Movie franchises are exhausting in the best kind of way, like hiking a 14er, or sitting in I-70 ski traffic.
You know what to expect but you do it anyway. This bogs you down until that rapturous moment when you finally get where you’re going. And then it’s gone, and you’re thinking about the return trip.
As a diehard fan of the Alien series, that’s how I felt going into Alien: Romulus, the seventh main-vein installment in a 45-year-old franchise. This world is older than I am, and history hangs heavy.
Starting with Ridley Scott in 1979, more than a half-dozen directors have gone where no one can hear you scream, including A-listers James Cameron and David Fincher. This time it’s horror guru Fede Álvarez putting his spin on the creepiest critter in space. Scott himself is a producer and his influence is all over the opening scene, when screens flutter to life and a mangled behemoth floats elegantly through cold, dark silence. Never mind that this scene is hardly referenced again. It sets the tone, saying, “This is NOT Alien: Resurrection.” As a diehard, I’m on board with that.
The plot picks up on a space-age mining colony. It’s a miserable place to live, and even worse if you work there. Young Rain (Cailee Spaeny) wants to leave this terraformed hellhole with her adopted brother, Andy (David Jonsson), a glitchy synthetic re-programmed by her dead father. Synthetics – sorry, “artificial persons” – are all over the Alien series, but this is the first time anyone has called one a “brother.” Johnsson’s performance is deft. Even Andy’s penchant for bad dad jokes hits all the right notes.
When Rain is denied a transfer and sent back to the mines, she hatches an escape plan with a group of young, orphaned friends. One is an old flame. One is hiding a secret. One is quiet, another crass, but all are desperate to leave. It’s a simple and effective setup. Their plan involves rocketing into space – a scene that’s nearly as jarring as a crash landing – and raiding a derelict craft. As a diehard, I can’t wait to get on board. Derelict craft are the haunted houses of space, and for the rest of the film these poor, doomed souls run, scream and fight their way past the xenomorph Hall of Fame, occasionally while fighting gravity itself.
Álvarez is more than a “gotcha” horror guy. There are plenty of jump scares – almost too many – but he knows that real horror starts with people. Missing parents haunt this film. No one in Rain’s inner circle is older than 20, maybe 21, which gives this world a touch of queasy realism. If humans really do jet off to colonize the stars, I’m betting life expectancy falls fast. And these kids make juvenile mistakes, which helps you forgive those palm-slap moments baked into the genre.
Also haunting this film is the faceless corporation, Weyland-Yutani. Corporate antipathy and distrust have run with the series since ’79, when Ash, a murderous synthetic played by British great Ian Holm, dropped us a third-act twist (almost) better than Darth Vader’s fatherhood bomb. Playing the Ash surrogate in this film is Rook, another company bot-man ordered to bottle the alien’s special sauce. Rook-slash-Ash is fan service to the extreme, right down to the CGI recreating Holm’s face. His character mostly serves the story – until the script serves him a line stolen straight from the original. It’s like nuking last night’s leftovers and calling it a meal.
Homage is all the rage these days. I get it. I don’t always like it, but I get it. Just this summer we got another Deadpool, another Apes, another Twisters, another Quiet Place and another Western with Kevin Costner. Another and another, ad infinitum. And even when films weren’t paying homage, the biggest blockbusters (and flops) were rehashing the same old stories, like the Borderlands movie and the Amy Wineland biopic Back In Black.
It’s the world Álvarez is working in and with Alien: Romulus he does his best to make it his own.
GRADE: B