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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