REVIEW

Review Alien: Romulus

Aliens: Romulus is playing now in theaters.

The titular beast from the Alien series is one of the most iconic movie monsters of all time, but as with everything, familiarity  breeds—well, not exactly resentment in this case, but it does facilitate a definite  diminishing  return when it comes to scariness.

And if nothing else, the five Alien films since the  original have fostered familiarity.

Alien: Romulus  attempts  to make H.R. Giger’s xenomorph scary again, and while much of the material seems recycled from what came before, I’m just happy that we finally have another Alien film that doesn’t blow chunks.

Directed  by  Fede  Álvarez (Don’t Breathe and 2013’s Evil Dead),  Alien: Romulus takes the  series  back  to  its  roots of crew members on a spaceship being hunted down and slaughtered by freaky creatures after the previous two films attempted some pseudo-cerebral world-building that ground the franchise to a halt.

The return to form is effective, as are most of the scares, but none of it feels original; in  many  ways  Romulus  eels like  an  amalgamation of  all the series’ greatest hits, from overly familiar character archetypes to suspiciously similar sets to winkingly repeated lines. 

The freshest facet of the film is the relationship between siblings Rain (Cailee  Spaeny) and Andy (David  Jonsson),  their  sister-brother  dynamic  causing heightened  anxiety  because you really want them both to live, much like Ripley and Newt or Ripley and Jones the cat from previous films.

Plot-wise things don’t really diverge from the familiar until the third act or so, at which point things finally feel new and  surprising;  there  is  one new  addition  to  the  Alien mythos here that is genuinely unsettling, and it’s just too bad that it took so long in the film to come along.

The  acting  in  Romulus  is quite  good,  particularly  that of the two aforementioned siblings (Jonsson has a fascinating duel role of sorts, and I would not be surprised if the character of Rain catapulted Spaeny  to  stardom  just  like Ellen Ripley did for Sigourney Weaver over forty years ago), but  the  script  these  actors have to bring to life is noticeably poor in certain parts.

The dialogue got an unintentional chuckle out of me a couple of times, with standouts such as  one  character  responding to  a  terrible  story  by  simply stating “that’s  terrible” and  another  one  frantically explaining, seemingly just for the audience’s sake, that elevators don’t work without gravity. 

I  also think I missed an important line or two because of various accents and a lack of diction, particularly during a big exposition dump halfway through, but that’s okay. I still understood everything.  It’s not like “alien kills people” is a difficult plot to follow.

The xenomorph is the perfect killing machine and doesn’t need to evolve, so maybe it’s not surprising that the  franchise surrounding it has not evolved much either after all these years. Alien:Romulus may not reinvent the wheel, but it does do what it was made to do, and that is make people afraid of space again.

Alien:Romulus is now playing in theaters.

Article written by TJ Reid

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