Alien: Romulus: More Nightmare Fuel
Okay, so.
Before I get into this, a bit of background is necessary. The Alien movie franchise holds a special place in my...um, heart? Psyche? Nightmare cellar? Something like that.
I was, you see, a huge fan of Star Wars. I saw the original in the theater on opening night when I was eleven, and it blew me away. For years after, I was absolutely obsessed with all things Star Wars.
So it came to pass that when Alien was released, my parents, thinking oh, it’s a science fiction movie about space, he likes science fiction movies about space,” took me to see it. I must’ve been...I don’t remember. Thirteen, maybe?
I had nightmares about the alien in Alien for the next thirty years. No exaggeration. This is, in fact, why my wife suggested that I make a xenomorph facehugger sex toy; she loves pushing my buttons so.
You can imagine, then, what a disappointment Prometheus and Alien: Covenant were. What all the movies after Aliens were, to be fair.
I went to see Alien: Romulus with my Talespinner, for I am not so foolish as to see an Alien movie by myself lest I have nightmares for another thirty years. My expectations were, to be polite, tempered by the catastrophes that were the prequels, but I came away generally favorably impressed.
So, without further ado:
I don’t recall this exact image in the movie, but my, it gives me ideas. Where is the tail, I wonder? I bet I can make something like this...
First, the spoiler-free overview:
Alien: Romulus is, thankfully, not Alien: Covenant.
Is it worth watching? Yes. Yes, it is. It a solid, if uninspired (more on that later), addition to the franchise. It’s flawed, and it’s unlikely to become a classic the way the first two movies did, but it is a good, entertaining movie.
This movie understands what an Alien movie is supposed to be. It gets right what the prequels and the movies after Aliens get wrong.
And it’s gorgeous. The cinematography is just...wow. You ever watch one of those movies where you can hit Pause on any frame and what you see on the screen looks like a work of art? That’s Alien: Romulus.
Acid blood in zero G is a big, big problem...
The casting is very well done. Special shout-out to David Jonsson as “Andy,” the scrapped-and-salvaged artificial person (not a spoiler, we learn that near the beginning of the movie):
He plays a challenging role part pitch-perfect, and holds his own against Lance Hendrickson’s Bishop in Aliens.
And before you ask, yes, it did give me nightmares, which Prometheus and Alien: Covenant did not. So mission accomplished, I suppose?
Now, the critique (and the spoilers).
*** SPOILERS *** SPOILERS *** SPOILERS ***
Alien: Romulus is a good movie. It is not a great movie. It’s beautiful, it’s solid, it’s workmanlike, but it isn’t fantastic. I’ve seen Aliens scores, possibly hundreds, of times. I doubt I’ll go out of my way to watch Romulus again, though I won’t turn it off if it’s on the way I would, say, Alien: Covenant, a movie where everyone makes choices so infuriatingly stupid I wanted them all to die.
The Elephant in the Room
The first problem that Romulus has is, well, it’s a sequel to Alien.
The thing that made Alien so brilliant was the surprise. Nobody had seen anything like it. The alien design, the lifecycle, the eggs...these were new in a way anyone born post-Aliens can’t truly understand. There was nothing like it. People inin the audience freaked out during the chestburster scene.
Aliens isn’t in the same genre, because James Cameron is a superb filmmaker, and he knew that even though he still could deliver something new (the alien queen), he couldn’t really ever go back to the kind of surprise we got in the first movie, so he didn’t try.
So. What to do with a new alien movie? Everybody knows about the alien, the lifecycle, the facehuggers, the chestbursters...I mean, you could probably show a native of North Sentinel Island the facehugger and he’d know what it is. There isn’t anything you can do that’s like that first reaction when audiences first saw the thing come out of Kane’s body at the dinner table.
Even the actors famously didn’t know what to expect!
How can you follow that up?
Answer: You can’t. The audience for an Alien sequel is not, and cannot be, the audience for Alien.
So instead what we get is a series of callbacks to the earlier movies, both in dialogue and in scene:
I can’t help but feel that this robs the movie of impact. Yes, that scene happened in the movie. Yes, I cringed a bit. Same as when they included the line “get away from her, you bitch!” in Romulus as well.
Ideally, a movie should create iconic moments of its own, not be trapped re-creating iconic moments if its predecessors.
Pacing, Pacing, Pacing
The biggest flaw by far with Alien: Romulus plays directly against one of the greatest strengths of Aliens: Pacing.
The pacing in Romulus is weird and janky and at times, especially in the beginning, feels forced and rushed. The movie introduces us to the characters in rather haphazard way (except for Andy, the android), then rushes them onto the abandoned space station so things can get going.
Once they do get going, the pacing is uneven, with weirdly compressed timelines and equally weird plot pacing. We learn from this movie, for example, that the facehuggers implant their embryo in only a couple of minutes, which makes the one in Alien seem rather odd, and that they grow from chestburster to full-grown adult in perhaps 10 minutes. (Not 10 minutes of screen time, 10 literal actual minutes.)
Aliens, on the other hand, is a masterclass in pacing. (Literally. I’m told it’s actually taught in scriptwriting class as “how to do pacing.”) The beginning sets the stage without feeling forced or rushed. We get to know what happened to Ripley, we get to meet two of the important characters (Lieutenant Gorman and Carter “I work for the Company, but don’t let that fool you, I’m really an okay guy” Burke), with enough room to have a sense of who they are. The story unfolds perfectly to create a sense of tension.
The way problems keep piling on in Aliens is handled masterfully, like when we see the Marines reacting at first to the knowledge that the Marines won’t send a rescue for 17 days (Hudson: “Hey man, I don't wanna rain on your parade, but we’re not gonna last seventeen hours!”), then the moment they’ve finally come to grips with that, they learn that the reactor is damaged and now they only have four hours.
ffffuuuu-
Alien: Romulus borrows this “we think we have X time, we actually have Y time” plot technique, but much more clumsily, like oh, I guess I was wrong, we don’t have that much time after all. Other than a little grumble from-honestly I don’t even remember which character, everyone’s all like “shrug, it doesn’t matter.”
Which brings me to...
The Characters
All the Alien movies give us radically different groups of characters: Space truckers, Marines, quasi-cult prisoners, rogues working for mad scientists, colonists, explorers. Romulus gives us: a group of second-tier Hunger Games contestants. Only without the distinct personalities.
Other than Andy and possibly Rain, the characters in Romulus are tissue-thin, flat as a board, and a walk through the ocean of their souls will barely get your feet wet.
They’re completely interchangeable. I didn’t remember the names of anyone except Rain and Andy. There was nothing to differentiate them; any of the dialog except “I’m pregnant” could literally have come from any of them.
Again, completely the opposite of Aliens, whose characters have strong, distinct personalities impossible to confuse:
I’m not exaggerating for effect when I say I don’t remember the names of any of the characters beyond Rain and Andy. I think one of them is Rain’s ex-boyfriend, maybe, or something? Cousin, maybe? I literally can’t remember.
I would not be able to pick most of these characters out of a lineup. I have no idea who Tyler and Bjorn are or what role they played, except I think one of them was Rain’s ex-or-maybe-cousin. I certainly can’t tell them apart in the movie. They’re basically the same character in two different places.
The Science
Okay, yeah, it’s an Alien movie. “Science? Yeah, that’s a word we’re familiar with. So anyway...”
Yes, Alien moves can play fast and loose with the science...but man, this movie abuses the privilege. The chest burster growing to adulthood without a food source has always been a sore spot in Alien, but in Romulus, doing it in 10 minutes? Yeah, no, I think even the most generous fans are gonna stick on that one.
And did you know that the ring around a ringed planet is a solid surface, like a wall? I’m serious. Or at least a whole bunch of little rocks really close together zooming above a solid surface. That’s, like, got icebergs and such jutting out of it. Yes, that’s what the screenwriter thought. I may not have a degree in astronomy, but I’m pretty damn sure that...isn’t how rings work. Like, at all.
Is it still worthwhile?
Yes. Yes it is. Despite the flaws, it’s a much more solid addition to the Alien series than it really ought to be, and I do recommend it. It’s a butt-puckering rollercoaster; pacing problems notwithstanding, you leave the theater thinking “what the hell just happened to me?” (Yes, that’s a good thing.)
And it did give me nightmares, which most of the movies past Aliens have not. So, y’know, there’s that.
4 out of 5 stars, I sincerely hope this movie is successful enough to give us more.