus makes up for it as a pure and pacey thrill ride.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 