It’s pretty bold of Fede Alvarez to make his entry into the Alien canon a blatant remake. No, not a remake of any of the other eight films in the franchise but of his debut feature, 2016’s Don’t Breathe. Bunch of hard-luck twentysomethings, hellbent on escaping a dying industrial wasteland, decide they’ll pull off a heist from a remote ruin, only to be hunted down by a merciless, seemingly inhuman killer who hunts by sound and intends to use them for bizarre breeding purposes. In Don’t Breathe, their nemesis was Stephen Lang wielding a turkey baster. This time around, it’s everyone’s favorite xenomorph, and standing in for Detroit is a remote, sunless mining colony run by the eternally evil Weyland-Yutani Corporation.
The company still aims to add interstellar bioweapons to its product line, but for now it’s turning a profit off human exploitation (no change in the future, then), using old-fashioned company-store servitude to keep desperate workers under contract until they drop dead in the mine. That includes orphaned Rain (a perfectly fine Spaeny, much more memorable in Civil War and Priscilla), who dreams of faraway planets. When her small-time-crook Mockney ex, Tyler (Shadow and Bone’s Renaux as the Artful Dodger in space), convinces her to steal cryo pods from an abandoned Weyland-Yutani space station, of course she’s in. And of course there are aliens there. And of course her autistic-coded brother Andy (Rye Lane’s Jonsson) is a synthetic human because what’s an Alien film without a goddam robot?
Alvarez and his longtime writing partner Rodo Sayagues seem to be working their way through the big horror franchises, and while Romulus marks a dramatic improvement on their script for 2018’s blighted and Netflix-backed Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it’s nowhere near bloodspray distance to their ghoulishly gruesome Evil Dead remake from 2013. Sadly, Romulus lurches deeper and deeper into the quagmire that swallowed up their adaptation of The Girl in the Spider’s Web. They get lost in the labyrinthine mythology, as Romulus tries to cram in references to everything but the Alien vs. Predator duet. That urge finds physical form in the final act, a mishmash that crams together Prometheus, Covenant, and Resurrection. For all the flaws of the final products, the filmmakers wanted to make their own contributions to the story, and that’s why Alien has the longevity it has achieved. When James Cameron walked into that studio meeting and pitched a monster-hunting action flick as a sequel to the original’s survival horror, he kicked the story’s doors open. Alvarez has just made a patchwork quilt, and the stitching doesn’t always hold.
Alien: Romulus could have been like The First Omen, writer/director Arkasha Stevenson’s attempt to elaborate on the ideas of the original. Instead, it’s like Wish, Disney’s utterly misguided attempt to create a Grand Unification Theory of its fairy tales through a deluge of references and Easter eggs. Some – like the return of a Colonial Marine’s best friend, the pulse rifle – are forgivable and even cute. But others, like the misappropriation of the Alien series’ most famous one-liner and a pretty distasteful cameo, land like a dead facehugger.
Fortunately, Alvarez remains arguably the best horror director of this era when it comes to individual shots and scenes. The emphasis on practical scenery and effects increases the terror, while there are glorious little innovations like the amplified risks of acid blood in zero gravity. But such moments are diversions in what feels like a speed run through all the earlier films, and with the least interesting cast yet. Originality is what made Alvarez famous. If only he showed more of it here when it comes to storytelling, not just innovative jump scares.
This article appears in August 16 • 2024.