OUT NOW: Alien Romulus (Fede Álvarez)

When a derelict space wreck enters orbit, a group of desperate workers from the harsh mining colony below sneak onboard.

They see the wreck as an opportunity, a way to upgrade their ship to make the nine year journey to a planet far beyond the clutches of the company.

Too bad…

My relationship with the Alien movies is weird.

I first discovered them as a kid, through their novelisations by the great Alan Dean Foster.

I did not watch the movies until years later, by which time they had been spoiled and somewhat superseded by my imagined versions from the books.

Bizarre, I know.

So the movies have never really hit for me.

I can certainly appreciate them, but my ass-backwards introduction to them has always kept them at a distance.

It is tough not to reach for the AI-assisted facsimile of Ian Holm when trying to encapsulate this movie, but there is not much to it.

Alien Romulus is the perfect example of the Disney approach to franchise relaunches - take what worked before and repeat it.

If that includes recreating the face and voice of an actor who died years before the movie began production, so be it.

Alien Romulus has things to recommend it: it is the first film since the second to capture the idea of working stiffs getting screwed by the company.

There is some decent world building at the start, with our heroine trapped in a never-ending contract, always in debt to the company.

The catalyst for the film’s action is desperation.

In that respect it broadly follows the set up of director Fede Álvarez’s Don’t Breathe, but it is effective.

And the filmmakers do have some good ideas once the action shifts to the abandoned space station.

There is a decent slow walk through a corridor of facehuggers and an inspired beat involving zero g and acid blood.

But the overriding sense with this movie is of a checklist being ticked off: we get repetitions of famous lines, some familiar music cues, and even a third act that manages to combine Prometheus and Alien Resurrection. 

Heck even not-Ian Holm (a combination of puppetry and AI-assisted CGI) is a reprise of the scene from Alien 3 where Ripley talks to a puppet of Lance Henrikson’s Bishop.

Of course in that film, they had a flesh and blood actor on hand to provide the voice and soul.

The cast are fine, particularly David Jonsson as compromised android Andy. But the film is closer to a slasher with a group of vaguely likeable heroes who are meant to be dispatched.

But the film - despite some touches of gore - feels airless. And despite a few jolts, and the moments I mentioned, the film is never that tense.

It feels like the diet version of Alien - all the familiar tropes, but there is nothing new or unique to this iteration. All the previous films had something new to add to the mix, whether it was additional concepts like the queen or a prison planet, or changes to the tone or genre. This movie plays it safe.

And the film’s theme of a soulless corporation treating desperate plebs as experiments feels almost like self-parody when the film is exploiting the facsimile of a dead human being to play a facsimile of a human being whose prime directive is “For the good of the company”.

Indeed.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.