“A haunted house film takes place in a spaceship” – this is how Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking science fiction/horror mix was created Foreigner was characterized when it was released in 1979. Actually, it’s not a bad description. Then James Cameron came on board for Aliens and upped the speed factor, essentially turning the 1986 sequel into a rollercoaster ride on an alien planet. These templates set the double standard for everything else the franchise has given us: filmmakers set the dial for either spine-chilling chills or breakneck suspense. Even after everyone’s favorite xenomorph battles with Predator‘s in-house interstellar hunter or Scott became a philosophical dorm stoner with his prequels Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017) the films alternated between these two speeds. Usually it was a combination of original recipe and extra crispy.
You feel the urge to return to the jump scare basics in Alien: Romulus, the seventh film in the series (assuming you count the AvP Crossovers). There are still shootouts and chases and a nifty scene with a pack of “perfect organisms” in attack mode, spirals of acid blood floating in the air and weightlessness. We are still in space, the place where no one can hear your screams. But the powers that be have hired a real horror director, Fede Alvarez – he of the 2013 film “The evil Dead Restart and 2016 home invasion nightmare Don’t breathe – and you can feel that it draws heavily on the monster movie aspects that defined the original. In fact, there’s a general reverence here for everything Scott’s cosmic monster epic: the dirty space aesthetic, the splashy special effects, the 1979-esque opening credits, and the carefully recreated iconic shots. This film doesn’t want to renovate that haunted house. It wants to build a shrine in its honor.
The idea of going back to the source and trying to recreate the first film’s special mix of tension and terror, its long silences and sudden, violent shocks, is a dizzying thrill. Nothing against the scene that scarred a whole generation – and which remains an emotional, disturbing sequence to this day – but it was the clay by Scotts Foreigner that’s what made it such an enduring classic. Alien: Romulus is determined to replicate the Rosetta Stone feel of modern scary sci-fi movies. In fact, the film is so determined to achieve this laudable goal that it gently pushes peripheral factors like storytelling, non-expository dialogue, and character interactions that feel like the characters are really interacting into the background. What is on screen is neither a haunted house nor a roller coaster, but a regular theme park ride based on a movie – a Foreigner-themed attraction that also represents an overly respectful homage.
As for wax museums with a fluttering pulse, Romulus is certainly a professional affair – you can see the care that went into creating virtual copies of Michael Seymour’s original production design, the way the lighting in this new film harmonizes with Derek Vanlint’s cinematography from back then, how all those facehuggers and full-grown Xenomorphs look straight out of the Foreigner 1.0 models. And you wouldn’t accuse the film’s heroine of not being Ripley-like: Her name is Rain, and thanks to Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla, Civil War), she’s tough enough to take on any monstrosity with a double chin and a phallic head. Rain, a working-class orphan, is trapped on a planet that’s a mining colony; the corporation keeps increasing the number of hours it takes to get out. Her best friend is Andy (David Jonsson), a first-generation “synthesizer” whom Rain’s father once found in a scrap heap and restored to somewhat functional condition. What he lacks in full computing power, he makes up for with an undying loyalty to his sister in all but name, and a whole lot of scripted dad jokes.
There may be hope to get out of this impasse, however. Rain’s friend Kay (Isabella Merced) and her brother Tyler (Archie Renaux) have discovered what they believe to be a decommissioned Weyland-Yutani ship floating near the outer rings of their planet. They assume this ship has cryogenic beds that would allow them – and their friends Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and Navarro (Aileen Wu) – to travel to a distant planet with a sun. They steal these beds, install them in their own ship, and they’re off.
So the five of them, along with Andy, find an empty space station called Romulus. When two men and an android board to loot supplies for their journey, they stumble upon a medical storage room. The temperature rises, meaning previously frozen samples are beginning to thaw. Want to guess what samples they are? We’ll give you a hint. They like to hug faces. And you know, they implant embryos into human hosts that then burst out of their chests.
Rain and Navarro rush in to save them, just in time to notice a slew of scurrying creatures running, jumping, and trying to impregnate their new visitors. They also find Rook, the ship’s synthetic resident, who has been ripped in half. He might look familiar—and please bear with us as we pause for a moment and note that digitally deepfaking deceased actors, no matter how important those performers were to a beloved film, is a distraction at best and a farce at worst. Seriously, filmmakers: Stop it. It’s an insult to everyone involved.
The reanimated robot explains that 170 days ago, the crew of the cargo ship Nostromo was attacked by something sleek, mean, and literally dimwitted. Only one member survived, as she was able to shoot this predatory thing into space. The Romulus was somehow able to recover the creature to study it. It… didn’t end well. Rook wants them to bring these now-active specimens back to the colony for further study. Plus, one of Rain’s friends was successfully impregnated. And their own ship is damaged. And suddenly, even more of these Xenomorphs seem to be lurking deep in the lower decks of the station. More and more and more of them…
Spaeny in “Alien: Romulus”
20th Century Studios
Here is Alien: Romulusafter largely following the slow pace of ForeignerThe memorable first half hour between action scenes switches completely into horror movie mode and one is reminded that Alvarez is one of the few active directors who knows how to exploit scenarios like this. (Seriously, what is Don’t breathe but a Foreigner film with Stephen Lang’s Blind Man replacing HR Giger’s Freudian nightmare beast – right down to the forced insemination plot point?) And yet you sense the film drifting towards fan service, with the writer-director being the number one fan being catered to. It’s clear he wisely but also too much loves Scott’s first foray into interstellar terror, and the number of Easter eggs here outnumbers the alien killing machine eggs by three times. Having been handed the keys to the franchise kingdom, Alvarez isn’t trying to put his own stamp on the series. He’s simply trying to create a cover version with as much fidelity as possible.
No one can blame him, because the 1979 film is indeed a striking example of genre hybridization and a perfect cinematic organism. But the longer you suffer from underdeveloped characters (only Rain and, ironically, Andy seem mature and get real storylines; it helps that both actors understand the task) and sequences that seem more like winks, nudges and visions of the future, Romulus Video game levels than true story hits, the lower the returns. There is a crucial twist that feels unique, and while it’s still too little, too late, you can feel Alvarez getting creative with this warped conceptual move. Even that is, of course, tied in with a reference to Sigourney Weaver’s striptease and final boss fight from the first film. Does it meet the criteria of what we expect from this series? Yes. It is more than The Chris Farley Show from Foreigner Movies? Well… let’s just say that in space, no one might be able to hear you scream, but in the cinema, they’ll definitely hear your resigned sigh.
