A Lengthy, Spoiler-Filled Discussion of 'Alien: Romulus'

Where does Fede Alvarez's film rank in the pantheon of 'Alien' movies?

For nearly twenty years, the Alien series was arguably the most interesting franchise in Hollywood. Each of the four films made during that period follows the cursed existence of Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) as she squares off against insanely dangerous extraterrestrials known as “xenomorphs.” And each one was helmed by a different extraordinary director:

• Alien (1979) was the second feature from director Ridley Scott, who went to make scores of other important movies, including Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, and Gladiator. It is a psycho-sexual haunted house movie that ruthlessly plays our fears of physical violation, and it remains one of the best films ever made.

• James Cameron made Aliens (1986) in between The Terminator and The Abyss. His last three films, Titanic, Avatar, and Avatar: The Way of Water, were all record-breaking hits. Aliens is a kind of men-on-a-mission movie with a strong emotional center; it’s not nearly as sophisticated as Alien, but it is insanely fun.

• Alien³ (1992) was the directorial debut of one Mr. David Fincher. The production was notoriously troubled, and Fincher has long since disowned the movie, which is much, much better than people give it credit for. In any case, Fincher’s career more than recovered: he went on to direct such modern classics as Zodiac, Se7en, and The Social Network. In true Fincher fashion, Alien³ is unsentimental, existential, often, and always thought-provoking (people tend to miss all how it’s covertly about the AIDS epidemic).

• Alien: Resurrection (1997) was the solo debut of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who had previously co-directed the French cult classics Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. Like Alien³, Alien: Resurrection wasn’t very well-received when it was first released, and like Alien³, it’s better than its reputation. And like Fincher, Jeunet followed it up by making a masterpiece, Amélie. Alien: Resurrection has problems to be sure, but Jeunet injects the story with his characteristic humor, stages some fun set pieces, and allows the script, written by Joss Whedon when he wasn’t quite famous yet, to be as weird as it wants to be. The movie also makes an effort to complicate the relationship between Ripley and the xenomorphs in ways that I find fascinating.

Now. Every film in a series having a different director is not entirely unusual in and of itself… but you’d be hard-pressed to name another franchise where each director was such an iconic auteur with a singular, distinct style all their own¹. Some of these films are better than others, but none of them could have been made by any other filmmaker, and you can look at a single frame of any one of them and know exactly who made it.

Technically, the Aliens continued the tradition of hiring a new director for every up film for two more entries after the initial four: Alien vs. Predator (directed by super-hack Paul W.S. Anderson, NEVER to be confused with super-genius Paul Thomas Anderson) and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (the feature directorial debut of visual effects gurus Greg and Colin Strause, who have only helmed one other movie, the equally abysmal Skyline). But those movies are fucking unwatchable (and possibly not canon).

Scott returned to make Prometheus (2012), which had a lot of cool ideas that were poorly executed, and Alien: Covenant (2017), which just feels like Scott trying to make up for Prometheus. For whatever reason, those gosh darn xenomorphs just can’t seem to find their footing again.

Which brings us to the latest entry in the franchise, Alien: Romulus.

Steering the ship this time out is Fede Alvarez, best known for 2013’s inexplicably popular Evil Dead remake and the worst of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movies. Alvarez has technical chops, and Alien: Romulus is not an irredeemable piece of shit; there are a couple of scenes in this movie that are pretty cool, like when the heroes try to surreptitiously walk through a room full of facehuggers, or the firefight in zero gravity. The two leads, Civil War’s Cailee Spaeny David Jonsson, are both terrific. And the story is basically coherent, which I know sounds like faint praise, but it’s not nothing (just ask Borderlands).

But Romulus also has a LOT of problems, and, unfortunately, I believe that in this case, the bad outweighs the good.

Memberberries (Part One)

Those first four Alien movies each have their own look; Alvarez, however, shoots the film as 49.5% homage to Alien, 49.5% homage to Aliens, and 1% homage to Alien³. So while Romulus often looks pretty good (the cinematography is by Galo Olivares), it never looks especially original. For example: the best shot in the movie is the one at the top of this post… and it’s just a riff on the most famous shot from Alien³.

Alien: Don’t Breathe

Alvarez’s lack of ingenuity extends to the plot of Romulus, too.

Set in between Alien and Aliens, Alien: Romulus is about a young woman named Rain (Spaeny). An indentured servant for Weyland-Yutani (the cold-hearted corporation that has always acted as a secondary antagonist in these films), Rain fears that if she doesn’t find some way to escape, she’s going die young from working in the mines, just as her parents did².

Rain’s closest ally is her “brother,” Andy (Jonsson), who is really a defective “synthetic” (read: android) Rain’s dad found in a scrap heap and fixed up a bit. Andy is coded as being intellectually disabled. Some might argue that Alvarez did this because we’ve never seen a robot version of Lenny from Of Mice and Men before; others will say it’s a harmless variation of the Ripley/Newt relationship from Aliens³. But I believe Alvarez did this for the same reason they gave Lupita Nyong'o an adorable kitty in A Quiet Place: Day One: it’s meant to endear Rain to the audience. She loves and takes care of this poor guy, so she must be a good person, right? It’s a shortcut to make us feel things a better storyteller would make us feel through legitimate character work (more on that later).

ANYWAY, some of Rain’s other friends soon become aware of an abandoned Weyland-Yutani vessel that just so happens to be floating above their atmosphere. Those friends concoct a plan to fly to the ship and retrieve valuable parts so they can flee Weyland-Yutani and make new lives on some other planet, but they need Rain and (especially) Andy’s help. And so, against her better judgment, Rain joins the gang. Except that, naturally, once they get to the spaceship, they find it’s overrun with xenomorphs and facehuggers.

If this premise sounds familiar, that’s because Alvarez and his writing partner, Rodo Sayagues, are just recycling the plot from their 2016 hit, Don’t Breathe. In that movie, a group of down-on-their-luck young people (right down to the girl who is just looking out for her sweet and defenseless sibling) break into a blind guy’s house to rob him so they can run away and make better lives for themselves, only to discover that the blind guy is a total lunatic who is capable of hunting and murdering them even without his sight. All Alvarez and Sayagues have done here is swap out the blind guy for a space monster.

Memberberries (Part Two)

Alvarez just remaking his own movie is one thing, but he has also littered Romulus with the kind of Memberberries for which J.J. Abrams is famous.

We’ve already covered how this flick has its own Ripley/Newt thing going on, and the reuse of the most well-recognized image from Alien³.

I would also bet good money that the protagonist is named “Rain” because it sounds kinda like “Ripley.” Giger knows the two characters have nearly identical arcs.

A big part of the plot also revolves around the ship losing power and crashing, giving the characters a ticking clock against which to work. That exact thing happens in Alien: Resurrection, too.

Also cribbed from Alien: Resurrection: a xenomorph/human hybrid creature (although I concede that the one in Romulus is much creepier) that takes a bite out of someone’s head and is ultimately sucked out into space.

To be fair, three of the first four Alien movies all end with the xenomorph getting sucked out into space, but that actually makes an even stronger argument for mixing things up a bit in Romulus. But Romulus doesn’t mix things up.

The xenoman, by the way, comes about as the result of injecting a pregnant woman with the black goo from Prometheus⁴. Which is a neat idea! You might even wonder why they didn’t do it in Prometheus. Except that oh right they absolutely did do it in Prometheus.

Meanwhile, although Andy the android being “simple” may be new, his ethical ambiguity certainly isn’t.

Case in point: Alvarez also revives Ash, the evil robot Ian Holm played in the original movie. Holm has been dead for more than four years, so here he’s presented as a not-very-realistic-looking CGI abomination. I’m sure Holm’s family had to agree to this, and I’m happy for them that they got paid, but Ash’s inclusion is unnecessary and distracting.

Alvarez even figures out a way to reuse the infamous line “Get away from her, you bitch!” from Aliens. He tries to put a funny spin on it here by having Andy deliver the line in a less-than-confident manner, but… it’s still really out of character for Andy. It’s in the movie for us to all laugh and cheer at, not because it makes any actual narrative sense.

The Supporting Characters and Their Arcs

One of the things that makes those first four Alien movies so much fun is their supporting casts of characters. Not only are all they played by terrific actors, but they’re all colorful and memorable. The original Alien is, naturally, the best example: you never learn a single thing about any of the characters’ lives outside beyond the frame (including Ripley!), but you have a perfect understanding of who they each are, purely as a result of observing their behavior. The characters in Alien feel 100% real, even if the narrative is completely free of backstories. And because they feel real, your heart breaks a little each time one of them dies a horrible death.

The supporting characters in Alien³ also feel extremely real; the ones in Aliens and Alien: Resurrection are broader, but they’re still well-executed enough that you’re rootin’ for ‘em the whole way.

Unlike the obnoxious, one-dimensional teenagers in slasher movies, then, the supporting casts of the Alien films are more than just cannon fodder.

As Lars Ulrich might put it, though, the characters in Romulus are a little stock. I can’t remember any of their names and most of them have no discernible personality traits. One young woman is bald and of Asian descent, and that’s her whole character. One girl is pregnant, and that’s her whole character. One guy is the pregnant girl’s brother, and he kinda vibes with Rain, and that’s his whole character. Another guy is just an asshole; he actually does get a brief backstory, which is meant to make him sympathetic, but it’s not important to the story in any meaningful way because it’s all tell-don’t-show.

What’s nutty is that, again, the other Alien movies have all done better versions of this exact trope.

Yeah, sometimes these movies have characters who are just dicks, pure and simple, and they certainly earn their comeuppance (they’re usually the Weyland-Yutani faithful, like Ash in Alien or Paul Reiser’s character in Aliens). But there are also characters who spend a large chunk of the film acting like total jerks and then redeem themselves via a brave act that often costs them everything. Think about Parker (Yaphet Kotto) trying to save Lambert (American goddamn treasure Veronica Cartwright) in Alien, or Gorman (William Hope) sacrificing his life alongside Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein) in Aliens, or Dillon (Charles S. Dutton) becoming a martyr in Alien³. Those characters have multidimensionality because of what they do, not because we’re told they had sad childhoods.

Game Over, Man

I can imagine not-particularly demanding viewers who have never seen an Alien movie before more or less enjoying Romulus despite its many shortcomings. It is by no means the worst big-budget IP flick released this summer.

But this franchise has the potential to be so much more than just another exploitation of our collective cinematic sentimentality. Noah Hawley, the creative mind behind the Fargo television series, is overseeing an upcoming episodic prequel called Alien: Earth. Perhaps he can restore the xenomorphs to their former glory.

1. Mission: Impossible comes the closest; some might argue for the Batman movies, too, but those don’t all exist within the same continuity, and directors have routinely made more than one entry.

2. I admit that I’m being SUPER nit-picky here, but this already makes no sense within the larger context of the Alien franchise. Ripley is shocked to realize that Weyland-Yutani values money over her life in the first Alien; she even gives them a second chance in Aliens before finally learning not to trust these motherfuckers. But if Weyland-Yutani has entire planets full of what are really just slaves, then… how did Ripley ever think the company might have any moral values whatsoever? Did Ripley not know that Weyland-Yutani engaged in such practices? Or is she just an idiot?

3. Except Newt and Ripley are both more fully fleshed-out characters, and Newt is decidedly not helpless. Cameron manipulatively tugged on our heartstrings, but Alvarez violently yanks on them. I do not intend this statement this as a compliment.

4. The most absolutely bananas thing part of Don’t Breathe comes when the characters discover that the deadly blind guy has kidnapped and imprisoned a woman so as to involuntarily impregnate her with a turkey baster (I’m not making this up). Alvarez clearly has some issues with pregnant women, and I hope he finds a good shrink to help him work through it someday.