'Alien: Romulus' movie spoilers! Explosive ending sets up franchise's next steps

The Alien franchise, with its spin-offs, has been all over the place in terms of quality: from the perfection of 1979's Alien to the illegibility of 2007's Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem.

WATCH HERE ➣➣ Alien Romulus STREAMING ONLINE

DOWNLOAD NOW ➣➣ Alien Romulus FULL HD FREE

It has been as perilously overstuffed with ideas as 2012's Prometheus and as vague and confused as 1992's Alien³. It has proven itself so capacious that even the three films directed by Ridley Scott all feel like they come from different authorial sensibilities. I would be inclined to say that more of the films have been bad than good, even without cheating by counting the Alien vs. Predator movies, but through eight feature films, every single one of them was doing something - every film had its own identity and its own notion of what to do with the franchise.

And now that ceases to be true, with Alien: Romulus, which is a one-of-a-kind entry in the series only in a very dismal sort of way: it's the first film in the series that feels redundant. It is a safe, unobtrusive "this is the Alien you remember" that feels like nothing so much as another revolutionary 1970s 20th Century Fox science-fiction production turned timid and conservative in the hands of the Walt Disney Company, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, though that comparison is wildly unfair to The Force Awakens. That film is at least fun to watch, and I think calling Alien: Romulus "fun to watch" would be generous. But I was speaking now of its timidity and its desperation to be a safe, unchallenging, by-the-books Alien movie, an urge it demonstrates right from the most basic accounting of its scenario, which feels like it has been carefully arranged in every detail from the smallest to the largest to create the smallest possible ripples in the overall Alien universe. The closes this comes to doing anything to build out this universe is to include a solitary plot point that attempts to shore up the position of Prometheus (and by extension Alien: Covenant) in the series' lore. Not even to expand on those movies, just to confirm that despite being divisive, they haven't been written out of continuity. Which makes sense, given that those films' director Ridley Scott is still here as a producer. Otherwise, this is basically just giving a new, thin coat of paint over the story of the original Alien and getting a little fancier with the action and thriller setpieces, because there's CGI now and there wasn't in '79.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

I mean, hell, AVP: Requiem is just ungodly awful at everything a movie can do, but at least it's different.

The story starts in the literal ruins of the first movie, which is just too perfect for words. Here, in the chunks of dead space debris that used to be the Nostromo, a big chunk of carbonized matter gets swept up by a scavenging team which was obviously looking for it, specifically. The matter is brought into a lab and cut in half, revealing... some curvy black lines that are slightly darker than the matrix containing them. The first word of the title is Alien, so it's definitely obvious what we're supposed to be looking at, but even watching the film in a fancy theater with showy projection technology, I found myself mostly taking it on faith that it was probably the crystallized remains of a xenomorph, because otherwise it would make very little sense for Benjamin Wallfisch's score to get so grumbly and ominous in that particular moment. In general, Alien: Romulus errs on the side of making things dark and monochromatic, supposing this to be atmospheric; I wouldn't say that the film is unusually bad at underlighting by the standards of 2020s horror cinema, but those standards are pretty goddamn dark, and the abandoned space lab where the bulk of the movie takes place is full of spaces that are just kind of foggily black, rather than threatening haunted house spaces, which I am quite sure was the intention. The shot of the black thing that ends the prologue sequence is, to be fair, the only time in the movie that I had a hard time seeing plot-critical visual information.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

The rest of the film follows a small group of characters so poorly-defined that for a large portion of the first act, I was having a hard time whether there were six or seven of them. The only two we're being persistently encouraged to care about are Rain (Cailee Spaeny), a plucky young woman whose biological family is all dead on the shithole mining planet where she toils in indentured servitude, and Andy (David Jonsson), the barely-functioning android she regards as her brother. They have a plan to get away from the many-tentacled monster that is the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, Rain's present owner/employer, by leaving for a neutral colony around 10 light years distant, but some nasty bureaucratic shenanigans get in the way; fortunately, at this exact point in time, Rain's four friends (so the correct answer was six) have a scheme to use a stolen ore transporter and fly up into orbit where a derelict spacecraft with just exactly the right number of cryosleep pods lies waiting. The script by Fede Álvarez (who also directs) & Rodo Sayagues shoves us through all of this fast enough that there's no time to speculate how random and contrived this all is, which it occurs to me is maybe the one thing this actually does in opposition to the '79 Alien: it spends absolutely no time whatsoever easing us into the story, when it can instead just scream plot points at us until the six people are all on the derelict, a gyroscope-shaped station with two wings named Romulus and Remus. Which feels like the thing you backload into your movie once you have decided that Romulus is going to be its subtitle rather than an actual way that a station would be named, but any rate, it's abandoned and very dark and just about the first thing the six people do is to accidentally thaw a hold full of facehuggers, the crab-spider monsters who are the first stage in the lifespan of this franchise's nightmarish predator.

They also bring to life a ripped-apart android named Rook, whose body is played by Daniel Betts, but whose appearance and voice are both digitally-augmented replicas of Ian Holm as the evil android from Alien, and if there is one choice that just fully typifies what a complete disaster of artistically barren pandering Romulus is, it's that. There is, to be as bluntly clear as possible, exactly zero narratively justified reason for Rook to look like Ash (Holm's character in 1979. In the 45 years of the Alien franchise - in this very movie! - it has been established that there is a wide variety of android appearances. And there's no feint towards Rook being "really" Ash. We can't even say that only the Rook/Ash model is prone to evil, since there are perfectly wicked Michael Fassbender robots in this universe (indeed, casting Fassbender would have made much more sense, but I'm sure he would have said no if they even bothered asking him). So it's purely pressing on the nostalgiac legacy sequel button for no other purpose than "you see this? It resembles a thing you will remember. Love it and its familiarity." That is the sole motivation for using computers to desecrate Holm's corpse like this. And having made this wretched choice, the film botches it. The effects used to paint Holm's head on Betts's body are truly horrible. The CGI in Alien: Romulus is mostly pretty good, given a not-outrageous budget (this was originally intended to be a direct-to-streaming franchise, in an echo of the Predator franchise extender Prey in 2022, and while this is definitely a much worse film, it also has much better effects), but the Holm deepfake is just wretched, his features appearing to float above his body, and his head very visibly too small for his shoulders. It is some of the worst "fake an actor using CGI" work of the modern age, and I hate having enough examples to be able to make that comparison at all. But even more aggravating, despite how tediously dark and gloomy this whole movie is, the fake Holm is just right out there in bright light, easy to see - he literally steps into the light for his reveal, so we can see him all the better! Rule number one with iffy effects work is to keep that shit in the shadows, and they even had a built-in excuse to do that here. It's mesmerizing how badly it has all gone.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below