Since 1986 the Alien franchise has gone through multiple stages of evolution without measuring up to Ridley Scott’s terrifying original, or James Cameron’s dazzling sequel. Between Alien 3 and Alien: Covenant, the franchise has enjoyed a fair share of supporters for collectively maligned sequels and mildly fascinating (if not incomplete) prequels, which makes sense in a franchise that has seen filmmakers from David Fincher to Jean-Pierre Jeunet to Paul W.S. Anderson before getting back into the hands of Ridley Scott once more. Still, the Alien franchise has meant something, in some way, to a broad demographic of viewers. Few franchises of this scope have enjoyed the luxury of being defined by an array of admiration that isn’t totally exclusive to an individual entry.
Now seven years removed from Scott’s nefarious Alien: Covenant after a complicated relaunch in 2012’s Prometheus, a lot has changed. After countless attempts to get an entry off the ground with Neill Blomkamp (District 9) set to helm “a return to formula”, the Disney-Fox merger may have iced those chances for Blomkamp in 2019. Enter writer-director Fede Álvarez, the Uruguayan filmmaker behind Don’t Breathe, and another franchise remake, Evil Dead (2013), for Alien: Romulus. An interquel set between Alien and Aliens, starring Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, and Isabel Merced as they dock the titular derelict outpost.
The young group scavenges the outpost for cryosleep material before they become exposed to the scariest, gnarliest creatures known to viewers around the world. But of course, they don’t know the Xenomorph and face-huggers mean something to audiences who will enjoy watching them evade peril. Yet that very idea is the sole identity of Romulus. A sci-fi slugger that offsets its return to practically engineered set design with enough recalls to completely diminish the value of the parts and the image of the brand. A movie by and for those who don’t understand Alien is more than chest-bursting violence in the darkest canals of deep space exploration.
H.R. Giger’s design of the Xenomorph is one of the greatest artistic achievements ever crafted for a film. A design dripping with originality through bared teeth, slimy limbs, and phallic shapes that’ll elicit a presence terrifying enough to make you cover your mouth before you scream. Giger’s most monstrous creation is a brilliant study in understanding how design is shaped by the tune of the story. Dan O’Bannon didn’t just write a script about a group of underpaid space truckers stumbling into a monster that tears them apart. He wrote a story about corporate manipulation and the visceral evolution of forced sexual intercourse. This is important because the entire franchise understands that the roots of Alien are in the details of narrative, and of course, the inspired designs that came from it. Romulus is the first entry that seems to misunderstand the franchise’s conception.
Aliens goes a step further by warping its large-scale action extravaganza into a story about a corporation not believing victims before Ripley ascends into a surrogate mother. Mileage may wear thin on Alien 3, but its carefully designed brutalism is (at the very least) a specifically structured form of terminal misogyny through gender displacement. For all intents and purposes, the Alien franchise is an evolution of feminine development against the shapes and structures that attempt to worm their way into terrorizing the life of a survivor. The sexual horror is a gateway for the characters to pass through before a sci-fi monster crushes, binds, or suffocates the human viscera as an extension of the installed predation. The sexual passages toward femininity are rites of the franchise, and when those vital aspects are ignored, you end up with a film like Alien: Romulus.
Romulus’s pride is focused on a return to practical effects after Scott was laser-focused on more digital prosthetics for Prometheus and Covenant. A sci-fi franchise promising a return to practicality after the original filmmaker divided the fans with larger ideas and computer-generated prequels sounds awfully familiar. Doesn’t it? As to the promise made during the production, Romulus goes above and beyond in executing its mission statement to a deliciously intense degree. The sets are flooded with lighting techniques that click, patter, and buzz with a range of hues across the spectrum that’ll make the darkest corners of the room feel more ominous than you’d like. Pipes, wires, tubes, and electrical conduits drape from the ceiling, run across the wall, and through the floor with shapes reminiscent of the creatures the crew is running from. A tactile illusion maximized to foreshadow the inevitable punctures of death is admittedly impressive, even if the shapes harness a fractured remembrance of the franchise’s true nature.
The film’s technical make-up gives the outpost plenty of room for the setpieces to contract the characters’ chances of survival, but they are too evocative of sequences we’ve seen before. In a glaring example; a flock of face-huggers dart toward the crew as alarms sound and red light illuminates the danger. The sequence acts as if it presents a new sense of danger with shimmering tendrils entering the orifice of a character before they remove it, but we’ve already seen this in Aliens. We’ve seen ribs crushed in Alien, a transparent highlight of a malignant presence writhing in the recesses of a human body in Prometheus, and even seen the corrosive saliva disintegrate a character before our eyes numerous times. Yet, Romulus presents these situations with ever so slight variations of what we’ve seen before although they are fundamentally the same idea. It is an effortless reconstruction of familiar beats that’ll remind you of a movie you’ve seen rather than the one in front of you.
This assertion is reinforced by the haphazard digital reconstruction of a deceased actor in one of the most important roles of the movie. Again, for all of the tangibles, Romulus is undone by lazy designs and an unethical approach to proving the best interests of the company override the necessary creative thought to install new parts into an expanding machine. The relationship between well-executed promises is constantly offset by the outright refusal to push itself in a direction other than backward. This happens when there is no thematic reason to recycle the past for our entertainment. It is an absolute stroke of conscious reconstruction at the expense of emotional necessity to the point where it bears a gross resemblance to cinematic plagiarism. When a film exists purely through the framework of familiarity, there is no attempt to allow the audience to have an emotional resistance to the work in front of them. That resistance is necessary because it shows an individual's work operates on its terms rather than servicing an aggregated bubble of brand recognition.
Even if Álvarez is turning the sets upside down with some gravitational weight, the moments within the frame are pushed through the prism of legacy rather than notable merit. These moments reverberate through an artificial imaging technique that attempts to reframe how the audience views what they love about the franchise. When you bestow an invaluable preciousness to the presence of fans, the production is solely operating to appease them without offering a right of refusal. So, when Romulus continuously repeats beats, lines, and narrative arcs, the comfort of “getting back to the basics” is totally at odds with a franchise that has earned a vast collection of fans by pushing itself in perilous directions even if they aren’t totally successful. One of the fundamentals of science fiction is venturing into the unknown, and Romulus disregards this vital component of the genre by adhering to mindless demands.
Although Scott’s prequels may have stoked a fire in viewers who wanted a modern rendition of the Xenomorph, he still managed to reconfigure our understanding of the franchise through the cinematic discipline he has maintained throughout his career. Scott returned to the franchise and reincarnated a few vessels, but he afforded it a meaning verbalized by a cohesive omniscience within the rules he, O’Bannon, and Giger conceptualized in 1979, to service Prometheus in 2012. Thematically, Prometheus and Covenant are meant to provoke the conditions we’ve been comfortable with for decades by elevating the franchise to the heights of God-like creation retaliating against the emotional courses of human nature. Romulus doesn’t even have an atom-sized idea worth putting up against something as interesting as that. But that’s how we got here in the first place. Audiences denied Scott’s expertise in a cinematic field he advanced not once, but twice, and now we’re stuck with this decade’s umpteenth blockbuster repurposed as a carnival ride.
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