ALIEN: ROMULUS Review – You Just Had To Make It Weird (Or Alien Re-Resurrection)

Introduction

How did you feel about Alien: Resurrection (1997)? Did you like it, hate it, or accept it as good enough to scratch your Alien itch? Did you refuse to watch it all together? Were you even alive in 1997? Short of re-watching Alien: Resurrection, Alien: Romulus is the next closest thing. Depending on how you answered my questions, that’s good, bad, or you’re not even old enough to have worried about Y2K.

In Alien: Resurrection, a group of corporate scientists are studying captured xenomorphs (the aliens referenced by the title) aboard a ship. A ragtag group of humans and one obligatory android are also on board. When the xenomorphs escape and start killing, the group is chased around the ship and picked off by the xenomorphs one at a time, all while a final countdown to the ship’s destruction ensues. At the end of the film, there is a climactic fight between the last remaining human(s) and some new hybrid xenomorph.

Synopsis

In Alien: Romulus, a group of corporate scientists were studying captured xenomorphs (the aliens referenced by the title) aboard a space station. A ragtag group of humans and one obligatory android end up on board. When the xenomorphs escape and start killing, the group is chased around the station and picked off by the xenomorphs one at a time, all while a final countdown to the station’s destruction ensues. At the end of the film, there is a climactic fight between the last remaining human(s) and some new hybrid xenomorph.

There are differences, to be sure. Alien: Romulus takes place between the events of Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986). There are fewer characters in Alien: Romulus and none of them are Sigourney Weaver or Weaver’s Ripley. But there is a Ripley analog – Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny), a young miner caring for her android/surrogate brother Andy (David Jonsson). Yes, the android’s actual name is Andy. Andy the Android. Yeah, I rolled my eyes, too.

And the way they end up on the doomed vessel is slightly different. Rain is approached by ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) with a plan to escape their dead-end lives and flee to another planet. The three of them and three others – Kay (Isabela Merced), Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Navarro (Aileen Wu) – form a group that will definitely not all survive to see that planet.

Analysis

Unfortunately, none of the human characters are developed that well, so we don’t have much rooting interest in any of them. Rain is the obvious protagonist and we like her because she protects Andy. But Kay is pregnant, so…yeah. The other three barely get names and are just there as slasher movie fodder. As for Andy, we’re told he is an old model refurbished to the point of being little more than functional and mostly reduced to telling dad jokes.

See the problem here? We need another Ripley – a very capable and skilled person with leadership qualities and a badass streak who won’t leave a child or cat behind. Instead, in Alien: Romulus, we get Rain, who is really good at rebooting Andy and knows not to inject people with black goo. That’s about it.

Speaking of black goo, how did you feel about Prometheus (2012) and the whole xenomorph origin story? I thought it was half-baked and completely unnecessary. It’s one thing to give us the tale of how Darth Vader came to be Darth Vader (still unnecessary). It’s another to give us the origin story of a wild animal. Imagine if someone made a prequel to The Meg (2018) explaining the origins of megalodons. It’s a scary monster that wants to kill people. Got it. I don’t need more. As Patton Oswalt once joked when talking about the Star Wars prequels:

“I don’t care where the stuff I love came from. I just love the stuff I love!”

To be clear, I do not love The Meg or anything about it. The point is when the goo made an appearance in Romulus, I rolled my eyes again. Hard.

(Spoilers – If you want to be truly surprised and grossed out during the movie, skip the next paragraph)

Further Discussion

That goo was a key component in writer/director Fede Alvarez’s (Evil Dead, Don’t Breathe) vision for Alien: Romulus. He definitely saw Resurrection but took the wrong lesson from it. He saw the bizarre human-hybrid and thought “You know what this really needs? Graphic body horror.” Remember that pregnant girl I mentioned? She has one job in this movie – to give birth to that hybrid. And it’s a scene that you can’t unsee.

I realize that watching one of the chest bursters explode through a rib cage is quite awful, but watching one of the xenomorph eggs come blasting out from between that girl’s legs in an explosion of blood is simply over the top for me. and that’s not because labor and delivery bothers me – I watched my son’s birth and it was super cool – but because it’s in the movie just for the gratuitous shock value.

It’s also the point where the movie lost me, not just because of the gross-out factor, but because of the continued tie-in to Prometheus. I didn’t know it was possible to roll your eyes while trying not to vomit. With that scene seared into my brain, followed by the silly hybrid and final fight scene, I was less than thrilled by the overall film.

Conclusion

Don’t get me wrong, Alien: Romulus before the pregnant girl’s big scene was very solid. The film did what we want all Alien movies to do. It put a group of people in an enclosed space being chased by the scariest creature in movie history. It gave us another really good android character who garners more sympathy than the rest of the cast combined (not to mention Andy gets an upgrade for part of the movie that allows Jonsson to steal the show). It even did some creative things with the face huggers and acid blood to lift the tension. But Alvarez just had to make it weird.

Rating: Ask for four dollars back and a barf bag.

More from Cinema Scholars:

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE – Judgement Day

MAD HEIDI: A Review Of The Modern Grindhouse Epic

Keep up with Cinema Scholars on social media. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram.