Alien: Romulus Is An Absorbing Return To Basics

<em>Alien: Romulus</em> merges old-fashioned staging with modern effects. Its suspenseful set pieces, intelligent visual effects and gory body horror invoke the Ridley Scott original without looking dated.

Rahul+Desai

Aug 22, 2024

Still from Alien: Romulus. YouTube screengrab

FOR THE SEVENTH INSTALMENT of a 45-year-old movie franchise, the plot of Alien: Romulus is alarmingly bare. It’s borderline fan-fiction, circling back to the oldest sci-fi horror trope in the book: A ragtag crew encounters hostile creatures on a space station. That’s all there is. Not much else happens; the before and after barely matter. Never mind that the book itself was authored by this franchise, starting with Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) followed by James Cameron’s Aliens (1986). Alien: Romulus is an interquel, set between the events of those two films. So the “space station” here is the wreckage of Nostromo, the infamous commercial tug destroyed by the struggle between Sigourney Weaver’s warrant officer Ellen Ripley and the deadly xenomorphs with acid for blood.

The crew in Romulus plans to steal some cryopods from the wreckage to enable their escape to another planet. But little do they know that they’ve entered a metallic house of horrors. This film’s Ripley is Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny), a young space colonist whose pursuit of a better life is derailed by slimy facehuggers, chestbursters and human-xenomorph hybrids. Her journey is nothing madly original – a Greatest Hits rehash of the early Alien instalments at best, including a creepy AI-resurrected avatar of a dead actor from the 1979 film. I could say it’s unnecessary and poses an ethical conundrum, but let’s not pretend that cinema is not already moving in that direction. At least this movie finds the context to reintroduce an old face; after all, do people truly die in the futuristic Alien universe?

The narrative minimalism may sound like a problem, but in the case of Romulus it’s a big advantage. It wastes no time establishing the environment – or even the characters – because the film trusts its kinetic energy to reveal them. Within minutes, Rain, her adopted android brother Andy, her ex-boyfriend Tyler, Tyler’s pregnant sister Kay, Kay’s cocky cousin Bjorn and Bjorn’s girlfriend Navarro shoot into space and scavenge through Nostromo. Blink and you’ll miss it. Most movies might have shown Rain grappling with the decision to leave for a couple of nights in the oppressive colony, but this one gets down to business. Once aboard the Nostromo, however, the film relaxes, the tension slowly builds, and one by one, characters are bumped off in ascending order of moral fibre. While this template is old, it allows Romulus to be more primal and physical: suspenseful set pieces, detailed deep-focus cinematography, terrific production design that invokes the Ridley Scott original without looking dated, intelligent visual effects, and gory body horror that functions as both tribute and update.

Director Fede Alvarez prioritizes mood over complexity, allowing the film to merge old-fashioned staging with modern effects. At no point does the VFX overpower the dread and texture of a scene. The second hour, in particular, unleashes one claustrophobic survival sequence after another – but without flaunting its technical muscle. The action brings to mind a Christopher Nolan vehicle, where the emotional momentum of a moment outweighs the actual choreography of it. The best of them features a zero-gravity scene in which Rain falls upward while dodging floating blobs of acid (her use of a gun to control her direction evokes Matt Damon’s ingenuity in The Martian). This is immediately followed by a crafty elevator-shaft piece, which uses sound and space in a way that most new-age superhero productions have rendered extinct. I wouldn’t call it a throwback, but it’s certainly a reminder of how fear is the most fundamental element of human nature; stories don’t need to oversell it.

Cailee Spaeny is the perfect lead because she epitomises the familiar-but-newness of the franchise. It’s not just the fact that her eternally-young characters are growing progressively edgier. There’s always a sense that she looks like different actresses from different angles – Carey Mulligan in some shots, Natalie Portman in others, Jennifer Lawrence in some, Florence Pugh in others. Yet at the same time she’s original in how she expresses, moves, speaks and feels: like a living ballad that transcends her references. Her Rain is movie-star material, particularly because her character notes gradually emerge through the alien-drenched terrain. It’s like watching a reality show contestant outlast others by being human – and, at times, unremarkable. David Jonsson, as android Andy, does a fine job of unifying man and machine. More than once, Andy makes difficult choices – sacrificing one life to save many – and ironically serves as the conscience of a crew whose weakness is instinct. His equation with Rain is less mathematical, almost as if she represents the indispensability of the human mind and he, the heart.

Most of all, Alien: Romulus is the purest form of escapism for those who need it. I went into the film hoping to distract myself from a low phase. My head wandered a bit during the long setup, but the lack of premise ensured that I was never lost. Once the viscerality of a survival thriller took over, I forgot about life outside the confines of the cinema hall. It’s a cliche of course, but it’s comforting to know that well-made genre movies still have that power. It’s necessary. I stumbled out with a silly grin on my face because I had forgotten to breathe for a while and the edge of my seat was frayed. For a change, all that existed was outer space – not inner space – on a big screen.