Reviews

‘Alien: Romulus’ Is the Rosetta Stone of ‘Alien’ Canon

August 20th, 2024 | By Matthew Monagle

One of the benefits of writing reviews for yourself as editor is allowing a few extra days to think through your reaction to a movie. This is particularly useful when a movie is as invested in existing as part of a franchise as Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus. Picking between what elements work and don’t work is hardly the work of a single viewing, and waiting for a second screening to commit my thoughts to digital paper is some must-have breathing room when you’re tackling your favorite movie franchise. 

But after letting the movie simmer for a few days, I’m ready to declare Alien: Romulus a solid entry into the xenomorph canon – even if it proves to be a little overzealous in its world-building.

Whether directly or indirectly, the Weyland-Yutani corporation is going to be the death of Rain (Cailee Spaeny). The young colonist has already lost both her parents in service of the company, so when her last-ditch effort to book passage to another system is denied, she is left to weigh the options for herself and Andy (David Jonsson), the half-broken android she calls her brother. That is when a group of Rain’s friends come to her with a plan: sneak into the atmosphere to rob a defunct Weyland-Yutani cargo ship and use the supplies to leave their world behind forever.

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Almost immediately, things go wrong. The “cargo ship” turns out to be an abandoned R&D station with a suspicious amount of structural damage. Once on board, Andy’s programming is augmented by the command module of Science Officer Rook, a half-dissolved android who alone holds the secrets of the facility. And before you know it, what looked like a low-stakes heist becomes a battle for survival against facehuggers, xenomorphs, and all the worst that the Alien franchise has to throw at humans.

In the run-up to the film’s release, Álvarez made a point of celebrating the film’s practical effects. Smarter folks than I can speak to the method, but the result is a film that looks and feels an awful lot like Ridley Scott’s original feature. Álvarez has found the perfect marriage of high-tech and low-tech in science fiction; in a world where anything you can imagine can be magicked onscreen, there’s something almost thrilling about the appearance of analog technology and disk-based operating systems. Romulus is often a beautiful movie, and it is hard to imagine any studio executive thinking a straight-to-streaming release would have done it justice.

But for all the polish of the production design, the stakes of the film are surprisingly human. Álvarez may have claimed that his young cast was designed to make the deaths hurt more, but there is another concept here: the youthful rebellion of the film’s young cast allows the movie to bounce new ideas off of dystopian Alien tropes. Androids have always been the secret sauce behind Scott’s features; it’s no surprise that the relationship between Rain and Andy proves to be the endgame of Álvarez’s movie. How Rain and her non-biological brother navigate the dangers of the universe – and push the boundaries of their real or metaphorical programming – allows the world to fill in with richness around them, even as the movie finds narrative beats that echo across the franchise as a whole.

Callbacks are everywhere, including the soundtrack. Composer Benjamin Wallfisch is not afraid to draw on other iconic scores from the Alien franchise, peppering his work with themes from James Horner’s Aliens tracklist or the haunting motif from Marc Streitenfeld’s Prometheus soundtrack. What makes the soundtrack work so well – in much the same way as the narrative choices – is that these musical concepts never overwhelm the creation of something new. Alien: Romulus contains (literal) echoes of its predecessors, but the film mostly avoids the Skywalker fallacy of putting known faces through familiar paces.

Mostly.

There is one creative choice that threatens to undermine the balance of the film. While much has been written about that decision in the wake of the film’s opening weekend, we can feign ignorance for another turn. Suffice to say, one key character from the earlier films returns in the shape of an android, and it is a choice that really doesn’t work.

With the exception of Alien: Covenant – which explored the relationship between Michael Fassbender’s David and Walter to great effect – the sequels and prequels have shied away from the homogeneity of androids found in the Alien universe. But resurrecting a dead actor is a hard pill for audiences to swallow even if the effects are seamless, and this characterization was anything but. It’s not just that Rook feels bad; he looks bad, too, and that undermines the connective tissue Álvarez tried to construct onscreen.

Are we so short of stodgy character actors that we could not create a new android for the movie? And why did we need to introduce a new performer at all? No better way to tap into the existential nightmares of the prequels than by having David Jonsson play a more sinister version of his character, pitting Andy in a tug-of-war between his better natures.

Some will argue that the worst creative decision is the final act – where Romulus wildly tries to have its Alien: Resurrection and eat it too. But while that action sequence may feel caught somewhere between fan service and subversion, there’s no denying it’s a swing from the filmmakers rather than a misguided turn down a dead-end hall. Perhaps time will be kind to what Álvarez and company set out to do with their characters, but as we sit in judgment now, the Rook decision is the one thing that truly holds the film back.

Where does Alien: Romulus sit among its peers and predecessors? That is a question that sits only between you and your god. What I can say is that Romulus really works most of the time, and creates a kind of lived-in universe that I hope more filmmakers look to for inspiration. As a bridge movie between franchises – one that tries to establish something resembling a cohesive narrative between Alien and Prometheus – it is both surprisingly canon-heavy and reckless in its desire to please. Call it the best Dark Horse comic adaptation we never got. [3.5/5]