Prey successfully rebooted the Predator franchise on Hulu and Star on Disney+ in 2022. Can Alien: Romulus do the same for the Alien franchise on the big screen in 2024?
Nick Smith, our resident US-based xenomorph expert, discovers a derelict space station harbouring a deadly cargo. Will it be enough to scare the TikTok generation?
Guest post by Nick Smith
“How many different ways do you want me to tell the same story?”
This is the question Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) posed to a roomful of heartless corporate execs in the 1986 movie, Aliens. The answer is a lot, as long as it makes them money.
After a steady trickle of special editions, sequels and rip-offs, a glossy new $80 million Alien movie (originally intended to go straight-to-streaming on Hulu and Star on Disney+) is filling Fox’s coffers. Although it’s directed by hot shot horror director Fede Álvarez (Don’t Breathe, 2013’s Evil Dead), Alien: Romulus fails to tell that same old story freshly.
Álvarez knows how to tell a suspenseful story – Don’t Breathe was an exquisite update of the ‘old dark house’ movies of yore, and Evil Dead’s female-centric cast and grave tone made it a worthy remake. Álvarez ratchets up the fear factor in Alien: Romulus, and there are some great set pieces, including a scene where protagonists are trapped in a lab with facehuggers, another with an alien in an elevator shaft, and a twist where the Weyland-Yutani Corporation places profit over human lives.
If these scenes sound familiar, it’s because you’ve seen them before in previous Alien instalments. Which is all fine and dandy if those story elements build on what has gone before to show something new.
James Cameron had the right idea with Aliens, raising the stakes and using Ridley Scott’s original as a foundation, not a photocopy. In the first movie, Ripley puts herself in danger to save a cat; in the sequel, she saves a young girl (it would be a shame if anything bad happened to her). In Alien, Ripley dons a protective spacesuit; in Aliens, she climbs into a load lifter. You get the idea. The moments are similar but different, reminding audience members of what has gone before while simultaneously satisfying them with an extra layer of imagery and theme.
Alien: Romulus does not take that extra step where it really matters. It’s the movie equivalent of a remix, taking sequences and dialogue from its predecessors and reusing them to tell a not-so-new story.
The law of diminishing returns has never been so diminishing.
Alien: Romulus is really aimed at 18 to 25-year-old moviegoers who haven’t seen those creaky old Alien movies – Scott’s initial instalment celebrates its 45th birthday this year – and want to take a ghost train trip to the future. The mumbly young characters are endearing (it’s Gen Z versus Gen Xenomorph), and the off-planet setting is wonderfully dingy, in keeping with Alien’s lived-in look.
Weyland-Yutani is ruthless from the outset. Life is tough and unfair for these feckless heroes in a way we can all relate to; they feel powerless in the face of capitalist greed. Any worker who’s been sponsored by a company or hired under unscrupulous pretences will sympathize with the dispossessed kids, especially the heroine, little orphan Rain (Cailee Spaeny), who desperately wants to escape her grim, repetitive lifestyle, dreaming of a better world. Spaeny and her castmates give believable performances, with David Jonsson a standout as Rain’s non-biological brother, Andy.
The film also brings an original cast member back, ignoring the nuances of a great British actor, smoothing over his subtleties with de-ageing CGI. Another nod to the first film denigrates Ripley’s victory, telling us that she did not slay her dragon after all.
There are problems of logic – aliens can survive a shuttle rocket blast, but not a gunshot – and pacing, where a tight 90-minute rollercoaster ride has an extra half hour of rickety track bolted on.
Nevertheless, if sheer visceral thrills are what you came for, you’ll get your movie ticket’s worth. Álvarez is great at evoking feelings in the audience, keeping them on the edge of their seat, grossing them out, and encouraging them to care about the characters. He taps into primal fears regarding pregnancy, genetic research, tight spaces, high spaces and losing a loved one, to name just a clawful. All underscored by composer Benjamin Wallfisch's (Blade Runner 2049) lush orchestrations filled with creepy callbacks to previous Alien movies.
There’s enough sick body horror and sexual symbolism to make even the notoriously gloomy H.R. Giger smile from beyond the grave.
As French film director Robert Bresson once said,
“I’d rather people feel a film before understanding it. I’d rather feelings arise before intellect.” Turn off your phone, mind and memory, soak up the scares, and you’ll be on tenterhooks like I was.
Ultimately, franchises like Alien are damned if they try something different (as with David Fincher’s Alien 3 and the bleak ending of Scott’s Alien: Covenant), and damned if they don’t, keeping in mind that Alien wasn’t original in the first place, inspired by 1958’s It! The Terror from Beyond Space.
Episodic series offer a possible solution, with enough running time to tell a similar story with new ideas added. Netflix’s anime Terminator Zero is the perfect example of a show that refers to its source material, using it to tell a story of its own (the Battlestar Galactica reboot is another great example of this, so say we all). Hopefully, Alien: Earth, from Noah Hawley (Fargo), will perform a similar feat when it bursts onto Hulu on Disney+ in 2025.
While we wait, we have the derivative Alien: Romulus to watch as it drifts by like a sleek cryotube, a time capsule of older, better movies with a shiny new shell. Without the copied bits, this movie could have been a true sci-fi horror classic; instead, it feels like the company has interfered too much, insisting on a greatest hits package to maximise its profit. Judging by the box office returns, the company is right and audiences are eating this up with a bigger appetite than John Hurt at the breakfast table.
Despite the gripes, it’s great to see xenomorphs alive and killing, frightening a new generation of fans while acknowledging what has come before. As Bill Paxton’s character Hudson says in Aliens,
“Hey, if you like that, you're gonna love this ...”
Have you seen Alien: Romulus? Let me know in the comments below.
Nick Smith's new audiobook, Undead on Arrival, is available from Amazon (affiliate link).
