Alien: Romulus, 2024.
Directed by Fede Álvarez.
Starring Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, and Aileen Wu.
SYNOPSIS:
Alien: Romulus is available now in a digital edition, complete with bonus features, ahead of its December 3 release on DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K Ultra HD. The movie was a mixed bag for me, but your mileage may vary.
I’ve long been a fan of the Alien franchise. I’m even one of those people who liked Alien 3, and I appreciated that one even more when I had a chance to check out the Assembly Cut. I thought the third one was a perfect way to cap a science-fiction trilogy set in a future that was much more realistic than the one portrayed in Star Trek.
But, of course, we’re now in an era where pretty much every successful genre film needs sequels, prequels, comic books, novels, and just about anything else to make some money from an enthusiastic fan base. (When is Alien Land coming to Disneyland?)
And the thing with Alien movies is that they’re kind of a one-trick pony. Every movie needs to have at least one xenomorph, and its cast of characters needs to be whittled down until there’s only one person left for the final boss battle. (Synthetics, little kids, and cats are the exceptions to that, of course. Oh, and one of the prisoners on Fury 161.)
I still love the franchise’s story world, though. Like I said, it’s a much more realistic glimpse into the future. I’d be all in on Alien movies set in that world but not having to include one or more xenomprphs (I guess Prometheus might count, but it’s been a long time since I watched that one), but, yeah, that’s never going to happen. (Side note: That’s why I love Star Wars: you can tell pretty much any kind of story in that franchise, even one that never features a lightsaber, let alone a Jedi Knight and/or Sith.)
Which brings me to Alien: Romulus, which I was on board with, despite a few bumps here and there, until the end. That aforementioned final boss battle just did not sit well with me. I won’t spoil anything, but let’s just say I experienced the same feeling I had during the third act of Alien Resurrection.
But let’s start at the beginning, which is oh-so-full-of-promise. Twenty years after the events of the first Alien movie, Rain (Cailee Spaeny) is an orphaned miner in the colony Jackson’s Star, where she lives with Andy, a, shall we say, quirky android who was programmed by her father to be a brother to her.
Rain dreams of leaving her dreary existence, but it’s clear that in the future, corporations will be just as malevolent as they are today, and she finds herself stuck in a life of indentured servitude. However, her friends have a plan to get off the planet and travel to Yvaga, which promises a fresh start for all of them.
They just need an android to help them steal some cryostasis chambers from a derelict space station so they can sleep during the nine years it will take to get to that new planet. Rain brings Andy along, although she has reservations about how he will be treated, especially when she learns that a member of their group lost his mother after an android made a calculated decision that killed her, but spared many others.
Unsurprisingly, said derelict space station harbors a nasty secret in the form of xenomorphs that ran amuck after Weyland-Yutani scientists located the one that Ripley shot into space and brought it there. Yes, it was part of a bio weapon project, and we get plenty of exposition delivered by an android named Rook that looks just like Ash from the first film. (I thought that part was completely CGI, but apparently they built an animatronic head based on Ian Holm’s likeness and used CGI to help with facial features.)
You can probably guess the rest of the plot from there. I appreciated the fact that the characters’ goal wasn’t to kill the xenomorphs but, rather, to simply escape with the cryostasis chambers. There’s a ticking clock in the form of the space station’s imminent collision with the rings around the planet, which helps add to the narrative tension.
The atmosphere is appropriately creepy, which is right in line with the first four movies, although there are a few plot points that don’t make a lot of sense. The biggest head-scratcher for me was the seeming ease with which the characters infiltrate the space station. Wouldn’t the powers-that-be at Weyland-Yutani have put some kind of quarantine around it, given what happened?
There’s also been a lot of chatter online about the reuse of certain lines of dialogue from the previous movies, which director Fede Álvarez said was meant to be Easter eggs for fans. For the most part, I didn’t mind that, although the borrowed dialogue used to punctuate a major moment for Andy ended up undercutting the power of that scene.
And, of course, there’s the film’s third act, which, as I said earlier, just derailed the movie for me. It didn’t completely wreck the whole thing, since there was a lot to like in the preceding two acts, but, yeah, I’ll just leave it at that.
Alien: Romulus will be issued on physical media (4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and DVD) on December 3, but you can grab it from digital retailers now, complete with all the bonus features that will be on the disc. (Assuming there aren’t any retail exclusives, but I don’t think those are really a thing anymore.)
The extras kick off with 11 minutes of deleted and extended scenes and move on to the 25-minute Return to Horror: Crafting Alien: Romulus, which is broken into four featurettes. Director Fede Álvarez and producers Ridley Scott and Michael Pruss play major roles in those proceedings, along with the cast members and other people in the crew.
The last two bonus features are the 11-minute Inside the Xenomorph Showdown, which breaks down Rain and Andy’s frantic final race to freedom, and the 9-minute Alien: A Conversation, where Álvarez and Scott get to chat about the movie that started the whole thing.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Brad Cook
