Film Review - Alien: Romulus

Competent, engaging, and yet ultimately underwhelming

Warning: spoilers.

There is, I think, something deeply ironic about a film whose plot firmly rebukes the dehumanizing excesses of dystopian technocapitalism making prominent use of an uncanny, generative AI effigy of a beloved dead actor in pursuit of greater profits. It’s thematically and visually jarring: a reminder to the viewer that, although the computers and screens in Alien: Romulus feature a franchise-retro aesthetic - what Futurama once sarcastically called the sleek, dazzling veneer of the nineteen eighties - the film itself is firmly a product of the 2020s. Which isn’t to say it’s all bad: the cast of young (human, alive, non-generative AI) actors acquits themselves memorably, with David Jonsson doing a particularly knock-out job as glitchy synthetic Andy alongside lead actress Cailee Spaeny’s grimly determined Rain. There’s some beautiful camerawork early on, particularly of the eerily deserted Romulus station, and writer/director Fede Alvarez does a decent job of creating both a coherent visual aesthetic and a sense of mounting dread.

But for all that I was engaged sufficiently that the two hour runtime never felt laborious, I ultimately came away wanting more. Romulus isn’t an underachieving film, per se, but neither is it particularly ambitious. It’s competent with occasional flashes of something more, and if it was an original space horror property - if it was not inherently weighing itself against every other instalment in a franchise that now spans 45 years and counting - my reaction might be different. Instead, I feel rather like a teacher doling out a B- to a student they know is capable of better. It’s not a bad grade, by any means; objectively, it’s pretty good! It’s just that knowing exactly how the presented elements are capable of achieving an A+ makes the gap between those grades yawn wider than normal.

The setup for the film is strong: on the sunless mining colony of Jackson’s Star, orphaned Rain and her brother Andy - a glitchy, discarded synthetic repurposed by Rain’s late father as her guardian - are recruited by Rain’s friend Tyler (Archie Renaux) to help them steal the cryopods he’s found in an abandoned Weyland-Yutani station orbiting the planet before it crashes. With the pods in their possession, both they and Tyler’s crew - sister Kay (Isabela Merced), cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and his partner Navarro (Aileen Wu) - will be able to make the nine year journey to the non-corporate planet Yvaga, thereby escaping their punitive labour contracts. But the station - divided into two halves, called Romulus and Remus - contains a swathe of frozen facehuggers in the wake of a failed Weyland-Yutani attempt to experiment with a Xenomorph rescued from the frozen wreck of the Nostromo, and when Tyler’s quest for sufficient fuel for the stolen cryopods triggers their thawing, violence and terror ensue.

A compelling setup, to be sure; the problem is that, unlike almost every other Alien film, Romulus isn’t attempting to say anything beyond “I, too, am an Alien film,” which is not exactly a stirring thesis. While it borrows certain thematic notes from the franchise at large, such as the critique of capitalist exploitation inherent to the monstrosity of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, there’s nothing original offered alongside it. And paralleling this thematic deficit is a critical lack of new lore: whatever else can be said of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, they both swung for the fences in terms of introducing new ideas and a deeper history to the franchise, and though that material ultimately left us with more questions than it answered, it was nonetheless compelling in its possibilities.

Romulus, by contrast, gives us almost nothing that we haven’t seen before, while also delivering familiar elements in oddly clumsy ways. When Navarro succumbs to a facehugger, it’s a matter of minutes before her resultant chestbursting death. Not only is this a sharp departure from canon, as the process ordinarily takes hours, but combined with the fact that the crew have just been warned of her likely demise by the ghost of (A)Ian Holm as half-dead synthetic Rook, the end result is to prematurely excise Navarro (and thus Aileen Wu’s promising portrayal of her) from the narrative for less than the full measure of dramatic tension. At the same time, both the sheer number of facehuggers in play and their constant visibly does rather detract from their impact. The menace of the facehugger (for me, at least) comes first from their deployment as a jumpscare or a lurking threat scuttling through the unseen recesses of the ship, and afterwards from the psychological horror inherent in leaving their victims briefly, seemingly, alive and well, only to then die grisly deaths that frequently imperil those closest to them, like a walking double-tap strike. To have them surging about in finger-rattling swarms, flinging themselves en masse at the fleeing protagonists is briefly effective, but borders on cartoonish when repeated. Throw in the fact that the denouement features such a comically imbalanced Xenomorph-to-human ratio that Rain singlehandedly shoots dead at least six of them, and a lot of their on-screen menace comes from the fact that we, the audience, already know to fear them, rather than because Romulus makes them seem indestructible.

The one new addition comes at the end in the form of a human-Xenomorph hybrid - called the Offspring in the film’s credits - whose creation and visuals both hark to the Engineers of Prometheus and Covenant. Played to disconcerting effect by 7’7 Romanian basketballer Robert Bobroczkyi, the Offspring is easily the most frightening creature Romulus has to offer; and yet I can’t help feeling that his narrative potential is ultimately wasted. A defining characteristic of the most recent Alien films is their philosophical bent: the extent to which they openly play with questions of origin, creation and identity, and specifically through a mythological-religious lens. Prometheus is so named after the Titan of Greek legend who gave the gift of fire to mankind in defiance of the gods, a nomenclature mirrored in a story that sees the characters grappling with alien bioweapons they neither fully understand and yet hubristically attempt to wield. Similarly, Covenant evokes the Biblical covenant between God and humanity after the destruction of the great flood - an act echoed by rogue synthetic David’s genocide of an alien people as he sets about creating a new hybrid species with which to replace them.

As such, I’d expected to find something equally thematically chewy in Romulus, which - like one half of the station on which the action takes place - draws from another Greek myth. Along with his twin, Remus, Romulus was left to die in the wilderness by a king who saw the brothers as a threat; after being suckled by a she-wolf, however, both survived, and in adulthood, Romulus went on to found the city of Rome, becoming its first king. With this legacy in mind, I would’ve expected the Offspring to survive somehow, a father to future horrors, or else to have some significant relationship with his mother (who, somewhat unusually for a franchise invested in central mother-monsters and mothers-of-monsters, is side-character Kay, rather than lead heroine Rain). Instead - and unlike the other notable human-hybrid Xenomorph in Alien: Resurrection, which has its own strange connection to hybrid-mother Ripley - he exhibits zero connection to Kay, who he kills, and is then killed in turn by Rain, with no hint of secret survival. Which is not a bad ending, per se; and particularly given my prior criticism of the respective fates of Shaw and Daniels in Covenant, I’m glad that Rain, at least, if not Kay, was allowed to live. But given the clear thematic potential, it’s a let-down that there was no greater meaning to the Offspring: instead of founding a metaphorical Rome, he ends up instead like Remus, the brother who bets wrong on the kingdom’s future and is killed as a result.

Far and away, then, the strongest part of the film is Rain and Andy’s relationship. At the outset, Andy is almost childlike in his simplicity, stammering out the punny jokes Rain’s father programmed into him while shuffling along in glitchy stutterstop, more dependent on her for care than she on him. This dynamic changes, however, when Rain inserts a newer Weyland-Yutani chip into Andy onboard Romulus, so that he has the necessary access to override various controls - an upgrade that not only improves his speech, cognition and motor functions, but gives him a new prime directive (do what is best for the company) to replace his old one (do what is best for Rain). The resulting existential tension - is Andy autonomous, or a product of programming only? Is his personhood his own, or the property of whoever programmed him last? Does Rain really see him as a brother, or as a thing she owns? - is the closest Romulus gets to having a thematic or emotional thesis, and to the extent that it succeeds, it does so almost entirely thanks to David Jonsson’s phenomenal acting. His shifts in tone, microexpressions and body language imbue Andy with a depth that he might easily have lacked, making his performance a highlight of the film.

And yet (and yet) it’s difficult not to feel that even this dynamic is retreading old ground, as so many Alien films - and particularly the most recent two - have heavily played on the fraught relationship between a traumatised heroine and a flawed synthetic. Call in Alien: Resurrection bucked the otherwise all male trend by being female, while Prometheus’s David casts a long shadow, not only in terms of Michael Fassbender’s profoundly unsettling performance (then expanded upon in Covenant), but because of the depth and breadth those films gave to the question of synthetic ego, identity and autonomy. And as excellent as Jonsson’s performance is, it’s notable that Romulus doesn’t really treat him as an autonomous character, granting him central focus only when he’s either in the room with the human characters or directly looking to aid them. At the crucial moments when we might see him as a separate entity - waiting alone for Rain outside a corporate office; reacting to being given his new directive from Rook - the camera cuts away to someone else. Rather than taking an extra minute of runtime to contextualize him as an individual in his own right, the film itself treats his internality as irrelevant, thereby undermining its ostensible thematic interest in the question of his personhood.

Then again, this elision is on a par with Romulus’s other emotional failing: the lack of space given to grief. Granted, the characters are fighting both for their lives and against the clock, but particularly in contrast to the other Alien films, which tend to operate under the same constraints, it’s striking how every death in Romulus effectively severs the character from the narrative. Once dead, they aren’t mentioned again by the survivors, their bodies left where they lie; of necessity in the cases of Tyler and Bjorn, but it doesn’t escape notice that, in the final scenes, as Rain prepares herself for cryosleep, we never see her interact with the bodies of Kay and Navarro despite the fact that both have to have been moved. It would’ve been a small thing, to show Rain giving her dead friends any sort of funerary rites, or acknowledging their loss in the aftermath, and yet: nothing. And perhaps that’s a minor complaint in the scheme of things; but it says something to me, that Alvarez took the time to drop in multiple specific callbacks to Alien, both visual and scripted - to say nothing of deploying the digitized not-corpse of (A)Ian Holm in lieu of casting a living actor who'd also played an earlier synthetic - but not to give Rain her grief, or Andy his private context.

On balance, then, Alien: Romulus is a technically accomplished and broadly enjoyable film that appears to care more about its status as a part of the Alien franchise than it does contributing something new or meaningful to that canon. It does, however, continue the legacy of recent instalments in said franchise of giving me almost what I want, but in a way that deeply annoys me, and which I yet feel compelled to write about - and, doubtless, eventually, to rewatch, like a hungry insomniac visiting the fridge at 3am in the forlorn hope that the lone bag of shredded cheese on offer will have somehow become more appetizing in the hours since they last snuck a handful. But, then again, there’s nothing wrong eating shredded cheese from the bag; it’s only disappointing if you went in expecting something else - and in that sense, the fault is entirely my own.