Alien: Romulus
This review spoils much of Alien: Romulus, as a mercy to the prospective viewer.
Art does not necessarily have to say anything in particular to vindicate itself. Beauty, properly understood, is self-justifying. Entertainment has an obligation to conform to a standard, because a game show and a novel and pornography are not the same. But when art is not beautiful, and when entertainment is un-edifying spectacle, then it probably does need to say something meaningful for its vindication — and when it has nothing to say, it is empty and ugly.
This brings us directly to Alien: Romulus. The ninth(!) entry in the near-half-century old franchise carries with it expectations largely derived from its first two films, 1979’s Alien and 1986’s Aliens, both widely (and deservedly) acknowledged cinema masterpieces. The corollary to this is that the following six have been bad in varying ways — although 1992’s Alien3 is much better than its reputation, which suffered from the gap between expectations (of another war film) and what was actually delivered. There is something about science fiction and adjacent genres that lends itself to endless installments of dead franchises: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Star Trek are the prime examples, none of which have filmed enduringly good original content since the Reagan Administration. It is a dual condemnation: both of Generation X, which failed to mature in its cultural consumption; and also of American popular culture in general, which at the close of two centuries increasingly found itself in intellectual and narrative cul-de-sacs. (The rare exception here which illuminates the rule is the Blade Runner duo, which under Villeneuve found a sequel smarter and more original than its classic predecessor.) Their perennial revisiting can be understood in part as a desire to recapture the moment that was, in retrospect, the apogee of the American experience in nearly every sphere. The fan who shows up for these movies time and again, fueling the infinite production of artistic sludge, doesn’t yearn for Hoth or LV-426: he yearns for the 1980s.
Alien: Romulus stands squarely in this dreary tradition, at once better than most of its franchise peers and also disappointing in familiar ways. The performances are meaningless and functionally irrelevant. No one is bad, but also no one — save one — possesses meaning, except as a prearranged mechanisms for the advancement of the plot. Two women are bloodily sacrificed as monsters’ wombs; two men are bloodily sacrificed as pawns; and the age-old horror trope of the final girl is executed by a blank Cailee Spaeny in the protagonist’s role. There is also a synthetic — “I prefer artificial person myself,” a line from the 1986 film that you get to hear repeated for fan service in the 2024 one — played by David Jonsson, who dials in the one truly outstanding performance of the film. His turn is exceptional, scene-stealing, and at points aching, and he deserved a better script for it. A decision to digitally resurrect Ian Holm as a villainous synthetic — Ash, from the 1979 film, this time named Rook, but with exactly the same lines in many cases, again for fan service — turns out poorly. The production team is able to replicate his voice with precision, but not his image: it isn’t as bad as the awkward, uncanny-valley digital resurrections of Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher in 2016’s Rogue One, but it is close.
The plot is essentially irrelevant, and in fairness the writing — outside of a clunky initial exposition — is generally crisp when it isn’t setting up heavy-handed callbacks. This is not to say that the plot makes sense, because it emphatically does not. Things simply happen, for the most part, and the viewer is expected to go along with it. One shouldn’t make too much of this as a critique, especially in science fiction and fantasy — the people who do are largely also the people who pay to see these things again and again — but it is nevertheless present, and pulls at the viewer when something especially egregious transpires. Alien: Romulus is positively littered with Chekhov’s guns, and so this happens more than once.
Visually, the film is gorgeous in its exterior shots (which is to say, its digital effects) in space, and indifferent in its interiors. It tries exceptionally hard to replicate the mechanics and aesthetics of the 1979 film, and does reasonably well at it.
Watching Alien: Romulus reminds one of the experience of seeing statuary of late antiquity, where it is clear that the artists knew the expected forms but possessed none of the spirit or understanding that first gave them life. Its thick layers of referentialism, callback, and fan service highlight the extent to which director Fede Alvarez, late of Uruguay, grasps what happened in the two great franchise-touchstone films of yesteryear, but not why. The most-illustrative moment here comes when Jonsson’s highly engaging standout character saves Spaeny’s considerably less interesting character from death, and says the line — every franchise fan can see it coming a mile away — “Get away from her you bitch.” This is of course a direct reference to the single most-rousing scene in the 1986 film, in which Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley suits up in a power-loader mech and takes on the alien queen mano a mano. If you’ve never seen it, it’s worth a minute:
Alvarez re-creates it because, well, it’s a thing the viewing public will like, and it’s a cool line. But it doesn’t land the same way, because it is stripped of meaning. The 1986 line was not a mere expression of bravado: not a “go ahead, make my day” quip that affirmed the protagonist’s alpha status versus her opponent. It possessed meaning because of what the film was, which was a fundamentally matriarchal contest of good mothers and bad. Aliens is a great movie not because of its war-movie aspects, thrilling as they are, but because of this central conflict: a mother (Weaver’s Ripley) making war out of love for her adoptive daughter, and another mother (the alien queen) making war out of hatred for all that is good and virtuous. The culmination of the movie isn’t when the remnants of the Colonial-Marine expedition escape from Acheron, nor even when Ripley ejects the alien queen into the void: it is when Carrie Henn’s Newt, traumatized and orphaned, finally rushes to the woman who sacrificed everything for her and exclaims, “Mommy!” A superficial reading of this movie is that it details its heroine’s arc from worker to warrior, but the point is that she only becomes a warrior because she is a mother. Motherhood is ripped away from her at the film’s opening, in the discovery that her natural-born daughter is dead, and restored to her at its end. This is what makes the line challenging the alien queen so powerful: there is a virtuous and true motherhood, which is synonymous with humanity, and it is worth fighting for.
Cailee Spaeny gets no arc at all, no character development remotely comparable — she is the same at the beginning and at the end — but she does get the obligatory shoot ‘em up scene, because that’s what you people like.
Alien: Romulus actually does set up a variety of interesting questions and themes, and then engages with none of them. It sets forth a corporate-ruled dystopia (an amplification of previous franchise themes), but uses it only as incentive to get the cast offworld. It sets forth an exposition on the nature of artificial intelligence and humanity’s relationship with it — another callback, this time to the arc of Lance Henrikson’s Bishop from 1986 — and then fails to meaningfully grapple with it. (Jonsson’s superlative performance makes this the biggest missed opportunity.) It sets forth a plotline on the perfection of humanity through what Churchill would call “the lights of perverted science,” and then uses it only as a mechanism to generate the final monster, a human-alien hybrid who consumes his mother (in a grotesque and needless scene that is a mere pornography of violence) and seeks to kill all around it. (This is of course the exact same final monster as in 1997’s utterly abysmal Alien Resurrection. One imagines Paul Scofield yelling, “This franchise is planted thick with callbacks, from coast to coast, Man's fan service, not God’s!”) A more thoughtful movie might have grappled with some of this, understanding that the best of the Alien series uses the creature to illuminate humanity — not vice versa — but that is not the movie we have here. Fittingly, Alvarez is already talking up his vision for a rebooted Alien vs Predator, which makes even the worst of the mainstream films look like Mensa exams. There at least there will be no room for disappointment.
Of course none of this matters. Critique doesn’t matter, and a film like this will happen again, and soon, because this is actually what the viewing public wants. Alien: Romulus has had a blockbuster opening and generally positive reviews. Disney, the Weyland-Yutani of pop-culture filmmaking, considers it a win and therefore it will produce next product. If you hoped for something more, you are in a meaningless minority. Keep hoping: I can't lie to you about your chances, but you have my sympathies. The pity is that it is possible to make a good Alien-franchise movie these days. In fact, one came out three weeks ago. It’s hardly fifteen minutes long, and it’s an animation from a pseudonymous Internet animator calling himself OtaKing — and it captures the spirit and purpose of the series’s greats better than Alien: Romulus ever could, or even tried. I leave you with it:
Postscripts!
I nearly forgot about Alien: Isolation as another non-Hollywood example of good Alien-franchise content. It’s great and, though a video game, better than the contemporaneous movies, much like Knights of the Old Republic on XBox was better than any of the Star Wars films coming out at the time. And, for that matter, after that time.
The Red Letter Media folks have a similar review up: