ALIEN: ROMULUS may be the strongest entry into the franchise since the original. Certainly, this taut thriller provides strong characters, and an even stronger sense of dread, concentrating on the horror of the unknown that turns out to be as unstoppable as it is homicidal. The high-minded philosophical musings found in PROMETHEUS, for example, are still here, and just as potent, but Fede Alvarez has fashioned a roller-coaster experience that is suffused with terror and adrenalin.
We are a few decades past what happened to the Nostromo in the original, and the Weyland Yutani Corporation demonstrates an even greater level of dehumanizing ruthlessness. This time, it’s the Jackson Star Mining Colony, which gets zero days of sunshine per year, and where Rain (Cailee Spaeny) dreams of the sunsets to be found on the farming planet of Yvaga. Unfortunately, the only way for her to leave the sunless colony for the relative paradise of Yvaga is to meet her quota, the which is, coincidentally, raised every time it is met. The hopelessness of the situation convinces the usually law-abiding Rain to listen with an open mind to Tyler (Archie Renaux), who along with his sister, Kay (Isabela Merced), and friends Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and Navarro (Aileen Wu), have hatched a scheme to commandeer the derelict spaceship that has appeared overhead and use its cryo-pods to make the nine-year trip to Yvaga. They’re not just asking as friends who want her company, they need her brother, Andy (David Jonsson), the android that Weyland threw away only to be salvaged and repaired by Rain’s now-deceased parents and programmed to always do what is best for Rain.
The plan is sound, if on a strict schedule to get the ship operational before it crashes into the planet’s rings, rendered with beauty and menace as a buzzsaw of rock and ice. Of course, the one variable our intrepid band cannot know, or even conceive, is that the ship is actually a space station and that its cargo is, further of course, is the xenomorphs that haunt this franchise. Also, the space station is divided into two parts, Romulus and Remus (hence the title) and that will come into play in the course of this tidily written script. As will other foreshadowings dropped like narrative breadcrumbs for us to follow, not to mention some simply suburb call-outs to the original ALIEN that aren’t just homages, they are also an integral part of the plot.
One of the best things that Alvarez has done is to flip the structure of ALIEN. In that film, viewers were as in the dark as the crew of the Nostromo about what would happen when they took those alien pods onboard. Here, we know what those bits of vacuum-sealed biomass on the space station are, and that it’s only a matter of time after the temperature rises as the station is activated before a face is sucked and something even worse follows. To have accomplished only that, coupled with a sound design that is perfectly executed keep you on the edge of your seat all by itself, would be satisfying, but there is more thanks to Andy. Using speculative fiction to comment on current social mores is a time-honored tradition, but the trope of an underclass with no rights is handled with a delicacy that amplifies simple metaphor. Rain genuinely thinks of Andy as her family, to the bemusement and outright hostility of the others. Throwing a genuine bigot into the mix, albeit one who has a grudge against androids for a very specific reason holds the necessary mirror up to us, but it is a baleful reflection. What makes this work is Jonsson, who evokes a childlike gentleness as he tells the stale jokes to Rain that she’s heard a million times before. When a twist designed to save them all from the danger they’ve awakened, Jonsson takes on a different persona that doesn’t leave the old Andy behind so much as adds a new layer that is cool, intellectual, and rife with sociopathic tendencies. And that is when the deeper philosophical conundrums about directives and programming come into play, not to mention questions of identity that parse the difference between the collective good and personal loyalty. It flows as easily as the xenomorph’s acid blood and is sometimes just as disturbing. Kudos as well to Spaeny for finding the perfect blend of green adulthood and blazing steel.
Alvarez fills the screen with blacks and reds as he perfectly calibrates how to move the camera and splice an edit to tap into primal terror. The original xenomorph designs by H. R. Giger are expanded, often with deliberately gonadal flourishes that are also disturbing. What can only have been inspired by a vagina gives way to a new excrescence that is boldly phallic in its unfurling. A bonus is the slick way the film uses physics as it finds novel ways to keep the adrenalin pumping. From the time the would-be farmers dock with the space station, it is non-stop scares and heartbreak.
ALIEN: ROMULUS is a good old-fashioned horror tale, smartly paced, long on character, and on surprises. The only thing that could possibly make it better is if they added a cat. Maybe with the sequel.
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