I’ve been looking forward to finally watching Alien: Romulus for a while now, so I treated myself to the 4K Blu-Ray over Christmas, and you know what? It lived up to my expectations, thanks to my expectations being that it would be a pretty by-the-numbers Alien movie but shot and acted really well. I’ll admit I didn’t see quite how much it “borrowed” elements from the original four films coming, especially in the ending, but I can’t say I didn’t have a good time watching it. Let’s take a look!
Alien: Romulus in a “interquel” in that it takes place in between Alein and Aliens, and we actually open the story with a Weyland-Yutani vessel picking up the cocooned Xenomorph that Ripley ejected out of the airlock in the first film, though it inevitably waking up and killing a bunch of people is left to our imagination as we soon meet our motley crew for the film on a downtrodden and sunlight-less mining colony. Our heroine is Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) who is accompanied by her “brother” Andy (David Jonsson) who is actually a Synthetic who was reprogrammed by her father to look out for her, complete with a programmed compulsion to tell Dad jokes all the time. They’re actually an instantly likeable pair, which is good because the rest of the human cast is a mix of forgettable or nasty. After being told she has to keep mining for another bunch of years because Weyland-Yutani are corporate scumbags Rain and Andy meet up with their friend Tyler (Archie Renaux), his sister Kay (Isabela Merced), their cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and his adopted sister Navarro (Aileen Wu) and together they decide to take advantage of their access to a ship and a floating W-Y derelict that has cryo-pods on board to take a one way trip to a better planet/colony. The cast works well for what they are: Tyler is the kind-hearted one, Kay is the screaming helpless one (who for the record is pregnant), Bjorn is the complete bastard who you really want to see killed (and who has a hatred of Synths after one was responsible for killing his parents due to a “needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” logical decision one made) and Navarro is… the pilot.
They’ve got the eerie beauty of space thing down at least!
They reach the derelict and find it to be a space station instead of a ship (which is split into two halves: Romulus and Ramus, in case you’re wondering the about the film’s title), but undeterred they enter it and use Andy’s Weyland-Yutani access codes to get to the cryo-pods, but they’re low on fuel so they have to take a trip to the cryo-storage area, and guess what was being kept in cryo but is now free? Facehuggers! Lot’s of them, and so begins the survival horror as they steal a chip from a nearby bifurcated Synth and pop it into Andy so they can have greater ship access (with the side-effect of greatly increasing his intelligence) and Navarro is soon face-hugged. In order to get some answers they reactivate the Synth and here is the elephant in the room if you’ve been following coverage of the film: the Synth is a Rook model, same as in the original film, and in order to achieve this they used a mix of practical effects and CGI to bring Ian Holm back to life, with Daniel Betts providing the voice-a-like. Now, I’m not sure how I’d feel about it if I were in the cinema and unaware it was a thing, but going into it with the knowledge it didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would. Did it look distractingly fake? Several times, yes. Did it take away from the movie? … only those couple of times, otherwise I did like the continuity ties, I think it would’ve been far better if they’d just gone with someone who looks a bit like Holm and had the Synth’s face damaged as well as its body or something rather than the full CGI deepfake thing…
The Facehuggers as always are super-creepy, they’re often more effectively scary than the Xenomorphs themselves.
Anyway, Rook informs them that Navarro is being impregnated and points out the hanging corpse of the original Alien Xenomorph as the end result, so after removing the hugger they decide to head back to the ship. The now intelligent Andy thinks otherwise, especially as the new chip has given his a new core directive of benefiting the company over everything else, and the crew end up splitting up, with Bjorn, Kay and Navarro heading back to the ship by themselves, only for Navarro to get John Hurt-ed by having an alien bursting out of her, leading to the ship crashing back into the station. This leads to a whole bunch of fun set pieces as Rain, Andy and Tyler have to reach the ship with a corridor full of facehuggers while Bjorn and Kay have to deal with a freshly-minted Xenomorph. Bjorn is the first to be picked off but as the rest of the cast make it to where Kay is Andy refuses to let them help her as he knows the Xeno is waiting, and Kay is soon dragged off…
The acting is good, especially from Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson, the latter playing a really sympathetic good guys and a cold-hearted baddie in the same film, and the direction, lighting, sets and effects are all good. It won’t win any awards for originality but it will keep you entertained for two hours.
Overall Thoughts:
Rain gets a crash course in Smart Gun firing, which thankfully in this film has an auto-aim setting, explaining why a miner suddenly knows how to effectively use military hardware!
Alien: Romulus is something of a greatest hits mixtape of a movie, taking some great set-pieces, visual iconography and character tropes from the original four movies and meshing them together in a very enjoyable, if not predictable, two-ish hours.
Rain, Andy and Tyler reach a lab where Rook reveals (via a TV screen) that the object of the station was to use Xenomorph DNA to create a drug that could allow humanity to survive in space easier, as in this future we’ve found it rather hard due to new viruses, deadly atmospheres and general space travel hazards. Andy takes a containment pod of the drug as his new core mission and then we get a second “must make it to the ship but there’s loads of danger in between us” set of scenes. They find a classic hallway full of Xeno-gunk and staff members who have been chest-burst and also find Kay injured but alive and yet to be face-hugged. On the way back to the ship though Tyler is taken out and Andy is knocked out, leading to Rain sending Kay ahead to the ship with the vials while she heads back to Andy, removing his extra chip and restoring him to his nice and friendly self. After the one unique set piece in the film involving the Xenomorph’s acid blood and zero-gravity and a few more classic showdowns (including Andy using the “stay away from her you bitch” line from Aliens, which was proper immersion-breaking, but hey-ho…) Rain, Andy and Kay make it to the ship and off the station before it collides with the ice ring of the planet (thus destroying Rook), only we the audience know that in order to survive Kay injected herself with the Xeno formula…
You didn’t think I’d go the whole review without a Xenomorph screenshot did you? Here one is, repeating the classic Alien 3 Xeno/Ripley close-up shot…
This leads to the final act, as Kay gives birth to a human-Xenomorph hybrid, so yes they even copied Alien Resurrection, in this case most of the ending! This time the hybrid is tall and thin, and has more of a human face, but the effect is the same, as is its creepiness to be fair. It kills its mother and injures Andy it begins to hunt Rain, and after some tense moments she manages to flush it out into space (of course!) and get back on board the ship in time to pull it away from the deadly planetary ring. Rain puts herself and Andy in the cryo-pods and sets course for the same planet they were originally heading to, fulfilling their mission even if its just the two of them left.
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